Firstly dear reader, my apologies. This is a long one. But when it comes to ‘tuna ranching’, there is just so much to say.

A new report from Umami Sustainable Seafood Inc – a US-based seafood company and the largest supplier of sashimi-grade bluefin in the world – says that for the third year running natural spawning of captive bluefin Tuna has been recorded at its research and production facility in Croatia.

The report has been picked up by the press in a kind of lackadaisical, non-critical way. And if the champagne corks aren’t exactly popping, well maybe it’s because, what can we really say about it? Hurrah! Tuna can now get all the same diseases and cause all the same environmental damage as salmon!?

I would not presume to understand all that the business of aquaculture entails. I do, however, understand the environmental damage, to the sea and on land, that is being caused by that industry. Adding yet another big fish to the pond is not going to make things better.

Conservation International has recently endorsed the business of fish farming in its report Blue Frontiers – Managing the Environmental Costs of Aquaculture. And this sounds like an important endorsement, until you look a little closer at Conservation International itself, which earlier this year was accused of corporate ‘greenwashing’ after a senior employee was secretly filmed by undercover reporters discussing ways in which the organisation could help an arms company boost its green credentials (check out the story and the film here).

The revelation didn’t surprise many. Conservation International’s corporate sponsor list reads like a who’s who transnational corporate baddies (see also this 2003 article) and includes the likes of Cargill, Monsanto, McDonald’s, Starbucks, BHP Billiton and Coca Cola (though this is a story for another day…)

Back in the wide blue ocean, it may already be too late for the bluefin – and we have yet to see what the impacts of losing a major predator of the ocean will do to shift the entire ecosystem of the sea. Thus I understand the urgent desire to protect the species. And yes, I know, I know, I know. The assumption, ad nauseum, is that environmentalists like myselfare all a bunch of airy fairy hippies who want to give the world a hug but don’t really understand the intricacy of the science or the awesomeness of the technology behind it all (Mark Lynas, et al take note). Forgive me, but what a load of hairy old bollocks.

The hindsight of countless generations shows that when you mess with Mother Nature you will get burned. It’s not a matter of ‘if’ but ‘when’ and, of course ‘how badly’.

So before anyone gets up to celebrate the miracle of breeding Northern bluefin in captivity let’s consider just for a moment what is known about what has euphemistically become known as ‘tuna ranching’…

It may already be too late for the bluefin – and we have yet to see what the impacts of losing a major predator of the ocean will do to shift the entire ecosystem of the sea. Thus I understand the urgency to want to protect the species.

But let’s begin at the beginning. Why are the bluefin becoming extinct? Is it because of an essential lack of fish farms? The answer is no. Bluefin and other sea creatures are under threat because of an unsustainable global fishing industry where drift nets that would span comfortably from London to Brighton (about 60 miles) scour the sea, clearing it of every living thing. Tuna in particular have been over-fished to feed a luxury market, such as that which exists in the Orient.

It is the market that is destroying the tuna and I am most certainly sceptical of market solutions to save these animals because such solutions will always be driven by the need to preserve the market more than a need to preserve the species.

I cannot think of a single instance in which the ‘market’ has brought about intentional positive change for the environment or for people. The globalised ‘market’ is in fact a major stumbling block on the road to a sustainable society. Business by its very nature takes a small picture, short-term view.

(A businessman I met recently told me that one reason why techno solutions, and therefore market and political solutions, to our environmental problems are always presented in 20 year timeframes is that 20 years is short enough to be attractive to investors, but far enough away that nobody worries to much about the details of whether something will actually work – another story for another day…).

Umami’s news release says that it has made a significant investment growing over 1,000 young tuna into mature brood stock at its aqua farms in both Mexico and Croatia. This is likely the world’s largest brood stock holding, with the eventual goal being to release hundreds of millions of fertilised eggs and fry back into the wild every year.

Sounds phenomenal until you realise that on average a female bluefin tuna can produce 6-10 million eggs in a single spawning season. The number depends on how mature the fish is; a 5 year-old female can produce an average of five million eggs per year, whereas females aged 15-20 years can carry up to 45 million eggs. So allowing these fish to reach full maturity would contribute more to repopulating the ocean.

