Articles by Biodiversivist

Billion dollar idea

From Science:

Could a $1 billion prize help end the U.S. addiction to foreign oil? Representative Frank Wolf (R-VA) thinks it might. Last week, he urged the National Science Foundation (NSF) to raise such a prodigious amount from private sources and then give it to scientists offering ideas on how to make the United States energy independent.

But why limit the contest to scientists, and what exactly is a "scientist" anyway? It seems to me that we are not short on ideas. We are short on commercially viable ideas, and commercial viability cannot be proven in a lab. If cost were not the overriding variable, we could simply pay double the market price for our oil. Producers around the world would be knocking our doors down to sell their oil to us. That particular idea sure would not win a prize, because cost (commercial viability) is what this is all about. We are not hostage to foreign oil per se; we are hostage to liquid fuel costs, regardless of where that liquid fuel comes from. Also keep in mind that we have not hit peak energy sources, we have just hit peak liquid fuel sources. I hope someone dreams up something better than biofuels, and here is why:

Charisma

I walked into the study this morning to find my wife and youngest daughter watching an eagle on a wildlife webcam. They asked me if male eagles sit on eggs. No sooner had I said, "Pfft, I seriously doubt it," than another eagle appeared. The one sitting on the eggs flew off, allowing its partner to take over. Hey, roosters don't sit on eggs! Where would conservation (a major branch of environmentalism) be without charismatic wildlife? Speaking of which, Luna, the killer-whale orphan, was just killed by a boat.

Later, while poking around on the webcam site, I discovered a cool video of a black snake making short work of a nest of baby robins (click on the picture of the robin). I watched the exact same thing happen on my uncle's farm when I was a kid in Indiana. Black rat snakes can get up to six feet long. They are the generalists of the snake world, known to eat just about anything: rodents, amphibians, birds, other snakes, and even eggs. I was glad the webcam owner, obviously a bird lover, allowed nature to take its course. I bet that wasn't easy.

Wealth gradients

Ever wonder what it is that holds people in poverty? Although never expressed in polite company, there is an undercurrent in many circles that the poor are victims of their genes. There isn't a word for it, like racism or sexism, but the mindset still exists.

Here's the real skinny: poverty, like wealth, is usually inherited. Poverty is primarily the result of competition from other human beings. People like you and me took their jobs. It is also a matter of statistics and energy. A street orphan in Bangladesh has essentially zero chance of becoming CEO of Boeing, no matter how hard he or she tries.

How do you suppose President Bush, a man who rarely reads and can hardly string a grammatically correct sentence together, became president of the most powerful nation on Earth? He was not only accepted into Yale (SAT scores: 566 verbal and 640 math), but managed to graduate as well. He later attended AA, and with the help of a higher power managed to kick the drinking habit he had developed while at Yale. The best analogy I can come up with is a ten-mile race (having been a long distance runner for most of my life, I prefer footrace analogies to football analogies). Dubya started life's race two feet from the finish line and staggered over it. Others started in a huge pack at the starting line. Arrayed before them, somewhere between the starting line and the finish line, were people born to wealthier parents.

Environmental ethics III: The biocentrist pipes in

First, I would like to welcome you all to the sixth mass extinction event, in case anyone forgot where we are at this juncture in geologic time.

We all fall somewhere on a scale (depending on the topic) that has VHEMT at the extreme left and the traditional Judeo-Christian belief that man is separate from nature and that nature exists solely to serve man on the extreme right (although change is in the wind, with new biblical interpretations to support the reversal being discovered daily).

What we have here is a tug-o-war over the word environmentalist, kicked off, I think, by some anthropocentric-leaning articles, and readers' responses to them, and, ah, responses to those responses.