Christmas Reefs

It's Christmas, that time of year when so many of us decorate our houses with Christmas trees and wreaths. But what happens to those things when we're done with them? In most cases, we simply leave them on the side of the road to get taken to the dump. But other people have taken to doing more inventive--and environmentally-friendly--things with their old Christmas trees.
Take the case of Lake Havasu in California. Here, every year, dozens of discarded Christmas trees are dumped into the water. Believe it or not, this actually improves the ecological health of the lake. Ever since it was developed by local industry, the bottom of the lake has lost much of its organic material, such as dead trees and uprooted bushes. These serve an important function by providing shelter to the eggs and young of several species of fish in the lake. Once the dead trees originally in the lake are gone, fish numbers decline heavily.
This is where the Christmas trees come in. By providing artificial habitats for fish, they allow fish populations to increase and permit the ecosystem of the lake to be restored. This is actually not a new idea. The concept of "artificial reefs" goes as far back as the 1830s, when logs from log cabins were sunk into lakes to sunk off the coast of South Carolina to attract fish.
Using Christmas trees as artificial reefs may not be something most people would think of on the spot, but it is just another example of how, in order to preserves the ecosystems around us, we have to think outside the box. By looking at alternatives like these, we can see to it that less of the waste generated by our holiday activities ends up in landfills and incinerators. And that's sure to put anyone on the "nice list."
                                              
                 A boatload of old Christmas trees on Lake Havasu, about to be dumped into the lake.   After settling on the bottom, they will become habitats for fish and other animals on the lakebed.

Eco-tainment #8: The Glove of Darth Vader

It's happened. I've caught Star Wars fever. While I've been a fan of George Lucas's sprawling space saga for many years, that interest has only intensified with the release of its most recent installment, The Force Awakens, which opened in wide release today. So it's only natural that I should be making today's entry Star Wars-related.
The Glove of Darth Vader was a children's Star Wars novel written in 1992 and set after the movie Return of the Jedi. It focused on Luke Skywalker stopping the remnants of the Empire from hunting Whaladons--huge, intelligent, whale-like creatures from the planet Mon Calamari. The real-world parallel here is obvious. The Whaladons are whales, and the Empire's hunting of them is meant to represent the whaling industry that still exists in Japan, Norway, and Iceland.
As an environmental parable, there is nothing remarkable or exciting about The Glove of Darth Vader. In typical children's book fashion, the heroes and villains are distinct and unambiguous. The villains even go out of their way to refer to themselves as evil, by means of such phrases as "I bid you Dark Greetings" and "Dark Blessings".  While not as bad as Captain Planet or FernGully, this is still a very crude depiction of environmental issues.
This entry is less interesting for what it is than for the circumstances surrounding it. Like Captain Planet and FernGully, The Glove of Darth Vader was released in the early 1990s, at a time when enthusiasm for environmentalism seemed to be at an all-time high. During this time, environmental lessons were considered "cool" and shoehorned into popular fiction because they were thought to be what sold. Film studios, book writers and publishers, and TV executives all lunged at the marketing opportunity. Needless to say, this approach does not seem to have produced tangible results 20 years later.
The Glove of Darth Vader may just be an odd little footnote in the Star Wars story, but it shows how even the most unlikely franchises were cashing in on the environmentalism trend in the early 1990s.

Its story itself wasn't remarkable, but The Glove of Darth Vader is a perfect time capsule from a period when environmentalism was seen as a selling point--sometimes at the expense of common sense.

Can't Beat the Heat!

As I write this, the thermometer reads a balmy 64 degrees Fahrenheit --in the middle of December. This is something that I am fairly sure has never been encountered in recent memory. While it's certainly enjoyable to not have to bundle up in the winter, this is simply a mask for a much more serious issue. I've held off on doing an entire post dedicated to global warming on this blog for a variety of reasons. This is partly because I assume my readers are already familiar with it and I want to discuss things that need more time in the limelight, and partly because it's such a polarizing topic (even though it really shouldn't be).
Global warming, now better known by the annoyingly vague pseudonym of "climate change", is well understood to be the result of human activity--more specifically, the result of human industrial activity in the past 200 years. During this time, the average temperature of the Earth has increases to an even greater extent than it already had at the end of the last ice age. The most obvious symptoms of this are, of course, the loss of glaciers and ice caps, the desertification of tropical regions, and the acidification of the seas.
Those people who deny the reality of global warming tend to point out that snow and ice, sometimes in record-breaking amounts, continue to be a part of winter weather in many temperate areas. This is especially true, perhaps not coincidentally, in the southeastern United States. Now, of course, we find ourselves presented with a genuinely warm winter, with temperatures hovering in the 60s and even the 70s, and I can scarcely begin to imagine how global warming deniers might rationalize this.
While still focusing on the environmental aspects of global warming and how we can get people to acknowledge them, perhaps I should also mention a more aesthetic consequence. With global climate heating up, it may be that for may of us, snow in winter is going to become a thing of the past.

