Big Chill or Big Kill?

It goes without saying (at least to those of you who have been following this blog) that human activity is the single greatest threat to Earth's biodiversity today. Species are going extinct at a rate several times greater than the projected "background" rate--the greatest rate of extinction ever recorded since that of the dinosaurs at the end of the Mesozoic. This much, experts can agree on. What experts cannot agree on, however, is how long ago this modern-day mass extinction began.
The primary point of contention for people holding these different points of view is the extinction of the so-called "Pleistocene Megafauna"--the large mammals and birds that inhabited most of the continents up until about 10,000 years ago, but today persist mainly in Africa. There are two main hypotheses for why they died out, one being that they were unable to adapt to a changing climate, and the other being that they were killed off at least indirectly by humans. Both have their advantages and drawbacks.
The hunting hypothesis suggests that humans, after arriving on a new landmass, generally wipe out the local large herbivores and top predators. It's hard to argue with this from a strictly statistical standpoint, because many of the extinctions do indeed coincide (within windows of thousands of years, of course) with the arrival of humans. However, critics of the hunting hypothesis point out that  the weapons and technology of early humans may not have been sophisticated enough, and their populations not great enough, to kill off the megafauna.
The other hypothesis is the climate hypothesis. Most of the megafauna extinctions occurred during a time when the Earth was getting warmer, a trend that continues to the present. As stated above, this fits both with the time and with the idea that humans may have been unable to kill off these animals. It should be remembered, though, that there was more than one "ice age". There were actually several, separated by warm periods like the one we live in now, called interglacials. The Earth had been through several interglacials recently before the present one began, and if the climate hypothesis were true then it is certainly odd that the megafauna were able to survive these unharmed.
Most likely, as with all things in life, the answer is not black and white. The highly specialized creatures of the ice ages certainly would have declined as the climate warmed, but that alone need not have killed them off--after all, they had survived interglacials before. But in their weakened state, they could not survive one species that had begun to flourish. They could not survive us.

Eco-Tainment #9: Tokyo Mew Mew

My very first Eco-Tainment review was for Hiyao Miyazaki's anime film Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind. I'm not going to repeat what I said about it here, but suffice to say it was one of the precious  few works of environmental fiction that conveyed its message in an even-handed, sophisticated manner. Unfortunately, most of Miyazaki's fellow Japanese animators have not been nearly as nuanced in their environmental messages as he is.
 Tokyo Mew Mew, which aired from 2000 to 2003 in Japan and from 2004 to 2010 in the United States  (under the alternate title MewMew Power),  is a case in point.The program revolves around five teenage girls who each receive the power to transform into a respective animal--an Iriomote wildcat, a blue lorikeet, a golden lion tamarin, a finless porpoise, and a Humboldt penguin-- and become the guardians of the Earth and its ecosystems. This setup is reminiscent both of other series in the Japanese "magical girl" genre, such as Sailor Moon, and of American environmental cartoons like Captain Planet and FernGully. 
The antagonists, on the other hand, are alien invaders who seek to accelerate and use humanity's pollution of the Earth for their own ends. While this admittedly avoids many of the unfortunate implications of having a villain who pollutes simply out of greed or malice, it still falls short of the layers of subtlety that real-life environmental narratives possess. Tokyo Mew Mew is probably better than Captain Planet or FernGully, but it is nowhere near the standard set by truly skilled storytellers.
If there is one thing that can be learned from this, it is that perhaps the superhero genre is inherently unsuitable for giving viewers environmental messages. After all, a hero needs a villain to fight, and the often abstract concepts of environmentalism seldom make for good or marketable villains.

                                                     
                   On a show like Tokyo Mew Mew, a subtle, realistic depiction of environmental issues takes a backseat to a dramatic conflict between good and evil. While this is fine from an narrative perspective, what does it say about how we actually perceive environmentalism?

The N Word

There are some things we can all agree are bad for the environment. Driving an SUV when we could walk, leaving the lights on when we go on a long trip, buying produce that isn't organic--those sorts of things. And there are plenty of things we can all agree are good for the natural world (or at least look good), like recycling, not littering, and riding a bike or walking when we need to go somewhere nearby. But then there are things whose environmental effects people really can't agree on. And the most polarizing of all of these is nuclear power.

Most people, including many otherwise knowledgeable environmentalists, see nuclear power as dangerous and unreliable. They give a variety of reasons for this, including radiation emissions, proliferation of nuclear waste, and the potential for the creation of nuclear weapons by terrorists. While some of these reasons are indeed valid, many of them are not supported by sound science, or even by common sense. Indeed, many people seem to only be familiar with nuclear power from old sci-fi B-movies and episodes of The Simpsons.

Nuclear power plants, for example, cannot explode in the manner of a nuclear bomb, nor do they continuously emit dangerous levels of radiation. They are not exceptionally accident-prone compared to coal- or oil-fired power plants; indeed, they are much less so, given the rigorous safety tests they must pass. While there have been fatal accidents involving nuclear power plants (Chernobyl and Fukushima spring to mind) they are by their very nature unusual. Finally, nuclear power plants do not emit greenhouse gases. This is demonstrated by France, which gets most of its electricity from nuclear power--it has surprisingly little greenhouse gas emissions for a developed country of its size. 

Nuclear power by itself won't solve the world's energy problems. But people serious about alternatives to fossil fuels should stop demonizing it, and realize it might be part of the solution they were looking for all along.