And even if all these eggs were to hatch, they have only about a 3 per cent chance of making it to become a 6cm-long fry and a 0.1 per cent chance of growing to a saleable size and be sold in markets.

So why release these eggs into the wild?  Is it because we want to see the bluefin live freely in the wide wet ocean the way it is meant to, or is it because the fish produce too many eggs to be utilised in captivity anyway, or is it so we have a chance to go on hunting and selling them in ever increasing numbers? Some people believe the ‘why’ doesn’t matter. I disagree. The ‘why’ is everything, especially with market-based solutions, because it explains the true nature of the commitment. The moment the market wobbles the corporation is free to opt out or change its business plan entirely.

Bluefin tuna are among the most highly valued fish on the planet. In a market where a large fish of a high grade can fetch upwards of $100,000 the market value of the fish cannot be considered an incidental issue; it is central to the thinking behind the technology that will be used to breed them in captivity, and the way that the fish are harvested, penned, fed and, in most cases, drugged.

In many ways ’breeding programmes’, for large pelagic carnivores in particular, are a distraction from the real issues of over-fishing. And they can be a very expensive way of not solving a problem. In addition fish farming is a form of intensive farming as prone to causing environmental devastation and illness for the animals as its land-based equivalent.

Attempts to breed tuna in captivity are decades long and have been largely unsuccessful. Because the market is so lucrative tuna breeding has become a kind of Holy Grail of aquaculture.

Umami’s Croatian enterprise notwithstanding, there are still many problems to overcome when it comes to captive breeding of bluefin tuna.

In spite of their great size and apparent aggressiveness, bluefin are an unusually delicate fish, both physically and psychologically. There are currently two ways to raise them in captivity. One can harvest them from the wild and mature them in captivity on tuna ‘ranches’ (a practice that is accelerating the species’ extinction), or you can try to breed them in captivity.

The first option may seem easy but bluefin apparently bruise easily because of their delicate scales, and their gills take in little oxygen compared to other fish, so they have to swim continuously to breathe – even while asleep. Farmed fish breeders often trumpet the fact that captive fish use less energy swimming and therefore this energy can be directed into growth – I hate to imagine what swimming less in captivity might do to  a tuna’s metabolism). Transporting them to pens – after they have been scooped up by giant nets – means many die in the process.

Tuna in cages suffer the same problems as salmon. No matter how ‘well controlled’ the stock densities are there is no way such densities can be considered a normal existence for these animals. The fish can become stressed and are likely to become immune compromised and more vulnerable to lice infestations.

Like salmon, bluefin are large carnivorous predators used to having vast oceanic territories to roam in. The cues they receive from this nomadic existence are, in part, what trigger the breeding response. Tuna are also long living creatures that are hardwired to need this vast territory in order to remain healthy. The problems of farming salmon are multiplied greatly in tuna because tuna are that much larger than salmon.

Tuna can take up to 12 years to reach sexual maturity, compared to about three years for say catfish (another common  aquaculture fish), and getting them to breed outside their natural  habitat is difficult. The early experience of breeders in the US and  Japan found that even if the fish could be encouraged to spawn inside a pen and even if the eggs hatched, the fry usually died after a few weeks.

Another major stumbling block of the development of breeding programmes appears to be that life in a floating sea cage or giant tank apparently does not provide the right environmental cues to tell the fish it is time to breed. In the absence of natural cues most breeders use drugs (hormone supplements), though this appears not to be the case with the Umami fish. The drug treatment that mimics the gonadotropin-releasing hormone the fish would normally secrete to trigger the urge to breed, but that does not make it natural. A drug is a drug is a drug.

Recent science shows that breeders can use drug implants to get bluefin to produce eggs in captivity with some success.

