This is the way the world ends. Not with a bang but with decisions.
Canada Coho and Cod: A Decision Not to Protect
The above quote is from a recent column by Terry Glavin on the decision by Canada to protect neither Fraser River Coho salmon in BC nor Atlantic cod stocks under its Species At Risk Act (SARA). Glavin is a longtime conservationist and author, known to some here for his recent book Waiting for the Macaws.
Continued below.
The "quiet" decisions are folded in here:
Regulatory Impact Analysis Statement:
Northern Bottlenose Whale (Scotian shelf) and Channel Darter Protected Under the Species at Risk Act
A sample of the prose style is in order:
The GIC {Governor in Council}, on the recommendation of the Minister of Environment after having consulted the Minister of Fisheries and Oceans, is also not listing Coho Salmon (Interior Fraser Population) based on uncertainties associated with changes in the marine environment and potential future socio economic impacts on users associated with the uncertainty. Not listing provides future management flexibility related to uncertainty about marine survival and possible difficulties in recovery if marine survival worsens.
And so on. Glavin helpfully unpacks the bureaucratese for us:
In other words, it's because the British Columbia government doesn't want some pansy federal law impinging upon its ability to continue destroying the rivers where these coho spawn. It's also because the B.C. Wildlife Federation didn't want an unfamiliar federal bureaucracy interfering with the sportsfishing industry's control over which species it will help render unto extinction and which species it may permit to survive.
The treatment of the cod is parallel:
In other words, if there is any money to be made, any profits at stake, even remotely, Canada's endangered-species law will not be invoked to protect an endangered species. As if to rub salt into the wound of that disgraceful fact, here's another decision that was hidden within the mumbo jumbo of the April 7 "regulatory impact analysis statement": not even North Atlantic cod qualify for SARA's protection. Not the cod off Newfoundland and Labrador, not the Laurentian North stock, not the Maritimes cod.
These are the cod populations that once supported the largest and oldest pelagic fishery in human history. The cod that for centuries supported the fishing economies of Atlantic Canada. The cod that were so badly overfished that by the 1990s they had been reduced in abundance by more than 99 percent. Yes, those cod. And even those fish won't qualify for SARA's protection, even though the cod fishery is shut down.
To clarify, Ottawa is refusing to intervene on behalf of the cod where that would mean disturbance to other fisheries in which cod is a bycatch.
Is Glavin pissed?
Canada is the world's ninth-largest economy, and the only major industrialized country with balanced books. But in the life-and-death struggle to protect the planet's dwindling legacy of living things, we don't have a penny's worth of moral authority to speak with anymore. We are a laughingstock.
Terry Glavin's blog is interesting and multi-dimensional. A warning for the ideologically pure: Glavin supports the Euston Manifesto.
WWF-Canada says the government's non-action isn't good enough. There must be a plan.
Government not off the hook for cod recovery plan: WWF
The most important consequence of listing cod under SARA would have been the obligation of the Department of Fisheries and Oceans (DFO) to produce a rigorous recovery plan within one year. DFO would also have been responsible to provide direction on how such a plan could have been made to work for cod and the people most affected. This includes rigorous planning and the latitude for reasonable measures to be put in place to deal with incidental catch, or possession of cod.
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What cannot be disputed is that cod populations have declined precipitously - northern cod by 99% since the 1980s. There are virtually no signs of any broad-scale offshore recovery, despite fisheries closures of more than a decade. It is this historically unprecedented magnitude of decline in population sizes that qualifies these and other stocks for endangered or threatened status under any accepted criteria - Canadian or international.
WWF-Canada is calling on Canada and other governments to address fisheries crises like the cod collapse by: basing fisheries decisions on science - which includes ecosystem based and precautionary approaches; ban bottom-trawling and other harmful forms of fishing in sensitive areas; reduce bycatch; invest in better, more selective technology; and stop illegal fishing through enforcement both at sea and in ports.
"Rebuilding the cod fishery is one of the toughest problems imaginable in natural resource management," continued Rangeley. "Unless there is a strong alternative plan, this decision not to list cod under SARA is a decision to continue on the same course of action - continued moratoria and no hope for the future of the fishery and the communities that rely on it."
