The despoilation of the agribusinesses

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The world’s biggest palm oil agribusiness is destroying rainforests in Indonesia to make way for palm plantations — even though it’s against the law.  Last month, one of Wilmar International’s suppliers was caught bulldozing crucial rainforest in the Leuser Ecosystem, an important. wildlife habitat and the last place on earth where you can find endangered animals like Sumatran orangutans, tigers, elephants, and rhinos living together.  Wilmer supplies big users like Nestlé and Colgate- Palmolive.

Thanks to grassroots pressure worldwide, the Indonesian government has placed a moratorium on new oil palm plantations. Wilmar itself has even pledged to stop its role in deforestation.

Meanwhile, the majority of the world’s primates are in deep trouble. There are as few as 20 or 30 Hainan gibbons left in China, and the trapdoor of extinction is gaping for the Javan slow loris. Even numbers of Madagascar’s iconic ring-tailed lemur have slumped to around 2000.

These could be the next primates to disappear from our planet. But overall, the picture is even bleaker, with 60 per cent of all primate species globally predicted to vanish within between 25 and 50 years.

That’s the gloomy conclusion from the largest ever review of the survival prospects of the world’s 504 known species of non-human primate, 85 of them discovered since 2000. “This paper is a synthesis of the factors, at all scales, that are causing declines and extinctions,” says Anthony Rylands of Conservation International, joint lead author of the report (Science Advances, e1600946).

The biggest harbinger of doom is clearance of forests for agriculture, both by local farmers and by big agro-industrial producers of commodities such as palm oil and rubber. Between 1990 and 2010, for example, agricultural expansion into primate habitats was estimated at 1.5 million square kilometres, an area three times that of France.

 

 

Water full of drugs

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Water re-use means we are all consuming a cocktail of other people’s leftover medicines, but measuring their impact is almost impossible. A recent analysis of streams in the US detected an entire pharmacy: diabetic meds, muscle relaxants, opioids, antibiotics, antidepressants and more. Drugs have even been found in crops irrigated by treated waste water. It looks as if drug residues in our drinking water are set to rise, with one in five Americans using three or more prescription every  30 days. Fresh water isn’t immune either. Paul Bradley of the US Geological Survey and his team checked streams in the eastern US for 108 chemicals, a drop in the bucket of the 3000 drug compounds in use. One river alone had 45. And even though two-thirds of the streams weren’t fed by treated waste water, 95 per cent of them had the anti-diabetic drug metformin, probably from street run-off or leaky sewage pipes (Environmental Science & Technology, doi.org/bqdb).

The immediate drug effects in healthy adults, at levels 10,000 times lower than from a 400 milligram pill,  are miniscule, but the effect on small children exposed to low levels of pharmaceuticals for a generation, is not known. An adult prescribed multiple drugs is more likely to experience side effects, and risks rise exponentially with each drug taken by a person over 65. So could tiny doses of dozens of drugs have an impact on your health?  What happens to you after a lifetime of drugs at very low concentrations?  These drugs have been individually approved, but there have been no studies as to what happens when they’re together in the same soup.  Endocrine disruptors, artificial chemicals found in a variety of materials, for instance were ignored previously, but are now linked to breast cancer and abnormal development in children.

There are two possible solutions. One is to upgrade water treatment facilities. It’s an option Switzerland has gone for, but it isn’t cheap – it will cost the country over $1 billion. In England, it is estimated that just removing the hormone estradiol from sewage plants would cost billions of pounds.

The second answer is to have greener pharmaceuticals that degrade readily in the environment. It is possible to redesign drugs for heart disease so that they degrade faster in the environment (RSC Advances, doi.org/bqdg), though these molecules require testing before clinical use. Most pharmaceutical companies will not research this idea at their own expense, surprise., surprise! (extracted from an article by Anthony King in the  New Scientist).

I am sure that Epicurus would advocate a blitz on this problem and if it has to be at the cost of raising taxes, so be it.  One of the most disagreeable effects of the current anti-intellectualism is the distrust of scientists.  It is true that a tiny minority have soiled the reputation of the many.  I am thinking of those who were paid to doubt man-made climate change, those who dreamt up pseudo facts for the tobacco companies, and now the sugar and related industries.  But the vast majority of scientists are honest, hard workers, trying to improve the lot of mankind.  There are so many issues they can and should address – water full of drugs is one of them.

