Curiosity Is No Solo Act

The Foucauldian assumption that networks of information precondition ways of thinking, doing, and being has an ancient, rich, and still robust precedent in Indigenous philosophy. Rooted in the wisdom that everything that exists is connected to everything else, Indigenous philosophy foregrounds the vast and complex system of relational networks. While Western philosophy, especially post-Enlightenment, has typically emphasized the individual nodes of knowers and knowns, Indigenous philosophy has consistently contributed to a thinking on the edge, or edgework. (It is not insignificant that the English language is 70 percent nouns, while Potawatomi is 70 percent verbs. Or that Western settlers conceptualize land as private property and commodity capital, while Indigenous peoples understand it as a connective tissue in a larger gift economy.) The difference in ethos between piecemeal and of a piece with could not be more pronounced.

In an Indigenous onto-epistemology, one is always coming to know in intimate relationship with other knowers, including not only community members, but also all the components of the earth itself. In “Braiding Sweetgrass,” Potawatomi botanist Robin Wall Kimmerer tells the story of her own Indigenous curiosity. Growing up surrounded by “shoeboxes of seeds and piles of pressed leaves,” she knew the plants had chosen her. Declaring a botany major in college, she soon learned to stockpile taxonomic names and functional facts, all while letting her capacities to attend to energetic relationships fall into disuse. It was not until rekindling her connections with Indigenous communities — and specifically Indigenous scientists — that she remembered how “intimacy gives us a different way of seeing.” Her scholarship and outreach are now focused on honoring this ray of scientific and social wisdom.

What is perhaps most distinctive about Indigenous philosophy is its imbrication of a relational cosmology with a relational epistemology. At the heart of this worldview is “the eternal convergence of the world within any one thing,” writes Carl Mika, such that “one thing is never alone and all things actively construct and compose it.” From this perspective of deep holism, talk of knowing any one thing is “minimally useful.” As such, knowledge is not properly propositional but instead procedural; it is less concerned with knowing what than with knowing how. And its wisdom lies in “sharing” more than “stating.”

- More Here

Urban Evolution

The water flea Daphnia magna — a freshwater crustacean up to a few millimeters in size — is one species busy evolving in cities in response to heat, pollution and even local predators. These zooplankton can prevent algal blooms that overload ponds with toxic cyanobacteria, so this adaptation may have a big effect on freshwater ecosystems, says Kristien Brans, an evolutionary ecologist at KU Leuven in Belgium, who studies the water fleas.

One basic challenge in such urban investigations is to distinguish between two modes of response to altered environments: evolution (genetic alterations that appear across generations) and phenotypic plasticity (the flexibility to alter physical and/or behavioral characteristics in an organism’s lifetime).

For water fleas, it turns out that both are at play. Fleas raised in lab experiments at temperatures matching urban ponds are smaller, and mature and reproduce more quickly, than fleas reared at rural pond temperatures that tend to be several degrees cooler. (That’s phenotypic plasticity — no genetic changes have occurred.) But over time, urban water fleas living generation after generation in warmer, urban pond waters have genetically changed to have those same kinds of alterations. (That’s evolution.)

[---]

GLUE took white clover’s cyanide production as a model to study three questions. Do instances of urbanization in different cities lead to similar local environments? Do those similar environments lead the clover to evolve along the same lines — display parallel evolution — in a trait of interest (in this case, cyanide production)? And if so, what environmental factors are driving the pattern?

In a new Science paper, the collaborators showed that urban environments do indeed end up quite similar to each other, with less vegetation, more impervious surfaces and higher summer temperatures than their outlying rural areas. (In fact, downtowns of cities such as Beijing and Boston are more similar to each other in such factors than they are to their rural areas, Johnson comments.) Analyzing more than 110,000 clover plants from 160 cities in 26 countries, the GLUE investigators also demonstrated a strong link between urbanization and clover cyanide production. And after sequencing more than 2,000 clover genomes and analyzing the urban-rural differences, the researchers showed that natural selection truly is at work.

[---]

Unfortunately, the genetic biodiversity that can fuel adaptation often dwindles in urban areas. A genetic survey by Chloé Schmidt working in Garroway’s lab, for example, found this to be the case, along with lower population sizes, for North American mammals living in more disturbed environments. That’s a concern during a period when so many populations of animals and plants are seeing their natural habitats degraded or simply destroyed.

Scientists don’t take urban environments as precise models for the impacts of climate change. But they say such studies will provide important clues to how creatures may respond to dwindling access to water and food, and exposure to pollution, heat, drought and other dangers.

“We’re in the Anthropocene, and we don’t understand how we’re changing the environment on every level, from greenhouse gas emissions to changing the evolution of life around us,” Johnson says. “People realize this research is part of the solution.”

- More Here

Remembering Robert Trivers

Robert Trivers, who died on March 12, 2026, was arguably the most important evolutionary theorist since Darwin. He had a rare gift for seeing through the messy clutter of life and revealing the underlying logic beneath it. E. O. Wilson called him “one of the most influential and consistently correct theoretical evolutionary biologists of our time.” Steven Pinker described him as “one of the great thinkers in the history of Western thought.”

I was Robert’s graduate student at Rutgers from 2006 to 2014. Long before I knew him personally, however, he had already established himself as one of the most original and insightful scientists of the twentieth century. In an astonishing series of papers in the early 1970s, he changed forever our understanding of evolution and social behavior.

[---]

The next year in 1972, Trivers published his most cited paper, Parental Investment and Sexual Selection. Here he offered a unified explanation for something that had puzzled biologists since Darwin. Writing perhaps the most famous sentence in all of evolutionary biology—“What governs the operation of sexual selection is the relative parental investment of the sexes in their offspring”—Trivers threw down the gauntlet and revealed a deceptively simple principle that reorganized the field. From that insight flowed one of the most powerful and falsifiable ideas in modern science: the sex that invests more in offspring will tend to be choosier about mates, while the sex that invests less will compete more intensely for access to them.

[---]

Each of these papers spawned entirely new research fields, and many have dedicated their careers to unpacking and testing the implications of his ideas. As Harvard biologist David Haig put it, “I don’t know of any comparable set of papers. Most of my career has been based on exploring the implications of one of them.” Indeed, it is hardly an exaggeration to say that his ideas gave birth to the field of evolutionary psychology and the whole line of popular Darwinian books from Richard Dawkins and Robert Wright to David Buss and Steven Pinker.

To know Robert personally, however, was to confront a more uneven and less orderly organism— to use one of his favorite words—than the one revealed in his papers. The man who explained the hidden order in life often struggled to impose order in his own. “Genius” is one of the most overused words in the language, with “asshole” not far behind, and I have known few people who truly deserved either label. Robert deserved both. He could be genuinely funny, extraordinarily generous, and breathtakingly perceptive, but also moody, childish, and needlessly cruel.