Eco-tainment #7: Avatar

I'm going to get the obvious out of the way first--James Cameron's 2009 film Avatar (not to be confused with the Nickelodeon cartoon Avatar: The Last Airbender) is gorgeous to watch. Viewing it, you really do feel like you have been transported onto another world. But, as dazzling as the movie's visuals are, how do they compare to the story and its intended message?
The plot of the film revolves around Jake Sully, a crippled Marine who has been assigned to Pandora, a moon orbiting a planet in the Alpha Centauri star system. Sully is given an "avatar"--a mind-controlled artificial body in the shape of a Na'vi, the native sentient species on Pandora. His job is use this guise to convince the local Na'vi tribe to relocate so that his fellow human can mine the area for unobtainium--a rare and valuable element. Sully, however, begins to sympathize with the Na'vi, and encourages them to rise up against the humans who are ravaging their world. After gaining their trust, he leads them into battle and succeeds in driving the other humans off Pandora.
There is, admittedly, little about this plot that has not been done by other works. However, mere derivativeness is one thing; outright unfortunate implications are quite another.
The primitive Na'vi (who curiously resemble blue humanoid cat/lemur hybrids, despite every other large animal on Pandora having six legs) live in almost supernatural balance with their ecosystem. Their hair conceals tentacles that, when plugged into the sockets found on other organisms, allows them to communicate and bond with them. This is, of course, contrasted with the technologically advanced humans, who see Pandora as no more than a supply of resources and wish to destroy it.
The idea that people in less technologically advanced societies were less destructive to their environments is a truism that has persisted for centuries, but with little basis in reality. Indeed, a shockingly large number of extinctions in the past have been caused by people with nothing more than stone tools and fire. This is especially true on islands, such as New Zealand, Madagascar, and Hawaii. To be sure, the destruction caused by modern technological society is far greater in magnitude, but the fact remains that humans have never truly lived in "harmony with nature." And of course, humans will never have the mental communication powers that Na'vi do, so it would be impossible to live up to their standard in any case.
With a movie like Avatar, it's easy to forgive flaws like these simply because it looks so good. If only the rest of the movie was as good as it looked. . .

The Na'vi in Avatar are essentially the ultimate environmentalist fantasy: they live in harmony with nature, can understand and communicate with animals, and lack destructive technology. But is this a realistic path for all of humanity to follow?

Stepping Up to Bat

Few animals are as emblematic of the Halloween season as bats are. Its not exactly clear why this should be so: they are, for the most part, inoffensive and reclusive, with no interest whatsoever in harming humans. But the distrust many people have for bats has resulted in many species of bats becoming very rare indeed, and one of the most endangered bats of all lives right here in the United States: the Florida bonneted bat.
Less than 500 Florida bonneted bats currently live in the southern regions of Florida, the only place in the world where the species is found. It is an unmistakable sight in the wild--it is North America's largest bat, sporting a wingspan of nearly two feet, and its ears are folded forward giving it a distinctive bonnet- or cowl-like appearance. These insect-eating bats are solitary, and roost primarily in rock crevices and tree holes. Unlike most bats, the Florida bonneted bat is capable of taking off from a flat surface.
While the Florida bonneted bat was probably never a common animal, its recent catastrophic decline is most likely due to the rapid urban development Florida--especially southern Florida-- has seen in recent decades. Its small range coincides with the cities of Miami and Fort Lauderdale, all of which rapidly expanded and urbanized during the 20th century. With the cities taking over the areas the bats needed to roost, the population plummeted to its present low number. It also didn't help that in 1992, Hurricane Andrew destroyed many of the remaining roost sites, but that, of course, was something humans had no control over.
Another problem the bonneted bat--and by extension, all bats--faces is pesticides. When Florida became a major exporter of citrus fruits, the pesticides sprayed on the orchards accumulated in the ecosystem and became toxic for insect-eating animals such as bats.
All is not lost, however. While not as numerous as bird enthusiasts, bat enthusiasts definitely exist and have made major contributions to the conservation of these animals. They erect bat boxes to give bats a place to roost for the day, and sometimes even allow bats to roost in their own houses. Even if you can't make a bat box, or don't want to, you can still also make a contribution by only buying pesticide-free produce, which is free of the chemicals that can harm bats.

A Florida bonneted bat, one of the rarest mammals in the world. We may not think we have much use for bats and other "scary" animals, but they are quite dependent on us for their own survival.

Mad Science, Bad Science

If you want to make an omelet, you have to break a few eggs. At least, that was the way biologists operated up until the mid-20th century. For most of the history of the scientific study of animals, the only way to get a good look at them was by studying dead specimens, and the only way to get those specimens was to kill them. Naturally, things are different nowadays. Biologists don't go around killing wild animals for research,  and DNA samples have replaced preserved specimens as a source of information. But is it ever acceptable to kill an animal--especially an endangered one--in the wild for the sake of science?

