Ritual whale slaughter in the Faroe Islands

Whaling in the Faroe Islands in the North Atlantic has been practiced since about the time of the first Norse settlements on the islands. It is regulated by Faroese authorities but not by the International Whaling Commission as there are disagreements about the Commission's legal competency for small cetaceans. Around 950 Long-finned Pilot Whales (Globicephala melaena) are killed annually, mainly during the summer. The hunts, called grindadráp in Faroese, are non-commercial and are organized on a community level; anyone can participate. The hunters first surround the pilot whales with a wide semicircle of boats. The boats then drive the pilot whales slowly into a bay or to the bottom of a fjord.

Many Faroese consider the hunt an important part of their culture and history. Animal-rights groups criticize the hunt as being cruel and unnecessary. As of the end of November 2008 the chief medical officers of the Faroe Islands have recommended that pilot whales no longer be considered fit for human consumption because of the levels of toxins in the whales...

The primary reason for the Faeroes abstaining from joining the EU was in an effort to prevent the EU from meddling in their fishing policies. The slaughter of cetaceans is illegal within the European Union. 

More details, photographs, and a couple videos at this link.

Attempt to protect part of the Antarctic Ocean fails

Someday I hope to post some good news about the health and future of the world's oceans.  Today is not that day.

Talks to create the world's two largest marine reserves in the Antarctic have broken down, with conservationists branding Russia a "repeat offender" for blocking an international agreement.

Delegates from 24 nations and the European Union have been locked in talks in Hobart for the past 10 days at the annual meeting of the Commission for the Conservation of Antarctic Marine Living Resources (CCAMLR).

But the negotiations have ended in frustration for the nations, including Australia and the US, that proposed vast protected zones around Antarctica, with Russia, Ukraine and China refusing to back the plans...

"It's a bad day, not just for Antarctica but for the world's oceans, because so many fisheries are over-exploited and this was the one place we could create a reserve," she said. "The fact it can be blocked by a few nations with interests in fishing is very hard to take.

The failure of the talks is the third time in the past year that the proposals for protected zones have failed to find agreement among the commission's nations...

The region is considered by scientists as vital to the health of the world's marine life. It is estimated that three-quarters of all aquatic life is sustained by the nutrient-rich waters of the Southern Ocean, which are transported by an enormous current into the northern hemisphere.

More grim details at The Guardian.

Vietnam War military trash recycled by locals

A hat tip to my brother-in-law, who found an intersting report in The Aviationist:

...even if they can be refueled by aerial tankers, tactical jet planes heavily rely on the JP-8 fuel loaded on the external fuel tanks. However, the auxiliary fuel tanks represent an additional weight, additional drag, and they will reduce the aircraft maneuverability.

In real combat, external fuel tanks are jettisoned when empty or as soon as the aircraft needs to get rid of them to accelerate and maneuver against an enemy fighter plane or to evade a surface to air missile.

During the Vietnam War thousands of fuel tanks were jettisoned by U.S. combat aircraft.  The photos above (credit Hilli Rathner) demonstrate how locals have repurposed the tanks into serviceable boats not dissimilar in design to traditional watercraft.  The images below appear to show a similar unmodified fuel tank awaiting conversion, along with other military scrap.

"Who speaks for the human species?"

YouTube link.

Carl Sagan lived and spoke in an era when nuclear war and nuclear winter were paramount concerns.  That risk has not gone away, but were Carl Sagan alive today, I suspect his attention would be focused on environmental degradation.

Via The Dish.

How the world's oceans are being destroyed

Excerpts from an essay published in the Newcastle (NSW) Herald, by a man who recently sailed the western Pacific:

What was missing was the cries of the seabirds which, on all previous similar voyages, had surrounded the boat.  The birds were missing because the fish were missing...  No fish. No birds. Hardly a sign of life at all...

North of the equator, up above New Guinea, the ocean-racers saw a big fishing boat working a reef in the distance.

"All day it was there, trawling back and forth. It was a big ship, like a mother-ship," he said. And all night it worked too, under bright floodlights. And in the morning Macfadyen was awoken by his crewman calling out, urgently, that the ship had launched a speedboat.