[---]

I used to joke that one reason he was so good at explaining behaviors the rest of us took for granted was that he was like an alien visiting our planet trying to make sense of our strange habits—why we invest in our children, why we are nice to our friends, why we lie to ourselves. He told me that conflict with his own father was part of the inspiration for parent-offspring conflict and one of the observations that led to his insight into parental investment came from watching male pigeons jockeying for position on a railing outside his apartment window in Cambridge.

Robert also had a respect for evidence and for correcting mistakes that I’ve rarely seen among academics, a group not known for their humility. He cared more about truth than about his reputation and retracted papers at great cost to himself and his career when he thought there were errors. He also knew that he was standing on the shoulders of the giants who had come before him. 

[---]

He was a lifelong learner with a willingness to do hard things. After his astonishing early success, he could have done what many academics do: stay in his lane, guard his territory, and spend the rest of his career commenting on ideas he had already had. Instead, in the early 1990s he saw that genetics mattered and spent the next fifteen years trying to master it. The result was Genes in Conflict, the 2006 book he wrote with Austin Burt, which pushed his interest in conflict down to the level of selfish genetic elements. Few scientists, after making contributions as important as he had, would have had the curiosity, humility, and stamina to begin again in an entirely new area.

Trivers was a great teacher, though not always in the ways he intended. He often asked dumb questions—’What does cytosine bind to again?’ in the middle of a genetics seminar and made obvious observations—’Did you know that running the air-conditioner in the car uses gas?’ But as he liked to say, ‘I might be ignorant, but I ain’t gonna be for long.’ He could also be volatile and aggressive and there were many times when he threatened to kick my ass. I may have been the only graduate student who ever had to wonder whether he could take his advisor in a fight. Once, over lunch at Rutgers, I asked about a cut on his thumb after he had returned from one of his frequent trips to Jamaica. He matter-of-factly told me that he had just survived a home invasion in which two men armed with machetes held him hostage. He escaped by jumping from a second-story window, rolling downhill, and stabbing both men with the eight-inch knife he carried everywhere he went. He was 67 at the time.

[---]

One of the last times I spoke with Robert, a fall had left his right arm nearly useless. He described it as “two sausages connected by an elbow.” He was a chaotic and deeply imperfect man, but also one of the few people whose ideas permanently changed how we understand evolution, animal behavior, and ourselves. Steven Pinker wrote that “it would not be too much of an exaggeration to say that [Trivers] provided a scientific explanation for the human condition: the intricately complicated and endlessly fascinating relationships that bind us to one another.” That seems just about right to me. His ideas are some of the deepest insights we have into human nature, animal behavior, and our place in the web of life. The mark of a great person is someone who never reminds us of anyone else. I have never known anyone like him. I’ll miss you, Robert. You asshole.

- More Here

On Suffering

I am writing these words while sitting in a comfortable chair in a comfortable 70 degree house. And, I suspect, you are too. Basically comfortable, that is. Physically. Maybe you’re a little cold, but not consumed by the screaming anguish of an icy ocean you cannot escape. Maybe stressed, but not asphyxiating.

It’s times like these I find it far too easy to ignore the most urgent, most serious, most fundamental problem in our world.

[---]

I think there is one way in which we gain a more true understanding. During a time of suffering, this crevasse dissolves and our mental representation of the experience converges with the experience itself. It is then alone we might catch a glimpse of suffering’s otherwise-unthinkable urgency.

And yet this urgency prevents its very own recognition. When we ourselves undergo the worst, our minds and bodies scream in a deafening tone. We do not regard the urgency, the suffering itself, in abstract or conceptual terms. They are not things to be pondered; they are instead experienced directly without the mediating influence of words and symbols. During such a time, empathy is not merely impossible but unthinkable. This is not a character flaw; even the most altruistic among us does not think of others while she is drowning.

Nonetheless, it is tragic.

During the rare occasion during which we viscerally understand intense suffering, it can be challenging to take action to help others. And when, thank God, the agony subsides and our minds return from its all-consuming hell, again capable of empathy, the visceral sense of urgency has taken flight.

[---]

There is no cosmic justice in suffering on behalf of others, but there is something like cosmic justice in acting to prevent and ameliorate the worst experiences in our world.

Factory farming seems a reasonable place to begin, but wild animals plausibly suffer in far greater numbers. Veganism, though morally commendable, is not the sole means by which to help; very few among us, including those who eat meat, actively want animals to suffer. Perhaps we might reduce suffering the most by complementing the question of personal dietary consumption with a focus on preventing the maiming and castration of farm animals without anesthesia, among other interventions.

Among our own species, let us rectify the critical shortage of pain relief in low-income countries. And let us stare the very worst conditions right in their face, though merely as a first step to their mitigation. Cluster headaches, akathisia, and locked-in syndrome come to mind. I will not provide links; you may search for them if you wish. The elimination of these and similar conditions may be one of the most morally urgent issues that we face.

There is nothing beautiful or poetic about pain or agony. The world is not just. There is no virtue, no hidden meaning to be found. And I hope that my words might help to reduce the worst among it.

- More Here

Jonathan Safran Foer on Eating Animals

Ever since Jonathan Safran Foer's book Eating Animals came out, while Max was alive, I have been posting Foer's talk every year during Thanksgiving. 

So much irony in this day... billions get slaughtered after their short and miserable life full of pain and suffering.

Did I mention I love Robert Trivers and his "self-deception" hypothesis? 

This day is one of those days where human self-deception reaches a pinnacle. 

I am sorry for my fellow family who lost their lives today. 

10 Misconceptions About Evolution

• Evolution is “only a theory”  - Nope. 

• “Survival of the fittest” means that evolution favors those who are “strongest”  - “Evolutionary fitness” refers to reproductive success; more precisely, it’s a measure of the success of genes in getting themselves projected into the future and is achieved in many ways—including the ability to obtain food, to avoid becoming food for someone else, to overcome diseases, to adjust to local weather and climate, attract mates, and so forth. In a pioneering research report, male European red deer who were smaller and who bore less impressively developed antlers were often more “fit” than the hulking males, because these “sneaky fuckers” (don’t blame me: This descriptive phrase is part of the technical literature) copulated with the females while the more massive bulls were busy fighting antlero-a-antlero with other more physically developed specimens.  

• Evolution explains the origin of life (or it’s supposed to) - Nope. That is primarily a job for biophysics, biochemistry, and geology. 

• Evolution acts for the good of the species - It is estimated that something like 99 percent of species that have existed are now extinct, so if evolution is working for the good of species, it has done a terrible job! What really argues against “good of the species,” however, is the actual way natural selection operates. Although it is possible that species sometimes compete, and, as a result, better adapted ones replace their poorly adapted alternatives, evolutionary competition takes place almost entirely within species, not between them. 