However the flaw in this approach is that it assumes that it is some inherent flaw in the fish that it will not breed in captivity.  The experience with human hormone treatments such as the Pill and HRT (exogenous oestrogens that are listed by the International Agency for Research into Cancer, IARC, as known carcinogens) shows the devastation that such drugs can cause humans. It is inevitable that they will eventually have consequences for the fish and because our worldview is so unbelievably narrow the ’solution’– and here I am taking my lead from land-based intensive farming – will probably be to drug the fish with something else – again on the basis that the fish simply is responding in a flawed way to its captive environment.

The delivery of the hormone treatment to the fish is even more aggressive than for salmon, delivered by divers shooting time-release implants into the fish with spear guns.

What is more, in trying to get captive tuna to spawn reliably every year, tuna ranchers may be working very much against the fish’s natural rhythm. We don’t really know whether the assumption that adult tuna spawn every year, is correct. Experiments in captivity challenge this assumption, suggesting that spawning by an individual might occur only once every 2-3 years (see this Oceana report). What is the effect of enforced spawning on the fish’s health and well being?

Not only is the hormonal profile of the captive fish manipulated, so is its diet with high doses of nutrients in a form that the fish would not normally take in the wild. The use of supplements is less to do with the health of the fish and, as a recent study in the Journal of Aquatic Food Product Technology suggests, more to do with the need to maintain the colour of the flesh of the slaughtered fish over its shelf life, thus improving its market value. Nutrient supplements used in this way, to alter the biochemical profile of an animal, are also essentially drugs.

The natural life of these fish can be measured in decades however farmed fish are considered suitable for slaughter for sashimi at 3-4 months. In modern tuna aquaculture once the fish reach this age they are slaughtered. Again it is hard to see how this process of growing them to slaughter them is considered sustainable for the bluefin population as a whole.

Like salmon, tuna are carnivores they require a high-protein diet that can only be met with a mixture of soya (rainforest destructive and usually genetically modified) and other fish (things like pilchards and mackerel, thus hoovering and decimating the populations of smaller fish from the sea. The fish meal industry in Peru and Chile is responsible for some of the worst examples of unsustainable fishing practice and also destroys the lives and livelihoods of local people (see this video report). The fish that are being fed to the captive tuna by the way are good healthful fish that could be fed to humans as a much lower price than luxury tuna.

The feed/conversion ratio for tuna is appears to be very high. Salmon take 3-4 kg of food to produce 1kg of extra weight. Tuna require 25-20kg of extra food to produce an extra kg in weight. Let’s put that in perspective a bluefin tuna in captivity requires eats 20 times more fish than it eventually produces.

Fish in captivity are generally overfed to produce that extra and very valuable kg which fetches a higher price at market. Good for the seller but feeding fish to fish can never be sustainable. It is my view that is  aquaculture is to be sustainable as a source of food for humans then we  need to concentrate on inland fish such as carp which convert their fish food – which no human would ever want to eat – into weight gain just about at a one-to-one ratio.

The tuna farming industry appears to be growing in spite of the fact that there is little to no study of its environmental impact. It is likely that where major tuna populations are kept in cages, opportunistic species (such as lice) will follow and proliferate nearby and could in theory spread to wild populations. If the fish tuna are overfed there is also more waste from the food and the animals’ excreta which needs to be taken into account in any  sustainability profile.  Even all this does not take into account greenhouse gas emitted by fish farming, the production of feed meal and the transport of the fish to the customer.

Tuna cages are also often sited in strategic parts of the ocean, for instance where warm currents run. They may interfere or alter in some way the running of those currents and because of their high market value local fisherman may be prohibited from fishing in those otherwise fertile areas, thus impacting local economies. This has already been seen in the tuna farms in the Mediterranean.

In breeding tuna in captivity we are doing something inherently unnatural – shrouding it in the language or methodology of science does not make this any less true; and there are always unintended consequences to such endeavours. (For anyone interested in more it’s worth reading the Greenpeace report Challenging the Aquaculture industry on Sustainability – the concerns raised in it are real and valid).