Earlier this month, ornithologist Chris Filardi became the center of controversy when he revealed that he had shot a Mustached Kingfisher, an extremely rare bird thought to have a population of less than 500. Flared claimed that by shooting the kingfisher, he will be providing the scientific community with information about it that would be otherwise unobtainable. Many of his fellow scientists are unconvinced. They point out that a lot more information relevant to the kingfisher's lifestyle could have been learned by observing it alive.

The Mustached Kingfisher has not been seen in the wild for more than 60 years, and none exist in captivity. To kill the first one seen in such a length of time, so the logic goes, is a massive waste of potential information that could be used to save the species. While Filardi has defended his actions, he may well have lost most of his support with the scientific community

A similar controversy surrounds the "scientific whaling" program in Japan. Officially named the Institute of Cetacean Research--which sounds very professional-- its official duty is to conduct sampling surveys of whale populations, with the meat supposedly being sold merely as a byproduct. But it is generally believed that little, if any, scientific value has arisen from this practice, and it is simply hunting in disguise. 

That said, there are times and places where killing specimens is preferred and even necessary. Most deep-sea animals, such as giant squid, cannot survive in captivity and must be preserved as dead specimens for study. But in these cases there is some clear scientific benefit to killing them, because it is essentially the only way to study them at all. With the kingfisher and the whales, on the other hand, alternatives exist. There is no need for scientists to kill their specimens unless it is absolutely necessary.

The Mustached Kingfisher has inadvertently become a poster child for the ethics of killing animals for science. With less than 500 in existence, every individual that dies pushes it closer to extinction. 

Eco-Tainment #6: Ferngully: The Last Rainforest

Well, there's no use putting it off. This Eco-tainment review was a long time coming. But first, some background. In the early 1990s, there was a big "environmentalism fad," just like the one in the late 60s and early 70s. A lot of environmental-themed TV shows and movies came out of this. Captain Planet, which I've looked at already, was one. Another was 20th Century Fox's animated movie FernGully: The Last Rainforest. Like most animated movies in the 1990s not made by Disney, FernGully was not very successful in theaters (though it did sell well enough on video to get a sequel, which I will NOT be reviewing). But how good is it as a work of environmental fiction?
The movie told the story of the titular FernGully, a rainforest near Mt. Warning, Australia that is inhabited by a community of fairies. One of these fairies is Crysta, the movie's protagonist. She is a bold, adventurous sort, prone to wandering off and getting herself into trouble. This happens when she encounters Zach, a young man working for a logging company. Fearing that Zach will destroy the rainforest, Crysta shrinks him down to the size of a fairy. In the meantime, however, the loggers have accidentally released Hexxus, a demon of pollution voiced by Tim Curry. Crystal and Zach must team up to stop him. Rounding out the cast is Batty, a comic-relief fruit bat voiced by the late Robin Williams.
While the animation in FernGully is beautiful and some of the songs--especially Tim Curry's delightfully evil "Toxic Love" and Robin William's insane "Batty Rap"--are catchy, its environmental message sadly falls flat. There are a couple of reasons for this. The biggest one is the character of Hexxus himself. By including a supernatural villain personifying environmental destruction, the movie inadvertently distances these problems from their actual, human, causes. In other words, it essentially attributes both pollution and conservation to magic.
In all fairness to FernGully, however, its creators showed an admirable willingness to put their money where their mouths were. A portion of the film's proceeds were donated to environmental funds, including Greenpeace and the Sierra Club. Out of all the works of environmental entertainment produced in the early 1990s, FernGully could perhaps be said to have had the most tangible impact on environmental protection in real life.

 FernGully: The Last Rainforest was a noble attempt to combine an engaging fantasy narrative with an environmental message. Unfortunately, the movie's good-versus-evil plot tends to dominate over its real life context.

Medea's Choice

Nothing lasts forever. That's the truth, and there's nothing anyone can do about it--and our planet is no exception. Fortunately, Earth still has a billion or more years left as a life-supporting world, at least according to conventional wisdom. According to unconventional wisdom, however, our planet may already be in its old age.
The Medea Hypothesis (named after the Greek mythological woman who killed her own children after Jason left her) was proposed by geologist Peter Ward as an alternative to the better-known Gaia hypothesis. While the Gaia hypothesis suggests that life continuously maintains an ideal environment for itself, the Medea hypothesis states that life periodically destroys its own environment. And indeed, many of the mass extinctions in the fossil record seem to have been caused, at least indirectly, by biological activity. In other words we--humanity--are simply the most recent Medea event.
The Gaia hypothesis, of course, was one of the ideas that fed into the "environmentalism fad" of the 1960s and 70s, and even today much of what we know about environmentalism and ecology is based on it. But what if the Medea hypothesis is actually true? Is there any way to reconcile an environmental conscience with an understanding of the Medea hypothesis?
The answer is yes. The microbes that were responsible for the mass extinctions in the Permian and the Ordovician periods had no way of understanding what they were doing. Humans, fortunately, do. And that is why environmental efforts still matter, even if the Gaia hypothesis may not be true. We, unlike any life form that came before us, have the mental capacity to choose not to destroy our environment--and in doing so allow life on Earth to last at least a little while longer.
Perhaps this time, Medea can choose not to kill her children.