• Evolutionary theory says that living things are the result of chance - No, it doesn’t. There’s a half-truth hidden here; actually, less than half. Natural selection’s power comes from differential reproduction, the logical, unavoidable process whereby some genetic variants are more successful—more fit—than others. As such, its raw material comes from genetic diversity, which is produced by mutations and, in the case of sexually reproducing species, the reshuffling of genes via meiosis and sexual recombination. These processes are essentially random. But that’s just the source of the building blocks employed by natural selection. Natural selection definitely isn’t random—it does the heavy lifting and fitting together, by picking and choosing among various options, with some genes being projected into the future more than their alternatives—i.e., our old friend differential reproduction once again. Then the process happens over and over, repeatedly retaining those that are more fit and abandoning those that are less so. 

• Because we rely more and more on brain power and less and less on our muscles, human beings in the future will have big heads and small bodies - It is similarly easy to get hung up on the Lamarckian assumption that insects, crustaceans, fish, and amphibians that inhabit pitch dark caves are often blind because they stopped using their eyes, which therefore disappeared. Not so. These evolutionary changes, which are entirely compatible with Darwinian natural selection, occur because eyes are useless in the dark—hence, they lose the selective advantage that they convey in lighted environments—and, moreover, they take energy to produce while also being vulnerable to injury and infection. So, go ahead and exercise, use your brains, and hang out in dark places if you wish … but your offspring won’t have larger biceps, bigger heads, or smaller eyes as a result. 

• Gaps in the fossil record argue against evolution - Of course there are gaps in the fossil record! It’s remarkable that we have any such records at all, given how unlikely it is that any given dead critter will be fossilized and preserved, to which we must add an additional low probability that these remains will be discovered and recognized as such, perhaps hundreds of millions of years later. As for “missing links,” picture a line between two taxonomic groups, with as yet unidentified species connecting them; now, identify something between (linking) them: Now you have two new missing links! So, any time we find intermediate forms, there will necessarily be “missing links,” because every time a linking specimen is found (such as the discovery of Australopithecines linking nonhuman primates and Homo sapiens), new missing links are produced. In short, the more fossils, the more “missing links.” 

• Human beings aren’t evolving any more - We are. It’s just that evolution is typically a very slow process, limited by selective pressures (differences in the reproductive success of different traits and the genes that underlie them), along with generation times. It is possible that human beings in the future will have evolved the ability to function and reproduce readily with microplastics and “forever chemicals” in their blood, not to mention Strontium-90 in their bones and DDT in their fat, or maybe enhanced ability to manipulate computer screens, if such individuals have more kids. Each person’s genotype is fixed, so as individuals, we don’t evolve biologically. But Homo sapiens does, and will continue to do so, unless all people and their genes reproduce identically. 

• Because of evolution, living things are always getting “better” - Not necessarily. Early in the Earth’s history, a few billion years ago, life was very simple. Since then, it has evolved increasing complexity and enhanced ability to flourish in a variety of environments. In that sense, living things have gotten “better.” But any notion of improvement is subject to human-centered bias.  

• Evolutionary biology isn’t a science because it’s a historical phenomenon and can’t be tested - Many sciences, notably astronomy and geology, engage uniquely with historical phenomena (we can’t experimentally manipulate stars or continents), and yet they generate impressive empirical testing, often based on detailed observational regimes along with falsifiable predictions. And there is no question of their status as bona fide sciences. Evolutionary biology is no different.  

- More Here

Tyranny Of Experts!

But the ethnographic record makes it amply evident that the large-scale adoption of shrimp farming has caused an ecological and social disaster in the Bengal delta, blighting once-fertile land and further impoverishing the poor and landless. This is largely because the species that was chosen for farming in Bengal is a saltwater variety preferred by Western consumers: tiger shrimp (Penaeus monodon, or ‘bagda chingri’); Bengalis generally prefer a variety of freshwater prawn called Macrobrachium rosenbergii, or ‘golda chingri’.

Saltwater ponds for tiger shrimp aquaculture are often dug on agricultural land that is otherwise used to grow rice, fruit and vegetables. Over time, water from these ponds seeps into nearby fields and aquifers, salinising the soil until it can no longer support rice or any other crop. Then fruit trees and orchards begin to wither, and even the grass disappears, making it difficult to keep livestock. Soon, once-fertile stretches of land dotted with trees, market gardens and rice fields do indeed become, to use Paprocki’s words, ‘threatening dystopias’.

Dewan quotes a woman who went back, after an absence of some years, to a village where shrimp farming had been introduced: “I returned to a lona desh [saline land] without vegetables,” she said. “The salt is even in the air, eroding the walls of the houses so they crumble. Everything is lona [saline]. Everything dies. There are no fruit trees; the few date and coconut trees here do not bear fruit. Goats and chickens are too expensive to buy, and they often die due to the saline water. We need to buy all [our] cooking fuel, there are no trees or cow dung for us to use. There is no grass for livestock, the ponds are too saline for bathing, clothes washed in saltwater do not get clean and ruin quicker. We need to buy everything and because of this we cannot afford to buy fruit, eggs, or meat… The canals are gone; we used to bathe in canals that are now no more… we must bathe in the saline river. Our eyes sting, our skin itches and becomes dark. Our ponds are now saline. We used to drink pond water filtered with fitkeri [alum stone], now we must drink tube well water that we collect from far away. We suffer now, but the rich do not care.”

The social consequences of shrimp farming are no less ruinous than its environmental impacts, because it requires only a fraction of the labour needed to cultivate rice. So when rice fields are converted into saltwater ponds, the poor and landless lose their main source of income, and are left with no recourse but to migrate to urban shanty-towns to eke out a precarious living. This outcome is actually welcomed by some development professionals, because they take a dim view of subsistence farming in general, and see proletarianisation as a step up on the ladder of ‘progress’. Similarly, experts who advocate managed retreat as the most practical response to sea-level rise also regard migration away from the coast in a generally favourable light.

Irony of ironies: people who are forced out of their villages because of shrimp farming are often classified as ‘climate migrants’ by aid agencies and bureaucrats, despite the fact that their displacement is the result not of global warming itself, but rather of climate solutions advocated by credentialed experts. In effect, this is a process, as Paprocki notes, of “anticipatory ruination”, intended to ward off the possible harms of the future by causing actual harm in the present day.

[---]

The shared assumption in all of this seems to be that the great majority of people eliminated by the apocalypse will be the underclasses of the poorer nations. But what is the likelihood that this will actually be the case? While there can be no doubt that vulnerable people in the Global South will indeed suffer greatly on an environmentally disrupted planet, the ethnographic record suggests that the future may have some surprises in store for complacent global elites. Bengali farmers, for instance, no matter how poor, are by no means willing to go quietly into the night. On the contrary, they are clearly determined to confront the future on their own terms, privileging the values that are most important to them. In this effort, it is possible that the skills inculcated by subsistence farming will be an important source of resilience: that is, after all, precisely the thinking behind the ‘prepper’ and survivalist movements in the West. Indeed, it seems to me that the people who will be most at risk if a planetary catastrophe were to occur are those who depend on complex industrial systems for their day-to-day survival. Those who know how to live off the land may well stand a better chance of getting by when conditions deteriorate.