For all the reasons above, and with the full awareness that somebody somewhere will inevitably call me a hair-shirt-wearing, tree-hugging, fish-kissing, cave-dwelling luddite for asking this question, I still can’t help but wonder: in terms of resources spent and resilience gained, wouldn’t it be better to see the money being ploughed into captive breeding programmes put into ways of restoring the entire ocean ecosystem?

• Originally posted here.
• Pat’s previous AlterNet post is here.

© Pat Thomas 2011. No reproduction without the author’s permission.

Look beyond all the theatre of the US debt crisis, and there is opportunity in disguise, says Pat Thomas

Amidst all the hand-wringing about the US debt crisis, there’s been very little space given to whether the system that everyone is trying to prop up is actually worth saving. America, like most of the affluent West, is built on a foundation of infinite growth. And yet worshipping at this altar is a significant reason why the US has borrowed more than it can afford to repay, bringing the country to the brink of bankruptcy.

As Congress continues squabbling like over-tired sugar-saturated kindergarteners, Americans are rightfully afraid that the party really is over, that the ‘American way of life’ is dying, and that this death brings with it a future where an easy sense of entitlement and rampant consumerism and economy based on endless growth is over and where we will all need to apply more appropriate limits. This feels like death, and yet it is a basic tenet of life that something has to die before something else can be born.

The US debt crisis could actually be an opportunity disguised as a crisis. But sadly, there seems to be little enthusiasm for such revolutionary thought, let alone action, to reshape the economy. Instead the likely outcome is an anti-climactic compromise aimed at maintaining America’s triple A credit rating whatever the costs; one that will be used to ‘prove’ that the system works, but which in reality is propping up something that is morally wrong, culturally devastating, spiritually toxic and, of course, environmentally disastrous.

In contemplating this last point the immortal words of comedian Woody Allen, addressing a class of graduating students come to mind:

‘More than at any other time in history, mankind faces a crossroads. One path leads to despair and utter hopelessness. The other to total extinction. Let us pray we have the wisdom to choose correctly.’

It could be a prayer to almost any of the difficult choices we humans are currently faced with, but seems particularly pertinent to a debate about economic growth. For many economists the choice is simple: we grow or we die. And at first glance it would seem ridiculous to suggest that in pursuing perpetual growth we are in fact hastening the death of our species. And yet that is exactly what we are doing.

The promotion of a growth economy is predicated on many alleged benefits: greater longevity, better health, greater prosperity and more leisure time. Few of these stand up to closer scrutiny. We would, for instance, be hard pressed to show that longevity is a direct result of economic growth; though economic growth has certainly benefited from a longer-living, and thus longer-spending, population.

We may not be hit by plagues anymore (though as climate change bites even that may not be true for much longer); but we are suffering from more chronic diseases – many of which are environmentally mediated – than ever before and our longer-lived population requires much more healthcare – once again, a real boon for the economy. As for greater prosperity, according to the UN, 80 per cent of the world’s wealth is concentrated in 20 per cent of the population, and survey after survey shows that in order to maintain our precious standard of living we are all working longer hours than ever before. So much for leisure time.

The big picture of the consequences of economic growth and its view of the natural capital of the planet as a collection of resources to be exploited for the benefit of Homo economicus is pretty distressing. To be environmentally literate is to be acutely aware of the all-pervading and often malign influence of the growth economy:

• Our fossil fuel and mineral resources are rapidly depleting
• Personal and institutional debt is spiralling out of control
• The rates of ill health – both physical and mental – is rising
• Divisions between the rich and the poor are wider than ever before
• Our topsoil disappearing and with it the land’s ability to produce nutritious food
• Our fresh water supplies are drying up
• Clean air, untainted by pollution, is a now distant memory
• Fish stocks in our oceans are at critically low levels
• The population has increased beyond the point where the planet’s resources can support it
• And most humans in the developed world define themselves as consumers first, and people second.

Although it can be hard to accept the growth economy as anything but benign, the truth is that economic philosophy is dangerously out of sync with nature and with the human psyche and is doing untold damage to both. What is more, in a world where growth is the only goal, everything is open to exploitation.

