WWF at Schiphol

WWF (The World Wide Fund for Nature or Woof Woof) have put up some advertisements at Schiphol airport asking people to [in English] "Look, Look, but don't buy". The ads are asking people not to buy souvenirs from the countries that they visit on holiday that are produced by killing endangered plants and animals.



It seems like quite a straight forward ask, but when we know about things like climate change, mining disasters (even though this is an oxymoron, I use it to indicate the ones that affect humans immediately as well - think Chile and Hungary). The issue I have with this is the thinking behind it. WWF no doubt spent thousands for the advert, and I am sure hours of strategic meetings and planning went into the text, photos and style of writing. I imagine that tactically WWF (who also works on climate change) thought this would be an obtainable ask - something they think the public would take notice of and actually act on instead of ignoring. The issue is that this is a cosmetic change. It is the same as putting a disney plaster on an amputation.



As long as big NGOs and others trying to do something about the various environmental challenges we face continue to work on what is obtainable and doesn't offend funders, they will only act as a salve to our conscience as we head toward environmental collapse. We need organisations to shout, loudly, the inconvenient truths we are facing. No, we cannot afford to take intercontinental holiday flights, we have to change our patterns of consumption. We have to start listening to nature, seeing ourselves as part of a very intricate system and begin playing by the earth's rules. Seeing a small group of animals and plants as endangered misses the point. We are amongst the endangered species, time to call a spade a spade.

Fish

This deserves a blog.

AquaBounty is a Canadian company that has developed a GE Salmon. This Salmon is genetically engineered to grow year round (unlikely normal salmon that only grow for some of the year). The result is a bigger fish, quicker.

I'm not going to get into the science of all of this, or the fact that the eggs are being shipped to Panama (as it is not a signatory to the UN Convention on Biological Diversity) to be grown, and then shipped back to the US and Canada to be sold.
Consumers will of course be saved from seeing salmon that looks like it has been stretched and pumped up with a bicycle pump, as they will no doubt be offered the salmon, unlabelled as GE, in neat little shrink-wrapped polystyrene trays.

The bit I'd like to talk about is the company's (AquaBounty) argument for this fish. They claim, quite straight faced, that it is needed to address world hunger. This will no doubt be met with delight by the French who are trying to grow GE vines (which fortunately keep getting ripped out by volunteer reapers, even after public consultation and a fence being erected around the trial). Obviously the starving people in the world will soon need a chilled GE Chardonnay to wash down their GE salmon.

Jokes aside, could they be any more brazen? Salmon as a solution to world hunger? There are so many outrageous things going on here that it's hard to know where to start. How about with salmon. There used to be streams all over the Western US and Canada that were so full of Salmon in season that people scoop them out with buckets, and bears would take one bite of one fish and then move onto another. Many of these rivers and streams have been dammed for various reasons (something about progress and development) and the fish can now no longer return to the spawning grounds as they always have. This is perhaps not such a problem when, with all the money you've made by damming rivers in your own country, you can build fish farms in places like Panama and farm fish there. All good and well except these fish need to be fed something. Mostly they are fed wild fish, but it takes much more than a kilo of wild fish to produce a kilo of farmed salmon. Slowly it starts to look as if AquaBounty may not have the poor and starving peoples interests at heart after all.

We need to look at what we will need to do to enable people to eat salmon without having to make them artificial and raise them in artificial environments completely removed from any type of ecosystem. A good start would be to start questioning companies trying to sell snake oil by promising to feed the world with it.

A wonderful morning moment (another)

An amazing moment on the way into work today that inspired me, gave me hope and added to an amazing start to the day.

While riding along and listening to K'naan's "Take a minute", I was getting nearer to GP Berlin, and as a taxi backed away from me (there was a truck blocking the street that I had just squeezed past) I saw a women, perhaps 45, walk across the road and notice a dead bird that resembled much less of a bird having been run over repeatedly. I lost sight of her as she got off the street between two parked cars, but as I rode past, I saw her again. She was looking back down at the bird with so much tenderness and sadness.

Just amazing.

Clearly, it's the little things.