There is perhaps one other factor that could work to the advantage of ordinary people in the Global South: the fact that they do not share the pessimism about the future that is increasingly prevalent in the West. Indeed, doomsaying has now become so widespread in Europe and America that it is hard to know whether it represents a rational appraisal of the relevant data, or is merely an offshoot of a more general sense of political dysfunction and historic decline.

In my experience, it is exceedingly rare to encounter apprehensions of impending doom in India, or Kenya, or Indonesia. The absence of this generalised anxiety is probably the reason why apocalyptic fiction hasn't really caught on in India or elsewhere in the Global South. But it is also possible that Asian and African writers have abjured end-of-the-worldism for other reasons. “When all is said and done, this obsession [with apocalypse] may well be specific to Western metaphysics,” the Cameroonian philosopher Achille Mbembe notes in Necropolitics (2019). “For many human cultures, the world, simply, does not end.”

- How visions of catastrophe shape the ‘climate solutions’ imposed by aid agencies , read the whole piece; its so grounded in reality. 

The Simplest Argument For Veganism

I had a similar conclusion decades ago; the difference was I wasted a decade or so when Max was alive arguing. 

But thankfully, during the last few years of Max, I changed and realized these people don't give a flying fuck about anything else other than themselves and their goddamn family. 

People who eat meat from factory farms pretending that nothing is going to happen to them is clearly a form of infallibilism.

I am not talking about the tragedy of commons in terms of moral and ecological consequences but their diet makes them live a parochial life, what thoughts they can think, how to live a good life, how to make better decisions for themselves and their families. 

Just as there are odors that dogs can smell and we cannot, as well as sounds that dogs can hear and we cannot, so too there are wavelengths of light we cannot see and flavors we cannot taste.

Why then, given our brains wired the way they are, does the remark “Perhaps there are thoughts we cannot think,” surprise you?

Evolution, so far, may possibly have blocked us from being able to think in some directions; there could be unthinkable thoughts.

- Richard Hamming

In other words their diet makes their thinking and life stuck in a small rut of quagmire from which they cannot escape to realize the beauty of life right in front of their noses. Perhaps there are  thoughts we cannot think - in the spectrum of bandwidth of thoughts humans can think probably becomes even much smaller with their dietary choices which causes immense suffering. 

A much better payback happening here and now than some subjective future heaven and hell.

If someone is sad or suffering in your home; there is no way on earth you can jump around and pretend to have "fun". It is psychologically, morally, physically and mentally impossible to do so for normal human beings. But that's exactly what people are doing with this diet. So much suffering on their dinner plate they are inevitably becoming inhuman in their thinking. 

So I simply wait for them to die while I keep breathing after Max to make our fellow beings suffering’s a little less. 

I am not sure I am trying enough to make a change in this world. But I cannot keep breathing and not try; if one stops the other will automatically stop. 

Thank you for writing this immensely powerful short piece:

Imagine that you found out that your friend raised his own chickens. One day, he invited you into his house and you saw how he treated them. Dozens of chickens were chained up in a cage too small to move, inhaling the feces of those above them. Those chickens, you learned, had been debeaked, meaning their beak had been sliced off with a hot knife, without anesthetic. This probably felt like having their nose cut off.

When his egg-laying hens produced a baby male chick, he would drop it into a shredder because it was useless. He’d force the pigs to give birth in a little concrete cell too small to turn around in, and would kill them by forcing them into a gas chamber. Over decades, he’d genetically engineered the chickens to be so large that they could barely move, and the full weight of their bloated bodies was thus constantly pressed against the metal of the cage. And sometimes, to produce more chickens, he’d hold the female chickens down and inject them with semen from male chickens.

It seems like he is doing something evil! He should stop. Probably you would not return to his house of horrors. More likely, you’d call the police.

But here’s a plausible principle: if it’s wrong to do something, then it’s wrong to pay other people to do it. Because it’s wrong to kill, it’s wrong to hire someone else to kill. Because it’s wrong to rob a bank, it’s wrong to hire someone else to rob a bank. So if it’s wrong to treat animals badly, it’s wrong to pay others to treat animals badly.

But that is what you do every time you purchase meat from a typical source. You pay for the product of months of torment and mutilation. Factory farms treat the animals on them every bit as badly as your friend in the above hypothetical. Every one of the practices I described is routine on the factory farms that house more than 99% of animals killed each year. So if it’s immoral to mistreat animals, then it’s also immoral to pay for others to mistreat animals. This would mean nearly all meat consumption is seriously immoral.

And note: nearly all the excuses that you give for your meat consumption could be given by your hypothetical friend. He could note that meat consumption is natural, lions eat meat, the animals wouldn’t have otherwise existed, and so on for all the excuses for meat eating. But no one would buy those excuses when employed by him. They’re no more successful when employed by you.

Most people, after reading this, will not go vegan. They will continue eating animal products, even if convinced by the moral argument, because they enjoy its taste. To such a person, I don’t have much to say, for while it’s easy to give arguments for the immorality of meat consumption, it is much harder to convince people to follow where the arguments lead.

All I can say is that if you continue eating meat after knowing how the animals are raised, then you will have to grapple with a legacy of knowingly supporting the shedding of innocent blood, of supporting gassing, torment, caging, and merciless carnage doled out on the innocent because you were too weak to stop doing what you knew to be wrong. If we one day appear before God and are asked to justify our actions, I wouldn’t want that to be my defense. At the very least offset.

In fact, I don’t think veganism is enough. We can spare thousands of animals from a torturous fate per dollar. We can make animals spend many fewer years in a cage with a single dollar. One who does nothing in the face of this holocaust will have to grapple with a legacy of inaction in the face of unspeakable atrocities; of ignoring the trillions of beings tortured, slaughtered, and dismembered because intervening would require trivial personal sacrifices. If there is a judgment day, I wouldn’t want that to be my defense. Doing something about the population vastly larger than the entire human race being kept in nightmare torture facilities strikes me as a bare minimum.

My fellow beings, my larger family, although we share this blue planet together as our home, I am so sorry that I am not able to stop your suffering. I am trying...

Disavowal vs. Denial

The biggest disavowal trait is not climate change but killing animals. 

Interview with Alenka Zupančič, author of new book Disavowal

And it’s a very interesting concept, because we are used to this other concept, which is simple denial. You know, denial of climate change, denial of this or that.

But disavowal functions in a much more perverse way. Namely, by first fully acknowledging some fact—“I know very well that this is how things are”—but then going on as if this knowledge didn’t really matter or register. So in practice, you just go on as before. And I think this is even more prevalent in our response to different social predicaments than simple denial.

[---]

They are doing perhaps more damage. Or, what is even more important, they are entrapped in this kind of pas de deux with the direct deniers, because they present themselves as much more rational. They say, “Look at these stupid people. They just don’t believe in climate change. But we are enlightened. We know all about it.” But in the long run, nothing really happens. The practices remain just the same. You organize a couple of climate conferences, but growth still remains the principle of social functioning, and so on. So I think, not only is it more dangerous because it is more prevalent—I mean, there are many more people who are into this kind of disavowal functioning—but it’s also dangerous because there is this dance between the two.

