I’ve seen so much stuff I’d love to write about that it’s actually overwhelming. This happens from time to time, and the result is ironic in that I end up writing nothing. I’ve been tempted to just post a shitload of links to all of the things I’ve found interesting lately, but for a couple of the articles in question, the shotgun effect just won’t do them justice. I’ve been tempted to write about zoos before, and indeed I wondered whether or not I had, but the search function suggests that I have not. This cannot stand.

Like most kids, I loved going to the zoo. What isn’t cool about lions, tigers, and bears? It wasn’t until I was about thirteen or fourteen that I became aware that the animals at the Los Angeles Zoo were noticeably less excited about the cross-species experience than I was. They seemed bored at best, maybe even depressed. I’m sure anyone who’s made it to this particular corner of the Internet has noticed this about confined animals. And as we all know, teenagers aren’t very well attuned to moral ambiguity – I was no different – so I decided that zoos were bad, mmmkay? Undebatably, absolutely, unequivocally, evil.

Obviously my understanding of what zoos can and do accomplish has developed since then, and while I’m still a little uncomfortable visiting them (which is why I’m unable to illustrate this post with a photo of some captive exotic species), I appreciate that they work to conserve threatened species, and introduce the public to majestic, charismatic creatures.

Obviously, the zoo news of the day is the escape of Tatiana, one of the San Francisco zoo’s Siberian tigers (Panthera tigris altaica). Her escape and subsequent killing suggests that for some species, the good work done by zoos may not always outweigh the harm.

Life in a zoo isn't necessarily oppressive for all animals. Most animals didn't evolve to explore as much space as tigers. But tigers in most zoos are like people spending their lives locked in an empty living room. They are confined to tiny spaces, with nothing to do. Life is intensely boring, year after year. Some animal observers say zoo life may also be stressful. Tigers, who like to lurk, skulk and hide, are on display, with groups of strangers staring at them. Freedom is absent, and so are choice and control.

[…]

Roberts […] has no patience with the defense of zoos, either for their genetic storage programs or their ambassador roles. "The tiger is a perfect example of the way that zoos are missing the point about conservation," he says. Money spent on zoo tigers should be spent on protecting habitat for wild tigers. "There's an expenditure of millions if not tens of millions of dollars on captive tigers. If we really want tigers and not just a shell of the beast we call the tiger, the real emphasis needs to be first and foremost in the field."

Of course, with tigers more than perhaps any other animal, protecting habitat is more complicated than simply throwing money at the problem. Like many other exotic species, tigers are sought for specific parts of their anatomy, including their bones, organs, eyes, and even their penises, all of which are thought by some medicinal traditions to have curative properties. But cultural relativism is a sensitive issue, and not at all what I sat down to write about. What actually spurred me to write about zoos was an article from Time about a different species that is raising questions about how animals live in captivity:

Earlier this week [Germany]'s tabloid press agonized over the deaths of two tiny Eisbär cubs in a Nuremberg zoo, who were presumably eaten by their inexperienced mother, Vilma, after zookeepers decided not to intervene. Then on Wednesday, a fresh round of photographs and videos revealed that a third cub at the same zoo had been "rescued" by zookeepers after another mother, Vera, showed signs of rejecting her offspring.

Much in the same way that tigers can’t behave instinctively in captivity, captive polar bears seem to have trouble properly raising cubs. And if the ‘rescued’ cub is raised by zoo employees it is deprived of the change to learn the behaviors of its species from the mother. Still, alive is better than dead, right? Or does practice make perfect’ for mother bears that need to learn how to care for their young in captivity? Is the purpose of the zoo to keep these animals alive at any cost, or is there a point at which we’ve only saved an empty husk of the beast that once was?

In other news, tomorrow is my first day at my new job. Wish me luck.

I'm listening to Music that Matters, the weekly podcast of Seattle-area radio station KEXP, and I just heard the track quoted below the fold. This guy's indignation at the self-righteous among us is as massive as it is hilarious. Hopefully his post doesn't constitute biting the hand that feeds me.

This is a pretty interesting video (I can't figure out how to embed in Drupal) featuring an examination of the risks/rewards of action on climate change. Some of you will feel a nostalgic tingling when he busts out the grid on the whiteboard. That's because his analysis is an adaptation Pascal's wager, which you probably heard of back in your college philosophy class.

I think that the idea of choosing between columns rather than gambling on rows is valuable, but the author's wager is hardly any more bulletproof than Pascal's. Probably the biggest problem is actually mathematical: he does not (and I would contend cannot) attribute values to the four cells, or to the probability of each row being true. It seems obvious to me that a skeptic would assign very different values to each of these variables than I would, and that any final calculus will probably only back up each individual's pre-exisitng opinion.