The mantra of ‘growth’ has become a kind of mental monoculture. Many businesspeople and economists can’t see any other point of view and don’t really want to. And yet every argument that we make in favour of growth falls down at the feet of one simple fact: the resources upon which growth depend are running out.  In fact the only thing we seem to have in abundance these days is people.

Indeed, in my lifetime the population of the planet has doubled and the current economic paradigm relies on there being an increasing number of people in the world, to buy an increasing amount of stuff. The belief system of economics also says that we need perpetual growth to produce full employment for all these people and thereby avoid economic collapse.

It’s a vicious circle the consequences of which have been population explosion and an ever-increasing draw on natural capital. With regard to raw materials, nature is a closed system. So the natural capital on which our economic system depends will always be limited.

There is only one Earth. At current rates of consumption, and with the population as it stands globally, there are about 1.9 hectares of productive area per person, but the average ecological footprint is already 2.3 hectares. So we currently require one and a half Earths to live sustainably. The largest footprint belongs to citizens of the United States, who use up 9.6 hectares each. Five Earths would be needed if everyone in the world today consumed at that level.

Currently people in China use somewhere around 1.4 hectares per person. However, if world population continues to grow unchecked, and if people in China and India start consuming at US levels, it is estimated that we would need 25 Earths to satiate everyone’s desires.

In essence, there are simply too many of us using too much, too fast. And yet economics continues to demand unlimited growth. The only logical conclusion of this is that an economic system based on growth in demand and consumption is one that is designed to fail and must eventually come to an end, either through human design – let’s be generous and call that ‘choice’ – or through natural disaster.

You won’t hear any politicians talking this way because the way we have allowed our economic system to become structured is such that any drop in demand triggers market panic and the political nightmare of mass unemployment. Instead we continue to prop up the existing system through drops in interest rates, massive increases in credit card debt and home loans, tax cuts, huge federal deficits, bond sales and public and private borrowing from other nations. In other words we arrived at a place where we simply shuffle money (and debt) around in order to maintain the illusion of growth.

As radical economist Herman Daly is so fond of reminding us “Anyone who believes exponential growth can go on forever in a finite world is either a madman or an economist.”

And in the midst of all this craziness, this belief in a growth economy makes serious efforts at energy conservation, protection of natural resources and limits to population growth increasingly problematical. And the problem is not merely technological; it is cultural in the deepest sense.

Starting two centuries ago, our species embarked on this path of unprecedented growth, founded on a temporary subsidy of cheap hydrocarbon energy. Climate change is a side effect of fossil fuel consumption, and can now be seen as the most critical symptom of our growth binge. But unless we address the core of the problem, other symptoms will soon overwhelm us, even if we manage technically to resolve the dilemma of carbon emissions.

Addressing the core of the problem means letting go of growth; it means engaging in a period of controlled societal contraction, characterised by a stable or declining population consuming at a per capita level far below that currently taken for granted in the industrialized world.

For anyone who understands the ABCs of ecology – that is relationships between population, resources, and the carrying capacity of the planet – nothing could be clearer.

And whilst some people propose sustainable growth this, of course, is something of an oxymoron. Even at a small rate of steady growth – say between 2 and 3 per cent a year – we will eventually see a doubling of the economy in around 25 years. The price of that growth is a doubling of our use of resources and a doubling of our waste and pollution. On this trajectory our economy could have quadrupled by 2050. Contrast this with the 2006 Stern Inquiry into the economics of climate change, which made it plain that by the middle of the century we must reduce CO₂ emissions by up to 80 per cent, and even the comforting concept of sustainable growth becomes untenable.

However painful it is to imagine, and however difficult it is to implement, a new economic paradigm is urgently needed. And whilst detractors will say that this necessary restructuring will lead to the collapse of the economy, this is patently false. The economy, as most of us experience it, has nothing to do with economics. Economics is a philosophical structure that connects only intermittently and accidentally to the physical reality of the planet we inhabit and even less often to economics of everyday life which involve the mustering of wealth for human sustenance and well being.