We Need More Jane Goodalls

Not the teachers with thick textbooks or the graphs with red lines trending up or down. I mean the voices that made you pause. That made you look at an animal not as a specimen, but as a neighbor. That made you look at a pond as a microecosystem full of life.

For many of us, those voices are growing quieter. One by one, we’re losing the great science communicators and activists who taught us to care. The ones who spoke not just in data, but in stories. Who helped us fall in love with forests, oceans, elephants, insects, and the fragile web that holds it all together.

And with each loss, the question grows louder: who’s left to carry that torch? Whose voices are we raising?

The truth is, science on its own has never been enough. Charts and reports rarely stir people to act. What moves us is empathy, love, and passion. What changes us are stories. About humans who cared, about why we should care.

Think of Rachel Carson, credited with launching the modern environmental movement, whose book Silent Spring pulled back the curtain on pesticides and reshaped environmental law. Or Carl Sagan, whose Cosmos made galaxies feel like home. These were scientists, yes, but they were also storytellers.

They translated evidence into meaning.

[---]

And among them stood Jane Goodall.

She didn’t arrive with a PhD in hand or an ivory tower pedigree. She arrived with patience, curiosity, and a willingness to sit still in a Tanzanian forest long enough for the chimpanzees to accept her.

What she found changed science forever. Chimps making and using tools. Chimps mourning their dead. Chimps hunting in groups, strategizing, forming alliances and rivalries.

But her gift wasn’t just the discoveries. It was how she told them.

She spoke about individual chimps by name, despite other scientists insisting on using numbers and codes. She refused to reduce them to data points because she had seen their personalities, their choices, their lives. David Greybeard, Flo, and Fifi are some of the names even my kids have learned from reading about Dr. Goodall's work.

That simple act, introducing animals as subjects with dignity, cracked something open in our collective imagination. It made us reconsider not just chimpanzees, but the entire spectrum of life around us.

[--]

And her words on stage, “Only if we understand, will we care. Only if we care, will we help. Only if we help, shall they be saved,” became a mantra for a generation. It’s not a coincidence that I’ve used a similar quote on my own Climate Ages’ mission: When we understand, we care. When we care, we protect.

For me, and for countless others, she was a bridge. A reminder that science doesn’t have to choose between rigor and empathy. It can carry both.

Now that she is gone, I keep telling friends the same thing: we need more Jane Goodalls. Not because we need more chimp researchers in Tanzania. But because we need more scientists willing to be human in public. To risk being vulnerable. To speak with care as well as evidence.

- More Here

The Omnivore’s Deception By John Sanbonmatsu

Review of the book The Omnivore’s Deception By John Sanbonmatsu:

The global destruction of other animals at the hands of the meat industry is absolutely staggering: Humans kill more than 80 billion land animals and nearly 3 trillion marine animals every year, reports Professor Sanbonmatsu. Half of the planet’s land surface is dedicated to agriculture, with 80% of that devoted to either rearing animals for slaughter or growing monocrops to feed them. Tragically, almost all of Earth’s animals are captives, observes Professor Sanbonmatsu, with just a teensy 4% of all mammals (excluding humans) living freely in nature whilst their captive brethren are confined, awaiting slaughter. Seventy percent of all birds on Earth are our prisoners too, living out their flightless lives in brief, abject misery, thanks to the poultry industry.

Professor Sanbonmatsu discusses the well-known cognitive dissonance where most people think that hurting animals is wrong, but strangely, they are not bothered by killing and eating the very same animals. This paradoxical moral blindness makes meat-eaters view vegans and veganism as threats to their moral self-image and to the core of their group identity. Such human narcissism (as Freud referred to it) also leads to open contempt for vegans and vegetarians because people see themselves as superior to other animals. Such global, systemic abuses underlie and normalize the frequent recrimination that anyone or anything that is different from their oppressors is “an animal.” In short, to be born a non-human animal in today’s world is to be viewed as being unworthy of life. And yet, “[o]mnivorism is not a license to kill; it’s an invitation to improve our moral character, to act in accordance with our better natures,” Professor Sanbonmatsu asserts.

Amongst the many arguments that Professor Sanbonmatsu makes is a discussion of Aristotle’s bizarre ideas that social inequality and hierarchy are aspects of nature, “embedded in a Great Chain of Being”. Thus, according to Aristotle, it was natural for men to dominate and to victimize women (Aristotle viewed women as “incomplete” men), for masters to dominate and victimize slaves, for stronger city-states to destroy or enslave weaker ones, and for humans to dominate and victimize other animals. Despite Aristotle’s permission to abuse and kill other animals, it has been shown, repeatedly and in numerous different ways, that raising and eating other animals is devastating for the environment and a waste of natural resources, is dangerous to human health, provides an inferior source of nutrition, is a leading cause of food insecurity for our fellow humans, and is unspeakably abusive and cruel to the other animals trapped within this system.

One argument made by Professor Sanbonmatsu that especially resonated with me is that by waging war on other animals, we are continuing the war on women, on formerly enslaved peoples and on peoples with different skin colors or ethnicities. Professor Sanbonmatsu also agrees with my personal assessment that the problem with raising and killing animals for food isn’t just bad for the animals nor for the environment, but this practice actually damages our very souls.

This is not only the best book I’ve read this year but it’s the best book I’ve ever read about the morality of ethical veganism and of animal rights. It is so compelling, so coherent, and so crammed full of relevant information that even I, as a widely-read vegan and zoologist, learned so much. It eloquently presents a well-researched, thorough, nuanced and powerful argument for ending the near-universal human habit of exploiting animals for food and for entertainment.

 

Climate Change - Entire Country Of Tuvalu To Migrate To Australia!

Tuvalu is preparing to carry out the first planned migration of an entire country in response to the effects of climate change. Recent studies project that much of its territory could be submerged in the next 25 years due to rising sea levels, forcing its inhabitants to consider migration as an urgent survival measure.

This island nation in Oceania is made up of nine coral islands and atolls inhabited by just over 11,000 people. The country’s average altitude is just 2 meters above sea level, making it extremely vulnerable to rising oceans, flooding, and storm surges, all exacerbated by the climate crisis.

The visas will be allocated through a ballot system and will grant beneficiaries the same health, education, housing, and employment rights enjoyed by Australian citizens. In addition, Tuvaluans will retain the ability to return to their home country if conditions permit.

- More Here

What We Still Get Wrong About Psychopaths

While the idea of psychopathy as a “brain disorder” has a long history and has been studied using various technologies, it wasn’t until the year 2000 that scientists began to rigorously test it using structural and functional MRI methods. Since then, dozens of MRI studies have been published, yet the most reasonable conclusion to draw from this research is that no reliable evidence has emerged to corroborate the idea that psychopathy—as measured by the Psychopathy Checklist (PCL)—is correlated with brain abnormalities of any kind.