"Obviously I was worried. We were unarmed and pirates are a real worry in those waters. I thought, if these guys had weapons then we were in deep trouble." But they weren't pirates, not in the conventional sense, at least. The speedboat came alongside and the Melanesian men aboard offered gifts of fruit and jars of jam and preserves.

"And they gave us five big sugar-bags full of fish," he said. "They were good, big fish, of all kinds. Some were fresh, but others had obviously been in the sun for a while.

"We told them there was no way we could possibly use all those fish. There were just two of us, with no real place to store or keep them. They just shrugged and told us to tip them overboard. That's what they would have done with them anyway, they said.

"They told us that his was just a small fraction of one day's by-catch. That they were only interested in tuna and to them, everything else was rubbish. It was all killed, all dumped. They just trawled that reef day and night and stripped it of every living thing."

The essay goes on to detail seeing evidence of the Japanese tsunami in mid-ocean -

Ivan's brother, Glenn, who boarded at Hawaii for the run into the United States, marvelled at the "thousands on thousands" of yellow plastic buoys. The huge tangles of synthetic rope, fishing lines and nets. Pieces of polystyrene foam by the million. And slicks of oil and petrol, everywhere.

Countless hundreds of wooden power poles are out there, snapped off by the killer wave and still trailing their wires in the middle of the sea...

All of this is anecdotal, of course, but still unbelieveably tragic.  The children of our generation will inherit a world with vastly depleted and damaged oceans, and those living far inland will not be unaffected.

Global "worming"

I've blogged before about the dangers earthworms pose to forest ecosystems.  The topic was discussed this past week in a feature article ("Saving the Great North Woods") in the StarTribune.  Most of the article centered on the effects of a warming climate on the health and variety of trees in the forests (especially in the Boundary Waters Canoe Area - BWCA), but these comments are worthy of note:

These invasive creatures, spread mostly by anglers dumping their bait, have taken up residence in about half of the million-acre wilderness, by one estimate. And they are re-engineering the forest floor as they go.

At dusk Chaffin provided a tour of a colony of night crawlers — the most damaging of the worms — residing beneath a massive basswood tree behind his campsite. Each year, the worms can eat a season’s worth of basswood leaves, depriving the forest floor of “duff,’’ the carpetlike layer of decaying matter that is a critical component of northern American forests.

In a healthy forest, the duff keeps tree roots cool, germinates tree seeds and mushrooms, and provides a home for ovenbirds, salamanders and other small creatures. But below this basswood the earth is bare, a circle of hard-packed dirt 30 feet in diameter. Trees that might fare better here as the climate warms — hardwoods such as red maple and basswood — can’t take root in the packed dirt. Instead, the worms create ideal conditions for invasives such as buckthorn and garlic mustard, plants that evolved with them in Europe.

“It’s like a buffet line” for worms, said Chaffin, marveling at their ingenuity. But in the process, he added, they “are fundamentally changing the foundation of the forest.”

Photo by me years ago - I encountered this little fellow while digging in the sandy soil of northern Minnesota. He was unhappy about being exposed, and curled into this defensive - or threatening? - posture.

The slaughter of rhinoceros

I've written five posts about the ongoing worldwide slaughter of rhinoceros.  I hate to keep harping on the subject, but it keeps happening:

Nearly 700 rhinos have been killed in South Africa in 2013, making it the bloodiest year yet for rhino poaching. Last year, a record 668 rhinos were poached for their horns, but that figure has already been eclipsed with the deaths of 688 rhinos with three months left of the year, figures from the South African government show. There are around 18,000 white and 4,000 black rhinos in the country.

The dramatic growth in rhino poaching in South Africa, up from just 13 in 2007, has largely been driven by demand in Asia, in particular Vietnam, where rhino horn is seen as a status symbol. A survey of 720 people in Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City, published earlier this month, found that typical buyers were "educated, successful and powerful individuals" and use rhino horn as currency in networking.

