The activists among us should remember that there’s plenty to do together

I hope everyone's been following the discussion on animal rights and environmentalism. I continue to be impressed with the decency and thoughtfulness of the community that's gathered here.

Frogfish said most of what needed to be said. The unit of analysis for conservationism is population; for animal rights it is the individual. If you ask me, animal rights is morally bankrupt in the absence of environmentalism -- not the other way around.

But we should all remember: parsing the logical and ethical differences is a matter for thinkers. For doers, for activists, the job is to get things done. That means rallying people around the things they agree on, not emphasizing those that divide them.

As India modernizes, farmers and public health pay the price.

India's current burst of free-market reform and official attempts at "modernization" are by no means the area's first.

As Mike Davis shows in his luminous Late Victorian Holocausts (2001), the subcontinent's 19th century British rulers imposed an economic agenda literally ripped wholesale from the pages of Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations (1776), that bible of free-market dogmatists.

Davis lays out in devastating detail (first chapter available for free here) how in the 1870s, high-living colonial administrators dismantled the old Indian system for handling droughts, replacing it with one in which the price of grain floated freely based on global supply and demand. Thus, when a drought struck a grain-producing region in India, the grain price surged. The only buyers who could then afford it happened to reside in merry olde England.

The subcontinent's railroad system, paid for by taxes imposed on the Indians, very efficiently carried grain being produced in the non-drought areas to ports for shipment to the mother country. Its cutting-edge telegraph infrastructure, also financed by colonial taxes, transmitted price hikes rapidly. Famine thus rippled throughout India, including in non-drought-stricken areas.

Tens of millions perished in a series of famines in late 19th century India; before, when drought struck a certain area, food would move in from luckier areas and famines were rare. Davis claims the English took advantage of these not-so-natural disasters to consolidate its grip on the subcontinent. It was all very efficient, really.

Today in India, modernization is bringing new food-related woes: growing despair among farmers and surging diabetes rates.

It’s driving me mad!

A while back I lamented about how much extra driving my family does, now that our older daughter has started kindergarten. (To recap: the school that my wife and I chose isn't in our neighborhood, and we're driving an extra 75 miles every week as a result. Ugh.)

Just before school started, my main beef was that all that extra driving would increase our family's contribution to climate change. I still think that's right.

But there's perhaps a more immediate impact worth mentioning. I'm spending a lot more time in my car on the typical weekday -- a little over double the time, as a matter of fact.

And at risk of sounding like a whiner: it's really getting to be a drag.

It won’t happen through fear

Funny. I wrote this post last night and held onto it to post it later today -- and then John went and scooped me, saying many of the very things I had to say. Oh well. Consider this an addendum to his post.

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Ibon at peakoil.net voices his worst fear:

Shrimpers’ bycatch a goldmine for shark hunters

The classic battle of man vs. fish has resulted in dozens of blockbusters and bestsellers. But the drama and adventure that make these stories great are noticeably absent from most fishing practices in this day and age. Take, for example, sharking.

A recent article in the Sun Herald outlines a simple three-step process for hunting sharks:

1. Follow a shrimp boat.
2. Wait.
3. Stick your pole in the water.

Shrimp boats, after pulling trawls throughout the night, collect their shrimp and then throw the rest of the catch overboard. This "bycatch" is a smorgasbord of dead or dying fish, and a "feeding frenzy" of sharks quickly ensues. According to the article's author, Al Jones, "fishing behind anchored shrimp boats can be an awesome experience once a feeding frenzy is under way."

Quint must be rolling over in his grave.

An interview on planning for climate change

An interview I recently did has been published in the newsletter of Caisse des Depots, a state-owned financial institution that performs public-interest missions on behalf of the French government. Also quoted in the interview is Patrick Criqui, Director of the Energy and Environmental Policy Department of the Grenoble LEPII. You can get the full newsletter here (PDF). It's all about the problems posed by the long timescale climate change operates on, and is definitely worth reading.

Here is the interview:

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Why the Hudson Insitute needs to compost its manure a little better.

Very few people are actually passionate about industrial food. Sure, people will buy rock-hard and flavorless tomatoes from the supermarket without thinking much about it, but they won't get mad because, say, there's a farmers' market down the road where someone's selling flavorful heirloom tomatoes grown without chemicals.

Alex Avery of the Hudson Institute -- funded lavishly by right-wing foundations and agribiz giants -- is a different breed altogether. Indeed, it's as though Monsanto conjured him up in a test-tube: the fellow seems to have a congenital hatred of organic food -- and a burning desire to make you hate it, too. His preferred method for achieving his goal is fear.

Take the BS he's been spreading about the recent E. coli outbreak affecting pre-washed, bagged spinach, on Gristmill and elsewhere.