Overall, the experimental results are predominantly nulls with a few statistically significant but inconsistent effects (often in opposing directions), which might be better explained as a byproduct of confounding variables unrelated to psychopathy, such as substance misuse, medication, or head trauma.

This conclusion raises an important question: If there has never been any clear evidence of brain abnormalities in psychopathic persons, why do so many scientists keep portraying psychopathy as a neurodevelopmental disorder?

[---]

Of course, it is inherently difficult to determine whether the systematic omission of null effects from the review literature is an act of scientific spin or simply an honest mistake of overlooking null effects, or a mixture of both. And perhaps it does not matter what the reason is because, whether the problem boils down to an issue with scientific spin or honest mistakes, the reality is the same: For the past two decades forensic practitioners and legal decision-makers would have been misled if they had followed due diligence and relied on the review literature when seeking information about neuroimaging research about psychopathy. The good news is that in the past years, we have seen the publication of high-quality review studies, where authors are now paying more attention to the extent of nulls.

However, even as the review literature is slowly correcting, readers should be aware that spin about the brain-disorder view of psychopathy is not a problem limited to the scientific peer-reviewed literature. It is arguably more rampant in public media, including op-eds and journalistic interviews, as well as in popular books about psychopathy, sometimes written by leading scientists. A search on YouTube and TikTok will readily yield hundreds of videos (amassing millions of views) where experts are explaining how psychopathy is caused by a brain abnormality, and it is not uncommon for TV documentaries about psychopathy to include a segment with MRI research.

[---]

Similarly, the book The Psychopath Inside by James Fallon (from 2013) conveys an admittedly absorbing story about how Fallon himself, a neuroscientist, accidentally discovered that he was a psychopath by studying his own MRIs. Lastly, in The Psychopath Whisperer by Kent Kiehl (from 2014), the narrative centers around neuroimaging research on psychopathic persons, of which the author, a leading expert, writes that the “consistency of their [psychopathic persons’] brain abnormalities never ceased to amaze me.”

The ideas conveyed in these popular books are, of course, scientifically untenable, and they arguably border on sheer make-believe. While they are undoubtedly entertaining, they come across as a form of spin that ends up doing a disservice to forensic practitioners and legal decision-makers as they perpetuate scientifically misleading views. 

- More Here

This is how science works - constantly correcting the past wrongs. 

This is from 2014, I was fascinated by James Fallon's work that I posted on this blog too. Plus, I shared this story with so many people.  I was wrong. Science is correcting it now. 

There is a new book Murderland: Crime and Bloodlust in the Time of Serial Killers by Caroline Fraser which is making a serious impact now. 

I have theory brewing inside me for a few years now and I will post it soon. 

Habitat Destruction & The Extinction Debt

My dear Sapiens; I will see, when I see you. 

And yeah, I am part of this moronic species who celebrates self-destruction. 

An important cause of extinction of any species is the destruction of the habitat that it needs to survive.

From Wiki: 

The term extinction debt was first used in 1994 in a paper by David Tilman, Robert May, Clarence Lehman and Martin Nowak, although Jared Diamond used the term "relaxation time" to describe a similar phenomenon in 1972.

In ecology, extinction debt is the future extinction of species due to events in the past. The phrases dead clade walking and survival without recovery express the same idea.

Extinction debt occurs because of time delays between impacts on a species, such as destruction of habitat, and the species' ultimate disappearance. For instance, long-lived trees may survive for many years even after reproduction of new trees has become impossible, and thus they may be committed to extinction. Technically, extinction debt generally refers to the number of species in an area likely to become extinct, rather than the prospects of any one species, but colloquially it refers to any occurrence of delayed extinction.

Extinction debt may be local or global, but most examples are local as these are easier to observe and model. It is most likely to be found in long-lived species and species with very specific habitat requirements (specialists). Extinction debt has important implications for conservation, as it implies that species may become extinct due to past habitat destruction, even if continued impacts cease, and that current reserves may not be sufficient to maintain the species that occupy them. Interventions such as habitat restoration may reverse extinction debt.

1994 paper by David Tilman, Robert May, Clarence Lehman and Martin Nowak:

Abstract

Habitat destruction is the major cause of species extinctions. Dominant species often are considered to be free of this threat because they are abundant in the undisturbed fragments that remain after destruction. Here we describe a model that explains multispecies coexistence in patchy habitats4 and which predicts that their abundance may be fleeting. Even moderate habitat destruction is predicted to cause time-delayed but deterministic extinction of the dominant competitor in remnant patches. Further species are predicted to become extinct, in order from the best to the poorest competitors, as habitat destruction increases. More-over, the more fragmented a habitat already is, the greater is the number of extinctions caused by added destruction. Because such extinctions occur generations after fragmentation, they represent a debt - a future ecological cost of current habitat destruction.

 

Drone Captures Dolphins Guiding Lost Humpback Whale to Deeper Water

Killer Whales Groom Each Other Using Tools Made From Kelp

Primates, birds, and elephants are all known to make tools, but examples of tool use among marine animals are much more limited. Reporting in the Cell Press journal Current Biology on June 23, a team of whale experts has found widespread tool manufacture and usage in an endangered population of resident killer whales living in the Salish Sea—part of the Pacific Ocean between British Columbia and Washington. The whales fashion tools from kelp and use them for grooming purposes. 

“We found that southern resident killer whales regularly use lengths of bull kelp during social interactions, apparently as a tool to groom one another,” says Michael Weiss (@CetaceanMike) of the Center for Whale Research in Friday Harbor, WA. “To find that the whales were not just using but also manufacturing tools, and that these objects were being used in a way never before reported in marine mammals, was incredibly exciting.” 

Weiss and his team discovered this unexpected whale activity while conducting aerial observations of southern resident killer whales, which are a critically endangered whale population with fewer than 80 individuals left found in the Pacific Northwest. The team has been monitoring the whales since 2018 to learn more about their foraging and social behavior. 

- More Here

Bubba Becomes First Fish To Survive Chemotherapy

38 years ago, an anonymous donor dragged a large, sloshing bucket to the Shedd Aquarium in Chicago, USA, dropped it at the reception desk, and disappeared. When staff pried open the lid, they discovered Bubba – a giant grouper fish, presumably caught and determined too big to take care of. A note attached to the lid asked for the fish to get to a good home.

Upon deeper examination, doctors learned more about the Epinephelus lanceolatus. At the time, she was only 10 in long, and was a Queensland grouper – a species fast disappearing in nature. The "super grouper" needed treatment, so they nursed Bubba back to health and found her a new home in a tank in the coral fish exhibit, where the predator happily swelled to 4.5 ft (1.37 m) and a whopping 69.3 kilos (150 lbs).

While there, she became a popular attraction, as visitors marvelled at her mysterious origin story and compassionate change in circumstances. And when she was briefly removed from exhibition in 1998, fans were distraught.

