It’s time Scotland took on landed interests over animal protections
Mountain hares winning protected species in Scotland was an amazing achievement for Alison Johnstone and the Greens in Scotland. At least 26,000 mountain hares are killed per year, a number which is most likely to be an under-estimate. The backlash from estates was intense. It always is. They do not appear to like their behaviours exposed to the public.
Week after week we hear of raptors (often protected species) killed on estates in Scotland and the rest of the UK, in particular Yorkshire and Derbyshire. This article outlines the need to push harder against large estates and the power they wield in Parliament. Too many estates persecute native wildlife and have done for centuries, usually for the benefit of non-native birds which will be shot (a sport paid for and often subsidised) and agricultural animals. I believe it is also about power and greed.
Land owners have a responsibility to stop and change this outdated approach. We can’t let the systematic destruction of our wildlife on these estates slide any longer. It’s insidious and pervasive, and needs to be stopped.
https://www.thenational.scot/news/18542803.time-scotland-took-landed-interests-animal-protections/
Extinction Rebellion: Extremism?
This is (I presume) a screenshot taken of new (now redacted) police guidelines relating to government-led advice on handling the organisation Extinction Rebellion.
To clarify, Extinction Rebellion state:
“Extinction Rebellion is an international movement that uses non-violent civil disobedience in an attempt to halt mass extinction and minimise the risk of social collapse.”
The government and police force have effectively implied that ER are a terrorist organisation. ER’s response can be found here. https://rebellion.earth/2020/01/10/how-dare-they-extinction-rebellion-responds-to-terrorism-slur-by-police/
If protesting loudly against the destruction of our planet and all living things on it, including ultimately ourselves, is somehow seen as extremism, then you know the system itself is ruled by insane oligarchs and fascists who wish to strictly control the narratives and push us further into capitalist and consumer-led environmental destruction and death. This is an attempt to silence and destroy rightful dissent against a broken system. We are not extremists; we are humans who are wide awake to the insanity of the world we currently live in and who desperately want to stop the destruction and ecological collapse happening all around us right now.
This Was The Decade Climate Scientists Stopped Being Polite | Gizmodo Australia
Scientists’ ‘politeness’ went on for far too long. If you know a truth – one that will change the world if rampant consumerism and greed continue unchecked – you do something about it, especially if you’re backed by science and academia. The people I can’t forgive are past politicians and some scientists who said little and did nothing while knowing our natural world was doomed. This applies to consumerism and capitalism, deforestation, predator persecution, climate, whaling and overfishing and more. Where were they? For 30 years from childhood I looked around and saw chaos coming and no one in power doing anything about it. Only charities like FoE, Greenpeace (back in the day) and WDC were speaking out. Too late now I fear. Humans are our own worst enemies. Too few listening to science, logic and fact, and the rest too easily swayed by rhetoric, propaganda, brainwashing and greed.
https://www.gizmodo.com.au/2020/01/this-was-the-decade-climate-scientists-stopped-being-polite/
When nature says ‘Enough!’: the river that appeared overnight in Argentina
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/apr/01/argentina-new-river-soya-beans
“Until the early 1990s, the Morro basin was a patchwork of water-absorbing forests and grasslands, but they are mostly gone, replaced by maize and soya beans.”
It may be a good move to cut down on cattle ranching worldwide (to prevent deforestation, to cut back on carbon and methane production, to limit the ongoing human health crisis caused by increasing meat consumption, to avoid further water pollution from farm runoff, to limit predator persecution, and to spare countless animals the endless cycle of slaughter), but an irony here is that soya beans, the hero of every vegan and vegetarian, come at a terrible price. Deforestation and clearing for cattle ranching has been replaced with deforestation in favour of this detrimental monoculture of soya bean farming.
If course, it is true that the humble soya bean is the new answer to reducing or cutting out meat consumption, but the majority of this soya and maize is being grown to become feed for the animal agriculture industry, something the attached article completely fails to mention. Animal agriculture is literally eating up our planet in countless ways.