Offending everyone in sight

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 Kjell Magne Bondevik, the former prime minister of Norway, was stopped at Dulles International Airport on his way to the President’s Prayer Breakfast, held and questioned (even when it was clear that he had indeed been the prime minister of an allied country) because he had traveled to Iran three years earlier.
Of course, looked at another way, he had also been the head of one of the many freeloading nations on the planet who, as President Trump now points out, have “taken our country for a ride”, so he undoubtedly got what he deserved, as Trump would say.  In 2008, pressured by a “multi-departmental American lobbying effort,” Norway caved and agreed to buy the most expensive,  cost-overrun-prone weapons system in history, the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, rather than a perfectly reasonable Swedish plane. If they hadn’t, it might have adversely affected sales to other U.S. allies ready to “take advantage of America”.
And nine years later in 2017, despite endless delays and soaring costs, the Norwegians are still buying the planes — 52 in all at an estimated price tag of $40 billion!  What a crew of free-loaders! And the Trump Administration held and questioned the man partly responsible for this largess towards the military-industrial complex.
At this rate the United States will have not a single friend throughout the world.  And we haven’t yet organised the war that Bannon is anxious to provoke.

Is empathy a bad thing?

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Paul Bloom recently wrote a book called Against Empathy, and some of his friends say they are embarrassed to read it in public. Isn’t empathy something only a psychopath would object to?  Isn’t empathy a force for good? Are not  people are urged to express greater empathy in everyday life, and children are being taught to empathise more in school.

Empathy can be defined to be either  synonymous with kindness and altruism, (and hard to object to), or a capacity to share others’ feelings. This latter definition, says the author, as a guide for moral and political decisions, is a train wreck. Empathy makes the world worse.

Firstly,  it’s relatively easy to put yourself in the shoes of someone close, who is attractive and friendly, or who looks like you. But empathy for your enemies, for distant strangers is another matter.  Secondly,  empathy makes us focus on an individual. We can’t put ourselves in the shoes of a million people or even a dozen. And lastly,  empathy is malleable, and can be abused to sway people into backing all sorts of positions, including cruel ones. Adam Smith noted that the more we empathise with someone who suffers, the more we wish to retaliate against those causing the suffering. Research finds that more empathic people are the most supportive of violent reprisals.

Some worry that if we don’t empathise with others, don’t feel their pain, we won’t care enough to help. But the drive to improve people’s lives doesn’t require putting ourselves in their shoes.   Bloom says that we can and should transcend empathy and look at things rationally.   So skin colour doesn’t determine the value of a life, one person is not worth more than a hundred, and important decisions should be based on cost-benefit analyses and appeal to moral principles.   When study volunteers are taught to be compassionate without empathy, they become kinder and enjoy helping. In contrast, action motivated by the empathic urge is often exhausting – it’s unpleasant to experience others’ suffering.

Bloom says he wouldn’t want to live in a world without empathy. It’s a source of pleasure – enhancing the joy of literature, for instance – and central to close relationships. But for moral choices, there are better alternatives. (Paul Bloom is the Brooks and Suzanne Ragen Professor of Psychology at Yale University. His book Against Empathy is published by HarperCollins/Bodley Head, adapted from an article in New Scientist).

Personally, I am content with empathy being synonymous with kindness, thoughtfulness and altruism.  I believe that we can sympathize with and support those in  pain and not want to go to war, as it were, against their opponents.  What is omitted in this scenario is imagination  –  the imaginative can see in their minds eye what it must be like to see a young, unarmed teenage shot in the street by a frightened police officer without wanting  wanting to see that officer in the condemned cell. It would be good to know what drove Epicurus to welcome women and slaves to enjoy his Garden and take part in his philosophical discussions.  Was it empathy or was it a rational decision that the world would be a better place if all were treated as equals and with respect according to their characters and abilities?  Or may be it was a mixture of all of that?