"That's when we found out how popular [s]he was," said Shedd spokesman Roger Germann, to the Washington Post, "because we started getting letters from people saying they couldn't find Bubba on their last visit and wanted to know what had happened."

Midway though the 1990s, Bubba underwent her second big life change as she transitioned to male, as groupers often do. This is a common reproductive strategy in fish species, whereby the larger female fish in a tank change sex to male, while the smaller fish remain female – and since Bubba was so big, scientists weren’t exactly surprised!

But scientists were shocked to find in 2001 that Bubba, their beloved grouper, had cancer. 

While this usually is a sure sign of a fish’s demise, because of Bubba’s size, scientists decided to take the unprecedented step of treating him with chemotherapy. This was never attempted before on a fish, but groupers can live 30 to 50 years, so if successful, they would be making advances in cancer treatments, while giving Bubba years of his life back.

Luckily, Bubba responded well to the treatment, and he became the first fish to survive chemotherapy – and cancer! 

After his treatments, he spent many happy years entertaining visitors and serving as an inspiration for human cancer survivors. The Shedd Aquarium reported receiving many calls from people affected by the disease, especially children, asking how Bubba was and gaining strength and courage from the knowledge that he had survived his own ordeal and that chemotherapy had extended his life. And beyond that, he was a personal favourite for many at the aquarium.

"Bubba overcame some incredible odds over the years, and that's what made him so special to us," said George Parsons, director of the Shedd's Fish department, to the Underwater Times. "Every once in a while for the last three years we have been getting phone calls from kids with cancer or from their parents, wondering how he is doing." 

After regaining his health, Bubba was moved to a new home in the 400,000-gallon main pool of the Shedd's new $43 million Wild Reef gallery, so his fans could properly appreciate his beauty. He even got a new 5-inch friend – a golden trevally fish, which swims around him and eats his scraps.

"He is such a character," said Rachel Wilborn, one of his keepers, to the Washington Post. "He is so curious, always coming around to see what you are doing. If you give him a food item that he doesn't like, he spits it right back at you, then looks you right in the eye, waiting to see what else you can come up with."

After many happy years in his new home, the magnificent fish passed away in August 2006 from age-related issues. A Shedd official said his autopsy shows only “evidence of multiple organ system failure consistent with [Bubba’s] age.”

"It's going to be tough now, if I have to tell people he's no longer with us," said Parsons.

But nevertheless, even though Bubba has passed, his story lives on as a testament to the compassion of his healthcare providers and all who loved him. His body was even donated to Chicago’s Field Museum across the street, where they will keep Bubba’s skeleton as a part of its enormous fish collection and cryogenically freeze his tissue samples, preserving them for study by future generations of scientists.

"If you want to know why we went to all this effort for a fish," Wilborn said, "all you have to do is look into his adorable face. We did it for Bubs because he is such a cool fish."

- More Here

Finding Awe!

I am blessed. 

I lived for over 13 years in a state of Max's Awe and I still do.  has become our awe paradise. 

Thank you my love. "I" became irrelevant living and one day soon dying with you. 

Awe Is Good for Your Brain:

Some attribute the beginning of the study of awe to the Apollo 8 mission. In December 1968, three astronauts entered a small capsule—the vehicle for mankind’s first trip to the moon. (They orbited ten times but didn’t land.) Major William Anders glanced out the window in time to see his blue home planet rising above the stark lunar horizon. “Oh, my God,” he said. Then he took a photo.

Later called Earthrise, the image became one of the most famous photographs ever taken. Fifty years after Anders captured it, he said that the view of Earth changed his life, shaking his religious faith and underscoring his concern for the planet. “We set out to explore the moon,” he wrote about the experience, “and instead discovered the Earth.”

Dubbed the overview effect, the profound experiences shared by Anders and many astronauts helped usher in a wave of academic interest in transcendent events and their attendant emotion—notably, awe. Experimental psychologists tried to induce the emotion in laboratories, showing people pictures of earth taken from space, as well as videos of a flash mob performing the “Ode to Joy” movement of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, or Susan Boyle wowing the world when she sang on Britain’s Got Talent. (If you haven’t seen Boyle doing her thing, look it up; I dare you not to feel some tingles.)

For research purposes, subjects let scientists measure their goose bumps, supplied cortisol samples before and after whitewater rafting, performed tedious cognitive tasks, and were fitted with suction probes to measure something that’s called “awe face.”

Researchers pondered many aspects of awe, including why experiencing it caused some people to feel greater belonging or generosity. They speculated that awe may be the primary pathway through which therapeutic psychedelics help so many patients suffering from trauma, depression, anxiety, and addiction. They even asserted that experiencing awe may be the defining feature of our species.

For an emotion with so much riding on it, what seems surprising is that it took the academic world so long to take awe seriously.

“Science got into the awe game really late,” says Dacher Keltner, a psychology professor at the University of California at Berkeley, and the author of the new book Awe: The New Science of Everyday Wonder and How It Can Transform Your Life.

Keltner grew up in 1960s California, raised by progressive parents. All around him people were exploring Buddhism, experimenting with mind-altering drugs, and communing with nature. It was also the golden age of spaceflight. “I was raised in a historical period that was in some sense devoted to awe,” he says. “But it was a neuroscientific and cognitive mystery.”

In 2003, Keltner and the psychologist Jonathan Haidt published one of the first academic papers on the experience. In “Approaching Awe, a Moral, Spiritual, and Aesthetic Emotion,” the two scientists tried to pinpoint what exactly awe is. They combed through historical accounts by philosophers and mystics; what they arrived at was both eloquent and expansive.

“We said that awe is really an emotion you feel when you encounter something vast and mysterious that transcends your understanding of the world,” he says. The vastness part, he explains, doesn’t have to be literally vast, like a view from a mountaintop. It can be conceptually vast, like the anatomy of a bee or string theory or a late-night stoner realization that every mammal on earth must have a belly button.

In the two decades of research that followed, an even more remarkable conclusion emerged: that this state of mind could potentially alter us by unleashing feelings like humility, generosity, and a desire to reassess our lives. And sometimes even existential terror. Whether it’s cataclysmic or gentle, an awe experience could be an effective antidote to burnout, post-traumatic stress, heartbreak, and loneliness.

[---]

I had to admit, I hadn’t really been thinking of this spectacle from the plant’s perspective. It suddenly seemed a totally reasonable thing to do. Most of these plants have been around a lot longer than humans have. The seeds that created this bloom were made in the past. They finally germinated during this precious wet year, but the whole thrust of the extravagant effort was to make seeds for a future bloom in an outrageous cycle of hope. Godoy and I were standing, accidentally, in the middle of a space-time continuum that had absolutely nothing to do with us. We humans just need to not screw it up.

Then it hit me: the risk of chasing awe, of making it about personal growth, is that you dilute its strongest power. Because improving ourselves really isn’t the point of awe at all. I’d been doing it wrong, and it had taken a 27-year-old human and a cluster of yellow tickseeds to help me realize it. The point is this: by listening, we find a small seam in the universe through which to feel ourselves entirely irrelevant.