Eco-Tainment #5: Hoot (Carl Hiassen novel)

Florida is known primarily for two things. One is the fact that DisneyWorld is located there. The other is that old retirees move there. Those who pay attention to novels aimed at teenagers (now excitingly rebranded as "young adults") might notice a third--Florida is where Carl Hiassen sets the majority of his environmental fiction.
Hiassen began his career writing for adults, but in 2002 published his first novel for children, Hoot. The novel concerns a boy named Roy Eberhart, who moves to Florida from Montana and becomes involved in another boy's crusade to save a colony of Florida burrowing owls (an endangered subspecies) from having their habitat destroyed to make way for a restaurant. The boys resort to a number of unscrupulous and possibly illegal means to accomplish this, including putting snakes inside the construction workers' latrines and vandalizing their equipment.
Eventually, the construction foreman, who at first denied the existence of the owls, is forced to acknowledge that he is building on their nesting grounds, and the would-be construction site is repurposed as an owl sanctuary.
Hoot lies somewhere in the middle on the environmental spectrum of nuance that, one could say, has WALL-E on one end and Captain Planet on the other. The antagonists are very stereotypical evil money-loving CEOs of the sort that tend to populate these stories. This is in contrast with, for instance, Michael Bird-boy, in which the people causing the problems willingly confess to their faults and accept the protagonist's help in fixing the damage they have caused.
Hoot, however, is still an excellent introduction to environmentalism in fiction, and one that its target demographic of teenagers--especially teenage boys--will almost certainly enjoy.

While it may not be the most subtle environmental work in the world, Hoot still manages to be enjoyable and engaging.

Death of an Icon

As a rule, I don't usually follow news about celebrities. Too much gossip, not enough substance. But when, this past month, a certain famous individual passed away, I decided it was something worth talking about here. The "celebrity" in question here is Cecil, a 13-year-old male lion who lived in the Hwange National Park in Zimbabwe. He was considered one of the most famous individual animals in the park, and a popular tourist attraction. Then, on July 1st this year, he was shot by an American tourist.
Cecil's death generated a storm of controversy--not only about the legality of the killing itself, which the American and British governments have claimed was illegal, but also about the general morality of hunting top predators for sport. This has been a thorny subject for conservationists for decades, even more than the hunting of large herbivores.
By their very nature, top predators like lions are not common because their ecosystems can only support small numbers of them. This is, as ecologist Paul Colinvaux so eloquently put it, "why big fierce animals are rare." It goes without saying them that top predators are almost always the most vulnerable species in a given ecosystem to sudden change. Even a small decrease in their numbers can be catastrophic from an ecological perspective.
Fortunately, steps are being taken to curb the hunting of lions and other big predators. US senator Bob Menendez introduced the CECIL (Conserving Ecosystems by Ceasing Importation of Large) Animals Act, named after Cecil himself, which declares it illegal to bring hunting trophies from the killings of endangered or potentially endangered species into the US without explicit permission from the US government. Lions are not officially endangered, but are declining at such a rate that they could be potentially uplisted in the near future, so the CECIL Animals Act would make hunting them less attractive.
Cecil may have died an untimely death, but in doing so he highlighted an important issue for the environmental movement. What role should hunting play in conservation, and is it ever a good thing?

Eco-Tainment #4: Michael Bird-Boy

So far, all of the Eco-Tainment reviews I've done have been for movies and TV shows. but there's a lot more to the world of fiction than that. So today, I'm going to review something very different. It's a book that I read as a child, which I feel manages to tell a very realistic and nuanced explanation of environmental issues without falling into the same traps as Captain Planet did. It was written by Tomie dePaola, and its name is Michael Bird-Boy.
The plot of the book is simple. The titular Michael, who inexplicably dresses in a bird costume, notices a black cloud over the green valley where he lives. The plants wilt, the animals choke. Michael sets out on a journey to find out where the mysterious cloud is coming from. The source turns out to be a factory that produces artificial honey-flavored syrup. Michael brings up his grievances with the CEO, who is both willing to listen and shocked by the (implied) destruction she has caused. He suggests that the company convert itself to producing real honey, which would not pollute.
The beauty of Michael Bird-Boy is that it has no true villain. The boss of the syrup company is not malicious--she does not pollute out of a hatred for nature or a single-minded obsession with money. In other words, Michael Bird-Boy reflects a simplified version of the role real life corporations play in environmentalism. This is both unusual and refreshing for an environmental-themed work aimed at children.
As a final note of comparison between the two, Captain Planet creator Ted Turner once said that he made his villains exaggerated caricatures because otherwise "children might believe that if their parents worked in a polluting industry they were somehow villainous." But as Michael Bird-Boy proves, this is not necessarily the case. Children's stories are capable of depicting environmentalism in various shades of grey, and we will see more examples of this in later reviews.