"Wind turbine syndrome" - organic or psychogenic?

The question is raised in a column at Salon:

Wind-turbine syndrome is the disease you’ve never heard of, and many will tell you it doesn’t exist. The diagnosis was only first named in 2006, but it’s become more common as its suspected cause proliferates: Wind power is America’s fastest-growing energy source, and some people insist it’s making them sick...

Kristen French investigated the phenomenon for New York magazine. Plenty of people, she found, were eager to testify to an array of symptoms:

In the past decade, hundreds of people who live near wind turbines in places like Massachusetts, New York, Wisconsin, and Japan have reported that the windmills are giving them a litany of ailments. The first complaints were recorded in 2003, when a British physician wrote an unpublished report about 36 people in the U.K. who said the turbines made them sick. Then, in 2004, a physician in Victoria, Australia, distributed questionnaires to 25 people living near local turbines, and three of them wrote back about severe stress, insomnia, and dizziness. Even some Scottish Buddhist monks have complained of symptoms, including dry retching and crying. Last summer, Tharpaland International Retreat Centre sold its land to Scottish Power after its monks found they were approximately 70 percent less able to meditate. 

The term “wind-turbine syndrome” was coined by a pediatrician who also happens to be married to an anti-wind activist, but French talked to pro-wind sufferers who claim to be suffering as well. Those affected, she writes, say they have sound reason to believe that turbines are the source of their troubles. “It’s caused by sound waves released when the giant turbine blades collide with the wind—not just the audible whooshing noise, but the rumbling vibrations created by a low-­frequency sound, or infrasound,” she explains.

But most sciences and doctors, along with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, either won’t acknowledge it or flat-out don’t believe it exists.

To be precise in the terminology, the syndrome does exist.  A syndrome is just a collection of symptoms, without an implication as to whether the symptoms reflect an organic disease.  The question is whether the syndnrome is caused by sound/infrasound, or by anxiety.

More at the Salon link.

Centre pivot-irrigation crop circles

Anyone who has looked out the windows of an airplane flying over semi-arid agricultural land has seen them.  An artile at Edible Geography examines the question of what to do with the spaces between the circles.  Insert smaller irrigated circles, or...

These overlooked corners make up a not insubstantial percentage of a farmer’s available land. On a typical 160 acre “quarter section” in the American mid- and southwest, tessellating pivot circles will leave up to 24 acres, or 15 percent of each field, thirsty...

That was in the beginning. Today we can certainly solve that problem because we have the means of putting an attachment on the end of a typical system. It will swing out and retract as the system goes around so that the corners are covered. Well, the problem with that is that arm that swings out and all the equipment that goes with it is quite expensive.

Mathematics offers another possible solution: Farey-Ford circle packing, a tessellation technique... Elsewhere, a Utah farm family has found a niche leasing corners from their neighbours to grow less thirsty crops or graze cattle... And, increasingly, ecologists are preaching the potential of pivot corners. In a simplified landscape of monoculture crop circles, the corners can restore complexity: left as native perennial grassland or managed as early successional habitat, these concave triangles can provide valuable habitat for bees, birds, and predatory insects to support crop pollination and natural pest control. Sewn together across an agricultural landscape, the corners can even offer movement corridors for migrating species.

As a butterfly enthusiast, I'll cast my vote for allowing just a little bit of the earth uncultivated, as a reservoir for native plants and native wildlife.

Addendum:  A hat tip to reader charlie for remembering the relevant Biblical injunction:

"When you reap the harvest of your land, moreover, you shall not reap to the very corners of your field nor gather the gleaning of your harvest; you are to leave them for the needy and the alien. I am the Lord your God.”

Correlation of fracking and groundwater contamination

In Pennsylvania, the closer you live to a well used to hydraulically fracture underground shale for natural gas, the more likely it is that your drinking water is contaminated with methane. This conclusion, in a study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA in July, is a first step in determining whether fracking in the Marcellus Shale underlying much of Pennsylvania is responsible for tainted drinking water in that region.

