Articles by Jason D Scorse

Maybe, maybe not

This is why I love the Economist magazine. They take cutting edge issues and put a monkey wrench in conventional thinking.

Turns out, organic food is not always better for the environment, fair trade may actually exacerbate poverty in some circumstances, and buying local may be be less efficient than buying food shipped thousands of miles away sometimes.

Animal welfare and environmentalism, again

Over the past few months I have tried to accomplish two things with respect to the topic of animal welfare:

1. Demonstrate that animal welfare issues are central to environmentalism, and
2. lay out policies regarding animal welfare that environmentalists should support.

In retrospect I think I skipped an important step: laying out the basic principles that underlie this connection.

For trashing the oceans

The UN failed to ban bottom trawling largely due to Iceland's efforts, which is a huge blow to marine ecosystems. So put Iceland in the category with Japan as another country leading the charge toward oceanic collapse! Shame on them. Email their embassies.

Between hunters and environmentalists, that is

There has been a surge of discussion recently about hunter and conservation groups getting along better with environmentalists, especially in Western states where they have traditionally been on less-than friendly terms. That's all well and good, but the rash of poaching big animals to satisfy big egos is about as much the antithesis of environmentalism as you can get. Environmentalists need to step up and condemn this behavior and call for much stricter penalties.

The test for whether the honeymoon between hunters and environmentalists is real is whether hunting groups will also condemn this behavior and support tougher punishment. Reasonable people can disagree about whether it is right or wrong to kill many of these animals at all (even among environmentalists), but killing them simply to satisfy bloodlust and one-upsmanship is wrong and should be stopped.