Despite being a scant 32 pages long, Michael Bird-Boy is a masterpiece of environmental fiction. 

A Pause from "Jaws"

In the past month, seven people swimming in the ocean off North Carolina alone have been attacked by sharks--a huge increase from the normal rate. Worrying as this is for the beach tourism industry, it is even more so for the sharks. Few animals have as double-edged a relationship with humans as sharks do. On the one hand, we revere sharks for there perceived ferociousness--they become symbols of aggression, power, and destruction. But at the same time, they are not valued in the same way that other predators like big cats and birds of prey are, and they are often killed out of fear.

Most sharks, it cannot be emphasized enough, are harmless to humans, and even those that could theoretically hurt a person rarely do. This does not, of course, mean that one should voluntarily swim in waters where large sharks have been sighted, but it does mean that they are not to be considered natural enemies of humans. In fact, it is estimated that the majority of shark attacks on humans are committed by only four species--the great white shark, the tiger shark, the bull shark, and the oceanic white-tip, or white pointer, shark. All of these are apex predators that live in the open ocean and prey on marine mammals such as seals and porpoises. Attacks on humans, then, are usually the result of curiosity or investigative behavior on the behalf of the shark. 

Unfortunately, even the educational media has done little to inform the public of the truth about sharks. The Discovery Channel's annual Shark Week, which will air this year starting this week, was originally intended to do this, but has since devolved into a festering heap of pseudoscience and exaggeration. Last year's Shark Week was especially terrible, featuring only one truly educational program ("Alien Sharks", about deep-sea sharks) and no less than six pseudoscientific ones.

Fortunately there is a lot that an ordinary citizen can do to help sharks. One solution is to only buy fish that was not caught in gill nets. This fishing technique involves laying huge nets over wide areas of ocean, and these often unintentionally trap other animals such as sharks. If your local zoo, aquarium, or natural history museum has a sea life conservation fund, donate to it as well. 

And for goodness sake, if there's a sign that says to stay out of the water, read it!

Birds and Bills

First drafted in 1918, the Migratory Bird Treaty Act was a landmark law that declared it illegal to kill, capture, or export various species of birds native to the United States. For over 80 years afterwards, this law has formed the cornerstone of American bird conservation, and has succeeded in preserving a number of species that might otherwise have become extinct, such as the snowy egret, the bald eagle, and the swamp sparrow.
Today, however, the Migratory Bird Treaty Act is under attack. In June Republican representative Jeff Duncan, of South Carolina, added a "rider" amendment to the budget for commence, Justice, and Science that would essentially prevent the Act from being enforced by federal prosecutors. This is not the first time that has happened. Many energy companies have accused the US Fish and Wildlife Service of selectively targeting them, and Duncan himself once suggested that the Fish and Wildlife Service should lower its fines to these companies.
In a stereotypical black-and-white morality tale, Duncan and the energy companies would be the unambiguous villains, to be brought to justice at the end. Yet it must be said that they, too, have a point to make. The Migratory Bird Treaty Act is strict and uncompromising. If you hurt a native bird, you will be prosecuted, no exceptions.
However, if the energy companies are not held responsible for their actions in some way, they will almost certainly continue to exploit and destroy their natural surroundings to an even greater degree than before. Millions of birds--and other animals--will die as a result of this. Surely there is some way for both parties to be satisfied?

A bald eagle, a species that owes its survival to the Migratory Bird Treaty Act. Despite being the symbol of the United States, this and other birds may face a threat from a new American law.

