The Economist touts Charles Clover's book on "fish mining"
In its "best books of 2004" issue, the Economist reviews Clover's new one, The End of the Line: How Over-Fishing is Changing the World and What We Eat.
The book depicts ineffective monitoring agencies:
Umpteen international agencies busy themselves with monitoring, suggesting and complaining, but to little avail. Politicians in rich countries yield spinelessly to the short-term interests of fishermen, who can still tweak the sympathies of other voters in a way that even farmers cannot. And consumers are resolutely uninterested.
Clover's recommendations:
Yet some fishery policies have been shown to work, especially in Iceland. Mr Clover suggests independent management, long-term transferable quotas, marine reserves and, above all, far greater openness, ideally with the help of satellites and the internet, to reveal what every boat is doing.
To see the Economist's other book picks, go here.
Wild turkey high-tech free-for-all: farmers, talk radio guys & biology geeks
[Made-me-laugh Department, Thanksgiving division.]
Tom Pelton of the Baltimore Sun must have had fun writing this:
In their guerrilla war with insurgent wild turkey populations in Maryland and elsewhere, grape growers have deployed falcons, shotguns, dogs, tape-recorded turkey distress calls, flashing lights and balloons shaped to look like hawks.
But one farmer thinks he has a better weapon:
blaring AM talk radio programs from speakers set up among his vines - especially on moonless nights, when the turkeys hit the grapes like drunken sailors.
"I cannot guarantee it will work with easy-listening music ... but [...] talk radio seems to drive every wild animal insane,"
A talk radio host responds:
"They've got to be left-wing turkeys," said Don Kroah, [of] WAVA 105.1-FM in Baltimore and Washington.
Geek biologists enter the fray:
After hearing complaints about turkeys, [Brian McGowan, a biologist at Purdue University] spent hundreds of hours prowling fields at night wielding video cameras with night-vision technology. He also strapped tiny backpacks to turkeys and used radio transmitters with global positioning systems to monitor their movements.
His time-lapse videotapes show that most of the crop damage blamed on wild turkeys is caused by raccoons and deer
Cool!
There's also mention of rocket-powered turkey nets.
Invasive species: how serious a problem?
Tim Burke suspects that worries about invasive species are, at heart, more aesthetic than substantive:
arguments against “invasive species” even from scientists sometimes seem not so much technical or scientific (when they are, they usually rest on the relatively weak assertion that there is a burning necessity for general biodiversity that trumps all other possible principles of ecological stewardship) but mostly aesthetic.
Hearing arguments against invasive species gives Tim deja vu:
[the] rhetoric and tropes [used against invasive species] sometimes seem uncannily familiar, reminding me very much of [some] ideas about race [and] miscegenation[. I notice] similar desires to stop the forward motion of change, to fix environments (human or natural) in their tracks, the same suspicion of dynamism.
The bit about race strikes me as a stretch, but but the part about "fixing environments in their tracks" is interesting. Especially as we consider the pro's and con's of stocking the Chesapeake Bay with oyster species from Asia.
UPDATE: With his talk of aesthetics and dynamism, Tim sounds a bit like Virginia Postrel.
Is the Chesapeake Bay Commission report fair to farmers?
From the Sun article that I quoted last Friday:
A new CBC report on cleaning up the Chesapeake Bay directs nearly all of its recommendations at farmers.
In the article, Pennsylvania state representative Russell H. Fairchild says that he expects to get
tough questions about the report's conclusions from his rural constituents, who might wonder why they are being targeted while a 400-home subdivision gets a pass.
"They might ask, 'What about that tanker truck that comes into the subdivision and sprays fertilizer on the yard?'" Fairchild said.
"And they deserve an answer."
Rep. Fairchild has a good point.
I don't see how we can put all the burden on farmers when we don't seem to have a handle on either (1) the amount of nutrients coming into the bay from urban/suburban lawns, or (2) the cost of fixing the the urban/suburban lawn problem.
CBF gets serious on priorities; next target is reducing nutrient runoff from manure
I'm glad to see the Chesapeake Bay Foundation is getting very focused on setting priorities:
the bay foundation has been driving forward with a plan it hopes will make bay cleanup more palatable - a strategy of breaking down the work and feeding it to government "one bite at a time," Baker said.
I think the flush tax was a bi-partisan success in part because of CBF's single-minded focus on it:
Step one was upgrading sewage plants, and to help that effort $1 billion worth of funding was secured with a so-called flush tax approved by Maryland lawmakers earlier this year. This year, CBF will use the law as a model when lobbying Virginia legislators.
The next priority for CBF:
Step two, Baker said, is to target the overflow of manure spread over farm fields in the 64,000-square-mile watershed.
This will be a harder nut to crack.