This amazing miracle of a planet, the only home any of us will ever have, the only known place in the universe that can support life as we know it, is dying. And you may well ask: how did we get here? What choices did our parents, grandparents and great-grandparents make that led us to this point.

The answer is they chose to believe and participate in the ‘miracle’ of economic growth. The fact is, the economic system requires more than money and natural capital to prop it up. It also requires our cooperation. Ultimately it is not our money but our beliefs and expectations, our habits, memories and desires that give power the current economic system.

If we are going to save the planet then we need to abandon the fantasy of infinite growth and begin the real and valuable work of engaging with an economy that will genuinely benefit both people and planet.

• Originally posted here.
• Pat’s previous AlterNet post can be found here.

© Pat Thomas 2011. No reproduction without the author’s permission.

Wildlife documentaries? Eco-tourism? Pat Thomas asks: Are we loving nature to death?

A new report puts forward the theory that wildlife film makers are invading the privacy of animals by going to ever greater extremes to film otherwise unseen moments of life in the animal kingdom.

According to Brett Mills, a lecturer in film studies at the University of East Anglia, the growing use of miniature cameras by wildlife photographers and film makers produces an invasive level of surveillance most humans would find objectionable if they were on the other end of the lens: “The key thing in most wildlife documentaries is filming those very private moments of mating or giving birth. Many of these activities, in the human realm, are considered deeply private, but with other species we don’t recognise that”.

He adds that while it might seem strange to claim that animals have a right to privacy, the idea should not be dismissed: “We can never really know if animals are giving consent, but they do often engage in forms of behaviour which suggest they’d rather not encounter humans”.

Debate on animals and privacy is largely philosophical. Allowing for the general validity of Mills’ argument, the very use of the term ‘privacy’, a mainly anthropocentric concern, may be obscuring the point of what is a potentially important discussion about the rest of the animal kingdom.

To require privacy requires a sense of oneself and as well as awareness of being observed by others. Some higher mammals appear to have one or both of these senses, but not all animals do. While they may not explicitly seek privacy, animals are exquisitely aware of their environments and will, when necessary, seek refuge or shelter or take other measures to ensure safety for themselves and their young and their group. 

Human sexual behaviour isn’t just for procreation and (usually) has a private element to it. But in the animal world mating rituals can be gloriously public, flashy, competitive, even violent. These open displays of sexuality have some practical purposes. They define territory and hierarchy assuring that the strongest males are given the chance to pass their genetic traits on; it also allows the most prolific breeding females to display their fecundity. All this happens to support the survival of the species; it’s only relatively recently that these activities have come to be regarded as entertainment for humans.

We all have to live on the same earth together and it would seem a given that all animals should have the right to exist in a way and in an environment that is natural to them without being deliberately interfered with, exploited or intruded upon. But most humans have such trouble with this simple notion that we have invented wildlife preserves and parks and zoos to keep the animals, that once had free roam of the wilderness, enclosed in legally defined territory (a few humans are now challenging this with the concept of rewilding, though to some extent both ideas assume the right of humans to dictate terms).

And, of course, we also have wildlife films that safely confine our experience of animals to screens big and small.

Wildlife film makers explain their craft in part by saying that they are providing a public service by helping more of us to know, love and maybe protect the natural world. Newer technologies, they argue, mean that the act of watching animals in their natural or near-natural habitat is less and less invasive. All of this is true – up to a point. And I admit to being one of those who first fell in love with the nature that extended well beyond my back garden through watching wildlife programmes. As a small child in the 60’s I was hooked on the corny wildlife films on The Wonderful World of Disney, the Wild Kingdom and the Undersea Adventures of Jacques Cousteau. Through most of my adult life David Attenborough’s obvious love for his subject has also been inspirational.

But nature films are also a big industry now. There are endless cable channels hungry for content and there is big money to be spent and made. March of the Penguins, for example, grossed £85 million [$130 million] at the global box office and the BBC notes that Planet Earth “has been sold to 95 countries and territories and the DVD was the highest ever TV DVD pre-order on Amazon. It has already generated over £22 million [$34 millon] of gross revenue”.