Eco-Tainment #3: Captain Planet and the Planeteers

I know I'm going to suffer the wrath of the Internet for saying this, but . . . most 1990s cartoons weren't all that good. There, I said it.
But what about Rugrats, you ask? Barely watchable.
Rocket Power? A shameless product of its time.
Doug? Unfunny and boring.
The first seasons of Pokémon? Just as cheesy then as it is now.
But while those shows all had some redeeming value--and I don't actively hate them-- there is one show that embodies the nadir of ridiculous trends in 90s cartoons. And that show is Captain Planet. Groan-inducing puns, one-dimensional characters, and heavy-handed morals, this show had it all.
Captain Planet was a children's TV series commissioned in 1990 by TV mogul Ted Turner, which aired on Turner's TBS network and later on Cartoon Network and Kids' WB as well. The show told of the adventures of five teenagers from different parts of the world--the Planeteers-- who possessed magic rings gifted to them by the Earth goddess Gaia. These rings, as well as giving them superpowers of their own, allowed them to summon Earth's defender, Captain Planet.
So, with such an interesting premise, how does the series hold up? Unfortunately, not very well. For starters, none of the characters are very three-dimensional. The villains have names like "Looten Plunder" and "Dr. Blight", and seemingly exist solely to pollute the Earth. In other words series chooses to frame environmentalism as a fantasy battle of good and evil, glossing over the complexities these problems actually represent.
One final character worth mentioning is Wheeler, the Planeteer from the United States. In contrast to his teammates, he was characterized as a cynical complainer who was only vaguely interested in environmental matters, and often caused problems as much as he solved them. There is little subtlety here--Wheeler is meant to represent the stereotypical view of environmentalism by Americans. This is made ironic both by the fact that Ted Turner, the show's creator, is himself American, and by the fact that another one of the Planeteers is from Russia, a country with an even worse environmental record than the United States!
 I suppose, then, that the problem with Captain Planet is not the concept but the execution. If it had taken time to explain to its viewers that pollution is not caused by supervillains with no goal other than to be evil, but by ordinary people like themselves, it could have been a fascinating "edu-tainment" series. If it had dropped the education pretense altogether and simply focused on the superhero aspect, it would have been enjoyable as well.  A lot of ifs could have made Captain Planet more enjoyable, but unfortunately it comes off as a huge wasted opportunity.

        Captain Planet is an entertaining TV show, but as an introduction to environmental concepts it is unfortunately lacking in real-world context.

Eco-Tainment #2: WALL-E

Pixar is perhaps the closest American equivalent of Hiyao Miyazaki's works. There are some obvious differences--for example, Pixar's movies are computer-animated rather than hand drawn, and none have a rating higher than PG--but both studios share their devotion to the artistic, story-driven side of animation. And, as it happens, both have produced films with nuanced, well-thought-out environmental morals.
In WALL-E, a polluted and lifeless Earth has been abandoned by humanity.Among the various relics of civilization that the title character, a solitary garbage-collecting robot, discovers is an old shoe with a plant growing in it--possibly the only one left in the world. This attracts the attention of EVE, a robotic sampling spacecraft sent to determine if Earth has become habitable for humans again. WALL-E is thus brought aboard the gigantic starship Axiom, which contains the remaining population of humans.
Aboard the Axiom, humans have grown obese from centuries of being pampered by the ship's robot crew. They have forgotten that Earth exists, and have no interest in returning. When the Axiom's intelligent autopilot (shades of HAL from 2001: A Space Odyssey) learns about the plant, he refuses to have the ship returned to Earth, and it is up to WALL-E and EVE to stop him.
The environmental messages in WALL-E are underlying rather than stated outright--indeed, the director of the film has stated that is was not even his original intent to write an environmental story, but he was surprised that so many people read an environmental message into it anyway. That said, it is hard to watch the captain of the Axiom marvel at the bygone wonders of Earth and not think that the writers had these themes in mind.
The Earth in WALL-E is in a dreadfully poor state. Besides the plant that kicks off the film's plot, the only living organism we see on Earth is a single cockroach, which WALL-E befriends early on in the movie. The implication, of course, is that all other animals and plants have died from humanity's mistreatment of the world.
Intentional or not, WALL-E is a welcome addition to the environmental film genre. Its animation is breathtaking, and the message is applied in such a way that it carries the story rather than overwhelming it--which is more than I can say for my next entry. . .

The title protagonist of WALL-E, a film that manages to convey its environmental message without being heavy-handed or overly proselytizing.

If It Ain't Broke, Don't Fix It

The concept of geo-engineering--of deliberately altering the planet's climate to temper the effects of global warming--has been much on my mind lately. There are many different techniques for geo-engineering that have been proposed. Some of these include fertilizing the ocean with iron particles to encourage the growth of algae, using chemicals sprayed from airplanes to deflect sunlight and cool the earth, capturing carbon dioxide and turning it to stone, and launching giant mirrors into space to shade the earth.
On the surface, these seem like the ideal solution to the problems presented by climate change. They can be--at least theoretically--accomplished using existing technology, and have been demonstrated in sub-scale experiments to significantly impact greenhouse gas concentrations. So what, then, is the catch? The problem with a lot of geo-engineering scenarios is that while they do indeed decrease the average global temperature and reduce the amount of atmospheric carbon dioxide, they cannot be tailored to suit specific ecosystems.
For example, one plan to remove carbon dioxide from the air is to release iron particles into the ocean, triggering the growth of large amounts of microscopic algae (single-celled plantlike organisms). As the algae photosynthesize, they would absorb carbon dioxide from the air and replace it with oxygen. The problem with this idea is that in nature, these massive concentrations of algae--called algal blooms--can produce deadly plagues known as red tides. Artificially encouraging algae to grow in order to reduce carbon dioxide could have the unintended consequence of making red tides more frequent.
Geo-engineering is a controversial concept. It should not, in my opinion, be viewed as the first and foremost solution to the environmental problems facing the world today, but at best as a last resort to fall back on if all else fails. For the time being, we should focus on preserving what is left of the world's ecosystems as they are, rather than trying to reverse the damage we have done by altering them further.

