Green Options

The Meatrix is a clever animated short that explains how incredibly cruel, destructive and dangerous factory farming truly is. Even the recent over-hyped outbreak of swine flu has been linked to poorly managed factory farms in Mexico, that are actually owned by US Agribusiness giant Smithfield Foods, the world’s largest industrial pork producer. “Industrial farms are super-incubators for viruses,” said Bob Martin, former executive director of the Pew Commission on Industrial Animal Farm Production, and a vocal critic of “contained animal feeding operations.”

Animals Asia successfully rescued 13 Asian black bears (moon bears) from bile farms in the past month. This is a small step in a continuing fight, as an estimated 7,000-10,000 moon bears still suffer in bile farms across China.

Hammy the hamster repeatedly demonstrates her preference for organic fruits and vegetables. For five out of the six food types, Hammy preferred organic; she did, however, seem to have a preference for conventional walnuts over organic. Please visit http://www.cooksden.com/hamster/ for more information.

Fifteen-year-old Bostonian Jordan Star has emerged as the surprise driving force behind a bill to ban the cruel practice of ’surgically silencing’ cats and dogs by removing their vocal cords.

Star, a freshman at Needham High, decided to take action after coming across a dog that had been debarked and abandoned. “It was just horrible,” he said of the dog’s struggle to get his attention. “It was just like a hoarse, wheezy cough. In a shelter, all they are is a mutilated animal, which makes them harder to adopt.”

Scientists succeeded for the first time in achieving the holy grail of conservation: bringing to life an extinct animal through cloning. For seven minutes.

Just seven minutes after Spanish and French scientists brought the Pyrenean ibex back from extinction, the young animal died of lung complications also common to other cloned animals. And so an extinct species blinked into life for an instant and then flickered out again.

The success, albeit brief, is spurring scientists and conservationists alike to imagine some wild possibilities. Can extinct species–say, the dodo or even the wooly mammoth–be brought back into their natural habitats through cloning and if so should they?

Harnessing the Earth’s Heat for Food and Power

As the rumbling temblors beneath Yellowstone National Park continue (over 900 hundred such weak quakes in 2008), media attention shifts to two topics: the possibility of a super-volcanic eruption (not likely, according to most geologists), and secondly, the harnessing of geothermal energy.

This latter consideration is all the more fashionable these days as America struggles to embrace an alternative and sustainable energy future.

Geothermal energy offers the promise of a virtually unlimited source of power. Although less energetic in terms  of total constant power output compared to the sun, harnessing the geothermal venting from a single, sufficiently high-grade, hot-spring could conceivably provide power for a population of tens of thousands, and it’s not weather dependent.  But there are also plenty of “lower grade” springs that can be put to other uses, such as growing hothouse produce (and the spring water is also used for watering the plants) and  naturally warming water for fish farming (the Talipia species, a popular dinner fish, is one species farmed this way). Not all animals that are farmed this way are used for food, some, like the farmed alligators in Mosca, CO (see photo), are raised for their skins primarily (though some do eat the meat).

A groundbreaking study has proved that man-made light sources can change natural light cycles, triggering abnormal animal behavior that often leads to injury and even death.

The study, published in the journal Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment, confirms that polarized light pollution can cause confusion in creatures that rely on light ‘cues’ to navigate through their environment, with many animals also thrown off course by light reflecting from buildings.

Seasonal food is plentiful right now, much of it in the shape of squashes and gourds. Last night I took a page (literally) out of Barbara Kingsolver’s recent book, Animal, Vegetable Miracle. Ever since I read the chapter on smashing pumpkins, I knew I had to try the pumpkin soup experiment.

For the uninitiated, she took on the task of making pumpkin soup in the actual pumpkin. She describes the culinary feat in detail, including the collapse of the shell when she attempted to serve the soup!

Editor’s note: For the last few months, we have run a number of guest posts from students in Professor Simran Sethi’s “Media and the Environment” course at the University of Kansas. We’ve all been pretty impressed with the work these students have done, so we were delighted to agree to publish a small-group final project from students J.J. DeSimone, Lindsay Crupper, Denzyl Janneker, Bobby Grace, and Adam Bowman. They focused on biodiversity in their project, and we’ll publish all five parts over the course of this week. Today’s post was originally published on May 9, 2008.

As humans, we collectively tend to be self-absorbed and not think outside our sphere of influence. More specifically, if something in the world doesn’t directly affect us we give little or no attention to it (I’m one of the worst culprits, myself). As such, it’s very easy for us not to think about what human wastefulness and global warming are doing to our plant and animal life. However, losing our earth’s bio and eco-diversity has frightening ramifications for humanity.

Photo credit: Adam Bowman

Taken in the Uintah Mountains, this photo illustrates what humans could lose unless they act to preserve open spaces.

According to Baker University Biology Professor and Natural Areas Director Roger Boyd, biodiversity is the amount of species in a given area. More broadly, eco-diversity refers to the number of ecosystems there are on the planet. If eco and biodiversity continues to decrease on the planet, then less food is available to sustain life. In essence, all of the earth’s biological life is interconnected; if our furry and scale-covered brethren run out of food, so do we.

A report released Wednesday from the World Conservation Union (IUCN) predicts an 80% population decline of the most common type of gorilla, the Western Gorilla, from 1980 levels by 2046. The 2007 Red List of Threatened Species finds "commercial hunting and outbreaks of the Ebola virus have virtually extirpated gorillas from a great deal of otherwise intact forest" where they were previously thought to thrive.

"What’s immediately needed if we are to halt the

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Rabbit CareEditor's note: We're pleased to welcome Gavin Hudson to our blogging team. Gavin lives in Seattle, and has worked for the Jane Goodall Institute, particularly its "Roots and Shoots" program. He'll be covering activism topics for us, particularly those that you can implement in your quest to "green the good life."

Do you dream of working with animals? Find out how you can volunteer at your local zoo or

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