Less than a third of Argentina’s rainforest remains. Losing that much established forest means losing deep networks of tree roots which naturally absorb large amounts of water from underground aquifers. The result is a huge new river appearing on land as has happened in Argentina. Why is this a surprise now? There are myriad experts in these fields worldwide who would have known this was a likely outcome as a result of mass deforestation. Why aren’t scientists involved in such massive economic and environmental processes and decisions?
Brazil has been in the grip of terrible deforestation for decades. With a changing climate, increased precipitation and otherwise poor substrate, deforestation in these countries inevitably means more landslides and more flooding, and perhaps more new rivers. We are drastically altering the landscape of the planet, destroying habitats and disrupting entire ecosystems.
Countless wildlife have lost their homes during this shift to soya bean plantations and deforestation, something that cannot ever be undone. When are governments of countries with such invaluable habitats going to quit putting profit before protecting and preserving their and the world’s most precious and vulnerable natural heritage? Rainforests are incredibly diverse, most are quite ancient, and they are so important to the world in terms of carbon sinks and wildlife biodiversity – they must be protected.
‘Extreme’ fossil fuel investments have surged under Donald Trump, report reveals
‘Extreme’ fossil fuel investments have surged under Donald Trump, report reveals
Following on from the last post with projections of 10cm sea level rise as glaciers melt, as a result of climate change, banks are responsible for much of our climate change by merrily investing in dirty fossil fuels despite knowing the impact and consequences. Is money really all that matters to these people? If your bank is one of them, dump them.
“RAN spokeswoman, Alison Kirsch, accused banks such as JPMorgan Chase of “moving backwards in lockstep with their wrongheaded political leaders”.
“If we are to have any chance of halting catastrophic climate change, there must be an end of expansion and complete phase-out of these dangerous energy sources,” she said. “Banks need to be accountable and implement policies guarding against extreme fossil fuel funding.”
Glacier shrinkage is past the point of no return : Research Highlights
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-018-03356-5
Today’s post is brought to you by, “What the hell are we doing?” And “Oh shit.”
“Warming since the late nineteenth century has led to a marked retreat of most of the world’s glaciers. Ben Marzeion at the University of Bremen in Germany and his colleagues simulated the long-term response of thousands of glaciers to recent and projected climate change. The researchers found that glaciers are already committed to enough shrinkage to raise global sea levels by about 10 centimetres, even if global temperatures do not rise any further for centuries.“
100s of dolphins tortured in Japan in alarming Facebook Live stream
And so the vile, arrogant brutal atrocities in the cove in Taiji, Japan continue, year after year, while the world remains blissfully ignorant of the evil these men do for six months of every year to migrating cetaceans unfortunate enough to swim past this little cove off the southern peninsula of Japan. Money is made, greed is satiated, murderous killing occurs and the world’s precious wildlife is decimated by Japan. When will this be called out and stopped as the heinous, greedy, short-sighted, violent, cruel and unacceptable activity that it is?
http://www.ibtimes.co.in/100s-of-dolphins-tortured-in-japan-in-alarming-facebook-live-stream-713359
Dolphins escape from Taiji facility in Japan – BBC News
It’s so tragic that these animals are so traumatised and conditioned to rely on handouts for resources that they gain their freedom after someone cut the nets and they don’t know what to do with it. Awful breaking of a wild animal’s autonomous, free spirit.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-38515187
The Toll of Dolphins Under Siege in Taiji | The Huffington Post
Thanks to Huff Post for sharing the plight of Taiji dolphins with its readers. It’s actually six months of every year that the Japanese fishermen commit these heinous crimes against nature and allow greed and ignorance to rule the town of Taiji, Wakayama Prefecture. Half of every year they slaughter dolphins. It should be absolutely illegal to do what they do but instead they get rich from selling those they spare from the butcher’s knife to marine amusement parks around the world.
Don’t visit dolphin shows. Your ticket funds this massacre in Japan every year. Supply and demand; stop demanding dolphins entertain us, they’ll stop taking them for captivity and killing the rest.
http://m.huffpost.com/us/entry/us_586d520be4b068764965c601?timestamp=1483650102083
Dragon Mother 
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