In this satellite photo, a huge algal bloom is visible off the coast of Argentina. Attempts to control greenhouse gases by fertilizing the ocean could lead to more events like this, and have potentially devastating effects for sea life.

Bee Afraid

Bees are probably the most important insects to the human experience, even though our relationship to them on a personal level is ambivalent. They are valued first and foremost as pollinators of food plants, and (in the case of the honeybee) as producers of honey and beeswax. While the widespread collapse of honeybee populations due to "colony collapse disorder" has made headlines worldwide,  the fact that other species of bees are in even greater danger is often forgotten, even though it has much darker implications.

Honeybees were originally native to Europe, Asia, and Africa, and were introduced to the Americas, Australia, and the Pacific islands by European colonists. Most plants native to these regions, therefore, have not evolved to be pollinated by honeybees; honeybees are technically an invasive species, albeit one that will probably never be removed. The native bees in these regions have not been so lucky. Many species  of New World bumblebee, for example, are in a steep decline. Competition for resources from honeybees may be a factor in this, as might use of pesticides and outright habitat destruction. One, the Franklin's bumblebee, is almost certainly extinct.

With the native bees dying out, many specialized plants in these areas will be left with nothing to pollinate them, and thus unable to reproduce. Fortunately, there are things one can do to help. "Native beekeeping" has become something of a trend among eco-savvy individuals in parts of the United States,  and it involves setting up wooden blocks with holes drilled in them for native stingless solitary bees to nest in. You won't get rewarded with honey or beeswax, but you'll get something a lot more valuable in the long run--a garden of native vegetation.

Eco-Tainment #1: Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind

This is a new series I'm going to be doing here on Environmental Esotericism, called Eco-Tainment. Basically, it's about different ways that the environmental movement and environmentalism has been portrayed in popular culture, and how these portrayals can help or hurt actual environmental efforts. Our first inductee will be Japanese animator Hiyao Miyazaki's excellent film Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind. First released in Japan in 1984 (and given a half-hearted, badly edited US release under the title Warriors of the Wind, before being picked up for distribution by Miramax), the film tells the story of a girl named Nausicaa, who must stop her village from using an ancient weapon--the "God Warrior"--to destroy the Toxic Jungle that surrounds them.
Nausicaa covers a number of bases that other environmental works rarely do. For starters, it focuses on insects and other invertebrates, creatures usually glossed over by popular entertainment. In fact, Nausicaa's mystical connection to the giant Ohmu--arthropods that resemble house-sized pillbugs--is one of the driving forces of the movie. The Toxic Jungle, meanwhile, is at first presented as a generic "polluted wasteland," but we later find out that it is in fact the opposite, that it is actually clearing pollutants out of the soil and water and making them safe for humans.
Even though Nausicaa does not take place on the Earth as we know it-- real-life animals aside from humans are absent, with the place of horses, for instance, being taken by large ostrich-like birds-- it is very clearly meant to serve as a parable for what may happen if we destroy our natural environment without taking heed of the consequences. When the inhabitants of Tolmekia, a neighboring kingdom to Nausicaa's, try to destroy the Toxic Jungle, they incite the wrath of the Ohmu and soon find themselves at the mercy of the creatures.
  Nausicaa is much more subtle about its message in these ways than many other environmental works, as we will see in later Eco-Tainment entries.

 A Japanese poster for Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind. The creature behind Nausicaa is an Ohmu, a fictional species of giant arthropod.

How to REALLY celebrate Earth Day

As you know, today is April 22nd--in other words, Earth Day, the day of the year chosen in 1970 to be dedicated to the environmental movement. Needless to say, it is also a time when many public service announcements and pamphlets are made encouraging people to help the environment in their own way. However, a number of the arguments these announcements contain, while not bad per se, are not necessarily the very best things that a person can do for the environment. Here, then, are some suggestions of my own:

1. Don't just recycle, reduce and reuse too!
This is something a lot of lists of environmental suggestions seem to miss. Recycling does reduce the amount of an original material used, but if it takes energy to recycle something, that energy has to come from somewhere and that negates the environmental benefits. To be truly environmentally friendly, you should also reduce the amount of a given material that you use and reuse that material as much as you can before disposing of it, at which point you should see if recycling it is an option.
This isn't to say recycling is a bad idea--it isn't, especially regarding aluminum, in which case it is not only eco-friendly but profitable as well.