Robert Jackson, a chemical engineer at Duke University, found methane in 115 of 141 shallow, residential drinking-water wells. The methane concentration in homes less than one mile from a fracking well was six times higher than the concentration in homes farther away. Isotopes and traces of ethane in the methane indicated that the gas was not created by microorganisms living in groundwater but by heat and pressure thousands of feet down in the Marcellus Shale, which is where companies fracture rock to release gas that rises up a well shaft.

For relevant background, see my 2011 post on fracking (with videos "My water's on fire tonight" and a trailer for "Gasland.")

From Scientific American, via Reddit.

The forgotten pollution: light

I suppose young people nowadays must get tired of hearing their elders proclaim how certain things were better in "the old days."  But I'm going to do just that, regarding the sky at night, because The Atlantic has an excellent, extended post on the subject of light pollution, as part of a review of a new book.

I grew up in the Midwest in the 1950s.  In those years, when you looked up there were stars by the thousands.

Now the typical American experience is so distorted that when a power outage blackens a city, some  residents phone police and emergency services with questions about unusual sightings in the sky (celestial objects).  This composite depicts the effects of light pollution on the observable night sky:

 More at The Atlantic (whence the images).

p.s. - recommended reading:  Asimov's Nightfall.

Shame on the human race

In the early 1960s, "surf rock" came to Minneapolis via "Surfin' Bird," a song by a local band called "The Trashmen."  Nowadays the connection between surf and trash has become more literal.

Noyle was shooting Indonesian surfer Dede Surinaya in a remote bay when he and Surinaya discovered the water to be covered in garbage, according to GrindTV. The bay was miles from any town, yet strong currents had carried the trash of the world’s most populated island, Java, to its once pure waters. "It was crazy. I kept seeing noodle packets floating next to me,” Noyle told GrindTV. “It was very disgusting to be in there..."

Indonesia, a country comprised of more than 17,000 islands, suffers from a terrible trash problem that is polluting its waters. Some of the population centers have little to no trash collection infrastructure, leading locals to dispose of their waste in the street or in river beds, after which it inevitably is washed out to sea...

Residents of large population centers are often the ones improperly disposing of their trash, which storms and currents carry to beaches and islands most locals have never even seen. "There is little cultural awareness when it comes to trash,” according to Time magazine. 

I know humans have done this since time immemorial, and that many who do it have no choice and no concept of the sequelae.  But the seas can't continue to absorb the inpact.

The majestic millennia-old " Mark Twain" giant redwood tree

Cut down in 1892.

Embedded photo slightly cropped from the original at National Geographic Found.

Fleet Street urine deflectors

From an interesting post at The Cat's Meat Shop:

The average (male) Londoner of the early 1800s, out and about, was quite happy to relieve himself in the nearest alley. Urinals were becoming more common - usually outside pubs - but typically one found a quiet corner and had a pee.

Those who lived in said alleys, or who owned commercial property adjoining, were not entirely forgiving of this practice, as this quote from 1809 suggests:  

in London a man may sometimes walk a mile before he can meet with a suitable corner; for so unaccomodating are the owners of doorways, passages and angles, that they seem to have exhausted invention in the ridiculous barricadoes and shelves, grooves, and one fixed above another, to conduct the stream into the shows of the luckless wight who shall dare to profane the intrenchments.    

Note the photograph was taken this year, so the deflectors are still in place.  Additional photos and discussion at the link (I always leave more at my sources to encourage you to visit them).

Via A London Salmagundi.

Hay

This morning I found two excellent websites devoted to hay.

Hay in Art has links to essays, poems, maps, paintings, and photographs of hay-related material.

The wonderfully varied symbolic and metaphoric associations of hay mirror its cultural and economic importance in the history of humanity. Hay has variously symbolized wealth and poverty, sexuality, love, life and death. The somewhat dated saying in our own culture "That ain't hay" (meaning "that's not entirely worthless") is remotely connected to the beliefs and rituals of the Low Countries of Europe over half a millennium ago. 

There's lots of material there to be perused (and blogged), since I'm a big fan of hay.  I need to go back later to learn things and harvest some material.