Mark Kurlansky's Cod is a compelling story of the rise and fall of the great fishery, and includes handy recipes.
Pooties Threaten World Heritage Site
Robben Island, home to reluctant resident Nelson Mandela for 27 years, is also a WHO site with 132 species of birds, including many rare species. Penguins and oystercatchers are among the island's residents. Now they are threatened by the feral descendants of cats once owned by Mandela's jailers. What to do? Decisions, decisions. The SPCA desperately tries to blame the situation on rabbits, anyone, to avoid the necessity of getting rid of the feline vermin. Hello. Cats kill birds. It is hard to believe any more research is needed to establish this fact.
Rare Birds' Deaths Roil South African Island
Now the rare birds are being killed, and the island's historic museum is fighting the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals over who is to blame. Among the suspects: wild cats, giant mice and, possibly, flesh-eating rabbits.
?????????
Bird expert Underhill slammed the SPCA for drawing rodents and rabbits into the plot.
"It is such a stupid idea that it is embarrassing," said Underhill. "It is not the rabbits who are responsible. It's the cats."
Some peaceable kingdom this is. No wonder the human deciders are having such a hard time:
But cats, rabbits and rodents are not the only pests on Robben Island. Seals around the island are on the increase and beginning to attack the penguins. And there are sizable populations of fallow deer, springboks, ostriches and other animals that are not indigenous.
Robben Island, which was used between beginning in the 17th century as a leper colony, then a military base and a prison, was declared a U.N. World Heritage Site in 1999 for representing "the triumph of the human spirit, of freedom and of democracy over oppression."
In order to keep its prized status, it has to meet a number of conditions, including the control of alien species.
Sooty Mangabeys: We're the Deciders
Sooty Mangabeys at Heart of Research Fight
As monkeys go, sooty mangabeys aren't cute. Big-fanged, gray and hairy, they simply stare when threatened. Few zoos stock them. Some animal rights advocates can't even spell the species' name.
Having thus established his impartiality, this big ape is going to elucidate for us the subject of bioethics as applied to medical research using primates. Why do I feel we will be no better served than the mangabeys?
The Yerkes National Primate Research Center has a large population of Sooty Mangabeys, a population so large in fact that it must segregate sexes and implant birth control in mixed groups in order to keep thing under control. Yet it can do no research on these monkeys, becuase they are listed as endangered. Now the center wants to make a deal: in return for being allowed to do AIDS research on the monkeys, they will fund conservation efforts in the mangabeys' home territory in West Africa.
Such a trade-off has never before been permitted, said Timothy Van Norman, chief of the international permits branch at the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service. "This is new territory," he said.
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"It's a deal with the devil," said Rachel Weiss, president of Laboratory Primate Advocacy Group, a Georgia-based animal rights organization.
While I do not necessarily agree with LPAG's position, this description is unfairly dismissive. See LPAG's
About Us page. Weiss herself worked at the Yerkes Center. Her organization functions partly as a support group for former researchers who find themselves emotionally devastated by their work with nonhuman primates. They do know what they are talking about.
The issue is not so much infecting these animals with a disease they would never normally encounter. Nor is it their painless death. It is their miserable lives under the strict laboratory conditions of a trial lasting months and years that is the real torture.
I don't pretend to have the answer. I'm not the decider. What has to be weighed is the relative good that could come from the research, and a few pages in the back of an obscure journal don't by themselves quite seem to cut it. Shots in the dark are justifiable in some circumstances. Why not bombard potato plants with gamma rays and search for point mutations? But these aren't potato plants.
I do find myself arrested by one thing Weiss said:
"The thing that concerns me is they (Yerkes officials) have a 'product' -- an abundance of monkeys -- that they want to do something with, and now they're going to find something to do with them. But that's backwards thinking, the idea that availability drives inquiry," she said.
I have an apricot tree outside my window, so I'll be making apricot jam soon. If you believe, as I do, that we owe these creatures a little more consideration than that, this is a question that isn't so easy to decide.