2. Fuel-efficient is good, but not great
I don't have a driver's license, so I'm pretty much limited to going places where I can walk or where I can ride on the bus. My mother, on the other hand, has a Toyota Prius, a hybrid-electric car. But, as efficient and clean as the Prius is, there are a lot of places near my home where I would much rather walk than ride, even taking into account the improved fuel efficiency of the Prius. Why? Partly because it should be remembered that, just like a light bulb doesn't pollute but a coal-fired power plant does, there are processes "behind the scenes" of all cars that still have negative environmental effects. A Prius may not pollute as much as an SUV, but for short distances walking is even better.

3. Don't be fooled by greenwashing
An unfortunate side effect of Earth Day is that many big companies use it as an excuse to advertise their products as begin "eco-friendly." Do not buy into this. This is known as "greenwashing" and it is a way of looking good without actually doing anything good. If you really want to make a difference, research the possible choices before you go shopping so you know what the most genuinely environmentally-friendly products available to you are.

Have a happy Earth Day--but remember to avoid the misconceptions!

Out of This World?

From the extinction of the dusky seaside sparrow, which can be directly traced to the construction of the Kennedy Space Center, to the poisonous rocket fuel contaminating the soil in Russia and Kazakhstan, space travel and environmentalism have never really been happy bedfellows. But one of the strangest debates that involves both of these areas involves something that is only just now being considered seriously: terraforming.
Terraforming, in essence, is the process of making a planet more Earth-like. This is not yet possible using purely existing technology, but could well be in the relatively near future. The most common scenario for terraforming involves placing large mirrors into orbit around Mars, using reflected sunlight to melt its polar ice caps, and introducing Earth life.
If this sounds familiar, it should. It is little more than an "up-to-eleven" version of what we are doing to the Earth right now. This, of course, begs the question: if we rightly condemn the act of polluting our own environment here on Earth, how would we justify what is essentially causing deliberate pollution on Mars?
One could argue, of course, that since there is nothing (that we know of) living on Mars there would be no ecosystem to protect. However, it should be remembered that the environmental movement here of Earth grew just as much out of a sense of place as it did out of a desire to preserve spies and biodiversity. Natural wonders such as the Grand Canyon and Niagara Falls are among the phenomena environmentalists have rallied around. Even if there is no life on other planets, would it really be right for humanity to recreate them in its own image?

Ill-Will Hunting

In the past, trophy hunting was a favorite pastime of wealthy people. Indeed, the earliest proponents of wildlife conservation, such as President Theodore Roosevelt, were themselves hunters and sought to establish wildlife preserves to protect game animals.
Today, of course, times have changed. Hunting these large, impressive animals is today considered to be in bad taste at best and illegal at worst. It is no surprise, then, that most environmentalists are opposed to the very idea of trophy hunting. However there are some who argue that a very limited form of trophy hunting could be beneficial. By creating a continuous demand for the animals as a resource, limited trophy hunting would ensure their long-term survival.
Such was almost certainly the thinking behind the decision made in Namibia to grant a select number of hunters permission to shoot endangered black rhinoceroses. Supposedly, the money from these hunts goes to fund rhinoceros protection, but many critics of this method of conservation have called foul. They claim that a similar amount of funding could be generated by other means, that it is unnecessary and cruel to "kill them to save them."
Needless to say, trophy hunters are enthusiastic for the opportunity to bring home the head of one of Africa's largest mammals, and unless it is officially banned for good, the hunting seems like it sill continue for a long time yet.

Three hunters pose with a rhinoceros that was killed legally in a trophy hunt. While environmental agencies debate the usefulness and ethics of these hunts, permits for them continue to be given out.

Environmental Elitism

In 1990, Turner Broadcasting System CEO Ted Turner commissioned Captain Planet and the Planeteers, an environmental superhero cartoon that lasted for six seasons. One recurring theme in the show that many reviewers picked up on was the treatment of Wheeler, the sole white American member of the multiethnic Planeteers. He was portrayed as the least environmentally knowledgeable of the group, presumably as a reference to the stereotypical cluelessness of Americans regarding such matters.
Why am I mentioning this? Because in real life, virtually the opposite is true. The majority of environmental support comes from well-to-do, affluent, whites. It is a fairly recent development; for most of history, people only saw nature as a supply of resources. It was not until people were able to live comfortably enough to explore the natural world for leisure that they could contemplate preserving it for its own sake.
For example, the disposition of the waste people generate is a classic problem of environmentalism. All too often, though, the chosen solution to it is to build landfills, and these landfills are too often built near  populations of unprivileged people who have no way of objecting to their presence. And this is not a good thing. This phenomenon has been dubbed "environmental racism" by experts, who point out the inherent hypocrisy of not getting the opinion of other groups of people when it comes to environmental matters.
Is there a solution? Is there a way to preserve the world's ecosystems as a functional whole while allowing people to keep the lifestyles they enjoy? One thing is certain--unless we look at environmental problems as from the perspective of everyone involved, that solution will always be out of reach.