And for those (few) interested in the day-to-day aspects of creating and maintaining a hayfield, there is a lot of practical information at Haying FAQ.


Photo from Marisio Pepi, via First Time User and A London Salmagundi.

"Foaming manure pits" on hog farms

As reported by Mother Jones:

You see, starting in about 2009, in the pits that capture manure under factory-scale hog farms, a gray, bubbly substance began appearing at the surface of the fecal soup. The problem is menacing: As manure breaks down, it emits toxic gases like hydrogen sulfide and flammable ones like methane, and trapping these noxious fumes under a layer of foam can lead to sudden, disastrous releases and even explosions. According to a 2012 report from the University of Minnesota, by September 2011, the foam had "caused about a half-dozen explosions in the upper Midwest…one explosion destroyed a barn on a farm in northern Iowa, killing 1,500 pigs and severely burning the worker involved."...

But if the causes of manure foam remain a mystery, a solution seems to be emerging, Jacobson told me: Dump a bit of monensin, an antibiotic widely used to make cows grow faster, directly into the foam-ridden pit. At rather low levels—Jacobson told me that about 25 pounds of the stuff will treat a typical 500,000 gallon pit—the stuff effectively breaks up the foam, likely by altering the mix of microbes present. No other treatment has been shown to work consistently, he said.

The agriculture industry and the antibiotic producers seem to be fused at the hip.

(The video is a Vimeo one that seems not to embed or load well.  There are pix at this PowerPoint presentation).

Arctic terns are starving to death in Maine

From the Washington Post:

At the Maine Coastal Islands National Wildlife Refuge, the tiny bodies of Arctic tern chicks have piled up. Over the past few years, biologists have counted thousands that starved to death because the herring their parents feed them have vanished...

What’s happening to migratory seabirds? Biologists are worried about a twofold problem: Commercial fishing is reducing their food source, and climate change is causing fish to seek colder waters, according to a bulletin released Tuesday by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. “We’ve seen a 40 percent decline of Arctic terns in the last 10 years,” said Linda Welch, a Fish and Wildlife Service biologist at the refuge...

Biologists at the Maine refuge are not sure whether herring sought colder waters elsewhere or went deeper, but they are no longer on the surface, from which Arctic terns pluck them. While other birds can dive deep for food, Arctic terns cannot.

“They’re not getting herring, so they bring butterfish that the chicks can’t swallow,” Welch said. “So they starve to death. You have thousands and thousands of chicks dying. It’s very sad.”

Arctic terns are famous, of course, for having the world's longest migration - from Antarctica to the Arctic - and back.

Arctic terns arrive at the Maine islands after a month of flying from the Antarctic, about 470 miles a day — 14,000 total — low on energy, longing for a bite. If they lack food and energy, “they can’t keep the gulls off them,” Welch said. Gulls eat terns.

CBC reports on a Keystone environmental catastrophe in northwest Alberta

YouTube link.

A massive toxic waste spill from an oil and gas operation in northern Alberta is being called one of the largest recent environmental disasters in North America. First reported on June 1, the Texas-based Apache Corp. didn’t reveal the size of the spill until June 12, which is said to cover more than 1,000 acres. Members of the Dene Tha First Nation tribe are outraged that it took several days before they were informed that 9.5 million liters of salt and heavy-metal-laced wastewater had leaked onto wetlands they use for hunting and trapping.

Via The Dish.

Meet "The GoosInator"

YouTube link.

Anyone who has ever slipped on goose poop in a park knows that a flock of Canada geese can make recreational areas unsuitable for humans.  The many large lakes around Madison, Wisconsin attract large numbers of geese.  One response is depicted in the video above and described in a Wisconsin State Journal article:

The stalker is the “GoosInator,” a $2,800 DayGlo orange drone of foam, plywood and plastic sent out to make a lasting impression on the city parks’ goose population. “The goal is to make life uncomfortable for geese, who see it as a predator..."

Man-eating sharks vs. men eating sharks

From A London Salmagundi.  Please reblog.