It is in this comodification of nature, the packaging of it for mass appeal and profit, where the issue of what has been termed ‘wildlife porn’ or ‘nature porn’ starts to make sense.

For some, the juxtaposition of the words ‘nature’ and ‘pornography’ may seem strange. The linking factor is the way pornography objectifies its subject by removing context, whether that context might be character, life story, environment or ecosystem. You know you are watching nature porn when nature becomes a commodity – and this, of course, is how the human body and sexual experience is presented in human pornography – something to be consumed and then discarded as we flick the channel over to X-factor or Lost or the night’s football or a re-run of Friends.

David Attenborough’s Planet Earth was, at the time of its release, considered by some to be a good example of ‘wildlife porn’ – a near constant flow of epic imagery, of vast desert vistas and brooding forests, of skies brim full of migratory flocks birds, of flowing rivers and raging oceans, all filmed and edited to provoke arousal and to incite powerful feelings in the viewer. Beautiful, yes, but also in some ways numbing and ultimately a false reassurance that, when it comes to the natural world, voyeurism is our only role. And of course, it also ignored the many genuine environmental perils going on behind the scenes.

Perhaps not surprisingly, the rise of the nature documentary/series/film doesn’t seem to have inspired many of us to take better care of the world, but it has helped give rise to the idea of eco-tourism. Essentially, you’ve bought the album, now see the live show.

This leads to another issue; namely that we change what we observe. This isn’t just the experience of quantum physics. Any observed ‘object’, if it is alive and aware or can sense that it is being observed, will react to the observation, even if the reactions are unconscious or unintentional.

The intrusion of wildlife photographers and, perhaps worse, eco-tourists into the natural world to watch, to feel a part of nature while still being apart from it, is having a profound effect on wildlife. It doesn’t just put habitats under pressure; it also impacts the reproductive behaviour of the animals within those systems.

Eco-tourism may superficially seem to be an antidote to couch-potato consumption of nature documentaries, but the fact is that at a very basic level, taking busloads of people into the wild crowds the natural environment of the animals and alters their biology and behaviour in significant ways.

In 2004 New Scientist reported on studies showing that polar bears, penguins, dolphins, dingoes, even birds in the rainforest were becoming stressed as a result the invasion from eco-tourism. The physiological effects noted were sometimes subtle: changes to an animal’s heart rate, metabolism, stress hormone levels and social behaviour. But the wider impacts on the animals were worryingly high and included fewer hours of sleep each day, weight loss, lower resistance to disease, lower reproductive rates and premature death.

Two years ago the Wall Street Journal reported that the boom in eco-tourism to the Galápagos Islands was having a devastating effect on wildlife there. Unsustainable development, an influx of workers from the mainland and introduced species were, the article noted, putting endemic biodiversity and habitats at risk.

In the forests of California, scientists have found that hiking, bird watching and other similar ‘low-impact’ non-consumptive activities can interfere with the mating habits of bobcats and coyotes. Where the eco-tourists went, there was a fivefold reduction in numbers of these animals. After banning the tourists, their numbers began to rise again.

We understood how animals respond to crowding even before eco-tourism came into being. Over the years studies have shown that animal populations living in crowded conditions display a number of behaviours that tend to limit the size of the population, including aberrant forms of sexual behaviour, small litter sizes, a higher incidence of spontaneous abortion, ineffectual maternal care and even cannibalism of their young.

In this respect ‘privacy’, or whatever we choose to call it, may be important to the normal physiology of many species, even when particular individuals or groups don’t appear to live, or in the case of zoo animals, may never have lived, in a very ‘private’ environment.