 

Yes, Shrimp Matter

I left private equity to work on shrimp welfare. When I tell anyone this, they usually think I've lost my mind. I know the feeling — I’ve been there. When I first read Charity Entrepreneurship's proposal for a shrimp welfare charity, I thought: “Effective altruists have gone mad — who cares about shrimp?” 

The transition from analyzing real estate deals to advocating for some of the smallest animals in our food system feels counterintuitive, to say the least. But it was the same muscle I used converting derelict office buildings into luxury hotels that allowed me to appreciate an enormous opportunity overlooked by almost everyone, including those in the animal welfare space. I still spend my days analyzing returns (though they’re now measured in suffering averted). I still work to identify mutual opportunities with industry partners. Perhaps most importantly, I still view it as paramount to build trust with people who — initially — sit on opposite sides of the table.

After years of practicing my response to the inevitable raised eyebrows, I now sum it up simply: ignoring shrimp welfare would have been both negligent and reckless.

This may seem like an extreme stance. Shrimp aren't high on the list of animals most people think about when they consider the harms of industrial agriculture. For a long time — up until the last few years — most researchers assumed shrimp couldn't even feel pain. Yet as philosopher Jonathan Birch explains in The Edge of Sentience, whenever a creature is a sentience candidate1 and we cannot rule out its capacity for conscious experience, we have a responsibility to take its potential for suffering seriously.  

We don’t know what it is like to be a shrimp. We do know that if shrimp can suffer, they are doing so in the hundreds of billions. 

Why worry about shrimp in a world where so many mammals and birds live in torturous conditions due to industrial agriculture?2 The answer is that shrimp farming dwarfs other forms of animal agriculture by sheer numbers. An estimated 230 billion shrimp of various species are alive in farms at any given moment —  compared to the 779 million pigs, 1.55 billion cattle, 4 33 billion chickens, and 125 billion farmed fish.

Shrimp are harvested at around 6 months of age, which puts the estimated number slaughtered annually for human consumption at 440 billion. For perspective: that’s more than four times the number of humans who have ever walked the earth. At sea, the numbers are even more staggeringly shrimpy. Globally,  27 trillion shrimp are caught in the wild6 every year, compared to 1.5 trillion fish.

Despite their size, shrimp are the proverbial “elephant in the room” when discussing animal welfare in food systems.

[---]

The future of shrimp welfare is one of the most underexplored areas in modern animal rights, but its potential for impact is immense. We are only at the beginning of a movement that could fundamentally shift the way we treat aquatic animals — both on farms and for those caught in the ocean. While challenges remain, including entrenched industry practices and global trade complexities, the path forward is becoming clearer with each step taken by animal NGOs and progressive food companies.

For the first time ever, shrimp welfare is becoming a relevant topic within the broader animal welfare movement, one that has traditionally focused on larger animals and more familiar causes. But the staggering number of shrimp affected, their capacity to suffer, and the emerging solutions make this a moral issue we can no longer ignore. Addressing shrimp welfare isn’t just about reducing suffering for billions of animals — it’s about redefining our relationship with the natural world, expanding our circle of compassion, and challenging the limits of our ethical responsibilities.

- More Here

The Languages Lost To Climate Change

Scientists and linguists have discovered a striking connection between the world’s biodiversity and its languages. Areas rich in biological diversity also tend to be rich in linguistic diversity (a high concentration of languages). While this co-occurrence is not yet fully understood, a strong geographic correlation suggests multiple factors (ecological, social, cultural) influence both forms of diversity, which are also declining at alarming rates. These high-diversity areas are also often at the front lines of the climate crisis. Where plant and animal species are disappearing, languages, dialects and unique expressions often follow a similar pattern of decline.

The Arctic may not be an obvious biodiversity hotspot, like the Brazilian Amazon or Tanzania’s coastal forests, but it plays a critical role in regulating and stabilizing the Earth’s climate and supporting life on our planet. Scientists often say that “what happens in the Arctic does not stay in the Arctic,” and any disruption to its habitat has far-reaching consequences for humanity.

Indigenous communities have deep relationships with the land they have occupied for generations, and this close relationship is reflected in the languages they speak — how they talk about the landscape, and how they express the beliefs and customs in which those languages developed. When their relationships with the land suffer, so can their languages. 

For example, Vanuatu, a South Pacific island nation with the highest density of languages on the planet (110 languages across 4,707 square miles), is home to 138 threatened plant and animal species. It is also one of the countries that is particularly vulnerable to sea level rise and climate-related natural disasters. Scientists warn that the climate crisis has become the “final nail in the coffin” for many Indigenous languages, as coastal communities are forced to relocate.

When they can no longer depend on the land, communities may be forced to emigrate to other areas where their languages aren’t spoken, leaving behind not just their mother tongue, but all the wisdom contained in it. There is also evidence to suggest that in cases where a language begins to decline — due to economic or social factors, for example — people may gradually stop caring for the land. When languages are abandoned, the traditional ecological knowledge they carry is also left behind.

“Our language and traditional practices are closely tied to the land,” a community leader from Dishchii’bikoh, a tribally controlled school, in Cibecue, Arizona, told researchers in a 2016 study.“In many ways, it is used in describing objects, teaching moral lessons, and expressing our purpose on this land. Since the loss of our traditional language … our traditional ecological knowledge has become more and more threatened.”

Increasingly, Indigenous communities are pointing to the inextricable link between language and biodiversity as evidence that humans are not separate from nature, but very much a part of it.

[---]

Linguistic diversity can be seen as an indicator of cultural diversity more broadly, Gorenflo says, which has traditionally been more difficult to define. “For a long time, anthropology was considered to be the social science that studied culture. But nobody could come to an agreement about what culture was,” he says. “Linguistic diversity is really what we’re using as a proxy for cultural diversity.”

The exact reasons behind the connections between languages and nature are not entirely clear, Gorenflo told me. Previous studies have suggested that areas with a high number of resources create linguistic diversity because people must adapt to more complex environments. But others have argued that it’s because more plentiful resources reduce the likelihood of having to share them and communicate with neighboring groups in times of need. Meanwhile, some research has suggested that the reasons behind this co-occurrence are far more complex and differ from one area to another. Gorenflo emphasized the need for more research. “Understanding this connection is important because it would change how we manage the relationship between Indigenous people and biological diversity — and nature.”

[---]

For Gorenflo, the factors driving the co-occurrence of linguistic and biological diversity, which were initially puzzling, are now becoming even more evident. “I see languages as an extension of the cultural system, which itself is part of the broader ecology of the world,” he told me. “So, it’s less and less of a mystery to me, and more about exploring what this ecology looks like.”

The preservation of endangered languages is about more than saving words — it could be vital to safeguarding centuries of human knowledge and understanding the systems that sustain us.

- More Here