But what do I know? Watch it and let me know what you think.

Well, it’s been more than two months since I promised more content here. I’ve told myself repeatedly that I’ll do it as soon as I finish moving, as soon as I sort out my career, or simply whenever the muse hits. None of those things have happened yet, but I’m sick of making excuses. Also, I don’t have anything better to do while I wait for my crème bruleé to set.

There are a ton of things I’d love to write about, but I won’t ever get to most of them, and you’ll never know what you missed. C’est la vie. Organic Matter used to be about slinging science around in the name of analyzing news and advocating for people and their relationship with ecosystems. I’ve been thinking much more lately about my relationship with the world than about telling people how they should relate to it. I’m not sure how many readers will be interested in me writing about that, but I’m much less worried about readership than I used to be. So tonight, for the first real content that this site has seen in almost two years, I decided to just write about what I did yesterday*. I went fly fishing. Kind of.

Oops. I was away for most of the weekend and missed it. Does that make me a bad environmentalist? Read Meteor Blades’ (2004 Kaufax Award winner for best commenter) post on Earth Day over at The Next Hurrah.

When you’re done there, feel free to confess one or two of your own environmental sins in the comments (and yes, I unabashedly stole this idea from the Gristmill).

In my plant systematics lecture this morning we touched (very) briefly on the subject of so-called "invasive species." I realize that my use of the qualifier "so-called" and my use of quotation marks go against the grain, at least in environmental circles, but I have a serious philosophical problem with how the issue of "invasive species" is handled.

It's not at all that I object to the goals of invasive species management, but I object to the philosophy and reasoning that underlies a lot of the arguments as to why it is important. Specifically, I can't abide those who believe that preventing the spread of species is to hold back some insidious unnatural process.

The spread of species is a natural process. Many plants depend on animals to disperse seeds and human beings are perfectly valid disperses. We're not special just because we're human. One of the prime reasons that an animal might be complicit in spreading plant seeds is that the plant provides some reward to the animal for doing so -- often some kind of food reward -- but for whatever reason, the plant is attractive to the animal. Plants make themselves attractive to us in many ways: agriculturally, pharmaceutically (both for therepeutic and recreational purposes) and aesthetically. Many of the rewards we get from plants cause us to grow them in locations where they did not previously exist, and in many circumstances they have a competitive advantage in the preexisting plant communities. Nothing here should be considered unnatural or immoral.

Massimo Pigliucci writes about the species problem in the latest issue of Philosophy Now (via the Uneasy Chair):

...a recent count by R.L. Mayden lists a whopping 21 different concepts of species proposed in the literature! Part of the problem is that biologists (and some, but not all, philosophers) keep adopting an essentialist concept of species: there has to be one right way to think of the problem, and hence one unique solution, which we would surely find if only we had more data (say biologists) or thought a bit harder (say some philosophers).

Dave Roberts at the Gristmill argues that though our methods of categorization are many, they are not essentialist, since they don’t correspond to “bright, unambiguous […] lines of separation” built into the natural world. From a philosophical perspective I believe he's correct, but unfortunately his insight doesn’t move us toward a solution of the problem of species; it actually further confuses classification.

Via the Invasive Species Weblog (newly blogrolled), a story that’s all over Central Cost news – the Nature Conservancy and the National Park service have teamed up to eradicate feral pigs (Sus scrofa) from Santa Cruz Island. This is a local story, but it deals with a controversy that’s unfortunately relevant in just about every inhabited place on Earth – how to deal with invasive exotic species.

Yesterday I posted a link to Nick Kristof’s op-ed on alarmism in the environmental movement. I agree with the spirit of the piece, if not the tone, and I certainly wasn’t bothered as much as a lot of other people. I spent a lot of time thinking today about how people within the environmental movement, who presumably have a lot of ideas and opinions in common, might feel so differently about the same piece of writing.

Nicholas (can I call you Nick?) Kristof has an interesting take on the recent ‘Death of Environmentalism’ debate:

At one level, we're all environmentalists now. The Pew Research Center found that more than three-quarters of Americans agree that "this country should do whatever it takes to protect the environment." Yet support for the environment is coupled with a suspicion of environmental groups. "The Death of Environmentalism" notes that a poll in 2000 found that 41 percent of Americans considered environmental activists to be "extremists." There are many sensible environmentalists, of course, but overzealous ones have tarred the entire field.

The loss of credibility is tragic because reasonable environmentalists - without alarmism or exaggerations - are urgently needed.