Articles by Biodiversivist

Shade-grown coffee not quite taking off

I made up that part about Starbucks. Coffee gets credit for just about everything. Depending on the day, you will find that it either causes or prevents cancer, depression, heart attack, and ostensibly, sex. However, the article did get me wondering how the shade-grown coffee campaign was going.

Apparently, sustainable coffee accounts for less than half of one percent of all coffee sold, and can be split into three categories: Organic, fair trade, and shade grown. Shade-grown coffee presently accounts for about 0.1 percent of all coffee sold. (99.9% is not sold as shade grown).

Call me… Ishmael

Joan Root was gunned down in her house the other day. She joins Dorothy Stang, Dian Fossey, and who knows how many others on the long list of people who have gotten in the way of someone's paycheck.

I stumbled on a documentary of Chico Mendes while writing this. If you have high speed and an hour or so to spare, I highly recommend watching it. Rubber barons created a monopoly by enslaving people, who were in turn broken by British plantations, who were in turn broken by new technology -- synthetic rubber. The surviving workers (Mendes being the son of one of them) adjusted to life in the jungles -- after displacing the native Indians, of course. But, it wasn't until cattle ranchers displaced them that the forests in those areas of the coast were finally completely destroyed.

I have a favorite saying: The future cannot be predicted because the act of predicting it will alter it (in unpredictable ways). So here goes. I predict that the next wave of destruction, maybe the final one, will be biofuels, and it will be the ranchers' turn to be displaced. The average American consumes 10 pounds of coffee, 70 pounds of beef, and 4000 pounds of gasoline annually.

Dolphins on a flippery slope

This is a photo of an eight-year-old female Homo sapiens hugging a five-year-old female Tursiops truncatus. According to my daughter (a dolphin enthusiast), killer whales are just big dolphins with really sharp teeth, and there are thirty-something species of oceanic dolphins and five river dolphin species (found in five different rivers).

Not too many years ago biologists were whining that this or that species was going to be extinct in the next forty or fifty years. The time frame has now shrunk to about ten years for many of these same species (gorillas, river dolphins, you name it).

Dogs are leftover from a time when we needed them, and now they suffer

Dogs have been in the news lately -- poisonings from tainted dog food and less than respectful treatment by a baggage handler. We have a lot of shared history with dogs. Dogs were once extremely valuable survival tools, used for the tracking of game, the herding of other domesticated animals, and most of all for the detection of dangerous predators, usually upright walking ones. That last use is still the most common. Modern burglar alarms have yet to emulate a dog's keen sense of hearing and smell.

You can just look at a dog to see how we have altered their genes. But, how have they altered ours? The alterations have to be there, given so much intimate contact over so much time. I am going to hypothesize (as I have done way too many times before) that the good feelings many of us get from dogs are the result of selective pressure, implying once again that dog lovers may have had a slight reproductive advantage over a long period of time. What else could explain the intense attachment some people develop for their pet dogs? Similarly, both of my daughters developed strong attachments to soft fuzzy objects as small children (a blanket named DeeDee, still providing great pleasure, and a sheepskin named Woooly).