For me the unasked questions are: Why do we watch nature films? What is it about the drama of birth, sex, survival and death of other species that draws us in? What do we – that is we who are not scientists – get out of the experience? Nature has long been our blank canvas and it’s tempting to consider whether our interest in animal lifestyles is really just a projection of our desire to be more free in our own mating choices and habits, to be more in tune with our natural environment, instincts and biology. What a strange world we live in where we can effectively watch a parade of elephants, tigers, chimps and whales humping all day long, but where a man, a human animal, can be prosected for indecent exposure (though finally, sensibly acquitted) after a neighbour, out walking with her child, inadvertently spied him making coffee in the nude in the privacy his own home.

As humans we believe that awareness of ourselves is our greatest gift. Maybe it’s time to apply some of this sentience in a less inwardly-focused way. It’s reassuring that so many of us love nature. But as with all forms of consumption we should at least question our ongoing, really voracious, desire for nature porn, and ask where it gets us, what it is displacing, what is lost through it, what might serve us better and what the potential damage is, to us and to the rest of the animal kingdom, if we don’t direct our interest in a more positive, practical way. These questions are more than a philosophical game, they are the obligations of a conscious, enlightened society.

Originally posted here.

Pat’s pevious AlterNet post can be found here.

© Pat Thomas 2010. No reproduction without author’s permission.

Here in the UK the news has an increasingly monotonous quality to it…  MPs’ expenses, Tony Blair’s illegal war, obscene bonuses for bankers, Tiger Woods, John Terry and Climategate. The characters change, but the story remains the same.

These are stories of arrogance and ignorance, selfishness and greed, laziness and lack of foresight, and when we read about it we are outraged, we demand resignations that (usually) never materialise and life and the media lurches on in search of the next outrage.

Most recently Climategate has morphed into Glaciergate with the revelation that the last IPCC report included bogus information  about the rate at which the Himalayan glaciers were melting. For me the most outrageous aspect of the ongoing story is the naivety of those who believe that all scientists are rational, infallible, incorruptible and above using clever ‘tricks’ to make their point. 

Climate sceptics and holier-than-thou environmentalists alike are now railing against the use of ‘grey literature’ as if this was an ‘offence’ on a par with genocide and paedophilia. Everyone seems to have forgotten that many significant discoveries begin life in the ‘grey’, as intuition, anecdote and hypothesis. Endless pages are being devoted to the call for more and better peer review, the resignation of Dr Rajendra Pachauri and new leadership of the IPCC.

I have my doubts, particularly when it comes to peer review. So many atrocities which have blighted our world and our lives – nuclear radiation, dioxins and PCBs, GM, thalidomide, the green revolution, to name but a few – have been ‘proved’ to be effective, progressive and safe through peer review. Conversely, some truly great scientific innovations – for instance those by Albert Einstein and Watson and Crick – were never peer reviewed. Most recently a group of 14 stem-cell researchers published an open letter charging that the process delayed or denied the publication of truly original scientific discoveries.

In truth, for more than 200 years, peer review has been an old boys’ network where some reviewers are more equal than others and which broadly functions as a way of keeping dissent and views that challenge the status quo out of the public arena. On such foundations is the belief that science will save us built.

The overaching narrative reveals a battle not about who is right but about who is less wrong. And the struggle of the average man is not so much about who you can believe, but whose lies or errors of judgement you feel most comfortable living with. It’s a precarious place to be.

What becomes clear is that our view of science suffers from the same distortions and hero worship as our view of sportsmen and celebrities. The Tigers, Terrys but also the Pachauris, groups like the United Nations and professions like bankers and scientists are so often blank canvases onto which we dump all our hopes and aspirations, our desires to be ‘right’ and ‘best’, all our unused potential, but also our darkest, most unconscious stuff, and our deep frustration with life. And perhaps what frustrates and angers us most is that these figureheads are failing to be the type of people we are not willing to be ourselves.

It’s not peer review but personal review that is most needed.

I’m not saying that we need to deny ourselves heroes – heaven knows so much of environmentalism is already framed the language of denial. But would it kill us to raise our awareness of how much these figureheads carry that really belongs to us, and reclaim it for ourselves? Maybe then, we could start doing something more constructive with our time and energy than looking for the next disappointment.

Read the original post here.  Read more from Pat Thomas here or visit her website, Howl at the Moon, here.