The Elephant and the Honeybee

Here’s a win-win story about a notoriously destructive human-wildlife interaction, and the little insect that just might save the day.

Elephants, as delightful (and Vulnerable) as they are, can cause a lot of damage. They have been seen as a pest in some parts of Africa and Asia for years, particularly feared for destroying crops and houses and even killing people in wild rampages through farming villages. This human-wildlife conflict has escalated severely in the last few decades, as human populations increase and human settlements and infrastructure encroach further into elephant home ranges. And you could excuse the elephants for having plenty of rage, built up from years of poaching, hunting and abuse at the hands of humans.

Elephant carcasses left to rot, killed only for their tusks. (Source: National Geographic, 2010)

Candlelit Carols

My favourite part of Christmas as a child was Christmas Eve. Christmas Day itself always tumbled by too quickly – a turbulent mix of torn wrapping paper, long distance car-sweat, swollen stomachs and heated tempers. In contrast, Christmas Eve was quiet, peaceful and candlelit – my family would sit around our decorated pine tree and sing carols with a little portable keyboard, enjoying my mother’s delightful fruitcake. I absolutely loved it.

The traditional carols hold so much more connotation and imagination between the notes than our modern day ‘pop carols’. And by ‘traditional’, I mean those that don’t talk about Santa Claus or our modern Christmas traditions of over-indulgence, over-spending and overwhelmed. Traditional carols are those that conjure up images of the true nature of Christmas.

Modern Luxury, a new oxymoron

I was reading an article (Everything Old is Green Again) in Conservation Magazine the other day which confirmed something I have suspected for quite a while – older buildings are often more energy-efficient than any built today.

The story uses the example of the Monadnock Building in Chicago, once the largest office building in the world. Completed in 1893, Monadnock had very thick brick walls (around 2m wide) to keep heat in during winter and out during summer, transoms and bay windows to allow natural light in, and windows were usually positioned to allow cross-breezes.

The Monadnock Building in Chicago - energy-efficient before it was on trend. (Photo Source: Wikipedia)

These features were very common to most commercial buildings of that period, before we decided that quicker, cheaper construction meant more cash to go around the table.

Land of Plenty

In my last post I wrote about Australia exporting our own fresh produce and importing poorer quality substitutes. A few days later Dick Smith was in the news on the same platform. Of course, Dick has always been an advocate of Australian food, with his own brand of Australian food products.

The latest addition to his product range is canned beetroot – the announcement came as he was on his way to Cowra, in NSW, to save a beetroot crop that was about to ploughed into the ground, yet another victim of cheaper international competition. Dick Smith paid the farmer out, booked the crop in to the only Australian-owned cannery (Windsor Farm Foods, also in Cowra), and we will (hopefully) see the product on supermarket shelves soon.

I suspect there was a little bit of a publicity stunt involved in this story, but he does make a very good point.

Renewable Food

A recent special investigation by The Ecologist magazine has highlighted an interesting link between global food poverty and famine and “food speculation”, a recent financial trading trend amongst the Big Money players.

The theory is that “speculators” (traders with no commercial interest in the commodity they are buying or selling) have the ability to increase global food prices, simply through their involvement in the stock exchange. In effect, an urbanite in London, who has never stood amidst a field of real live corn, can make a few million on corn stocks with the click of a button. Before you can say ‘popcorn’, a few thousand people in a poorer country across the globe go hungry because the boosted price of said commodity means they can’t afford to buy maize anymore.

Re-thinking science education

Following the publishing of an edited version of What’s Science Mummy? on The Conversation, I was invited to submit a related short piece to the ACEL Online (Australian Council for Educational Leadership) newsletter. You can view the front page here, but full access is restricted for non-members. I have printed the article below – thank you to ACEL Online for publishing this.

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Australia is lagging behind the rest of the world with science education, and this is becoming more apparent as disagreement over enviro/scientific issues increases in the public domain. A recent poll highlighted how Australians are interested in science, but don’t feel well-informed about it. This is despite the marketing/education projects many organisations deliver in an attempt to increase the public’s knowledge of scientific issues. One of the reasons these kinds of projects may not have the desired effect is that they are mostly available post-education, when many people have already formed personal interests and beliefs and values systems.

Bats out of Hell

Why is it so easy to lose perspective on environmental issues? With so many regulatory organisations and frameworks, multiple perceptions on the “right” way to conserve or protect, Media interference, and the ghosts of environmental lessons from the past breathing down our neck, it is easy to feel like you’re living inside an Escher drawing when you try and dissect any of today’s environmental concerns.

Take the Hendra virus issue currently making news along Australia’s east coast. Horses are dying after contracting the virus from flying foxes and people are dying after contracting the virus from horses. Now other domestic animals are proving susceptible to the virus, including dogs, cats and guinea pigs.

I don’t wish to resort to dramatic statements, but there is no other way to say it – entire human communities are being plagued by bat colonies, with many sleep-deprived residents living in fear of their health. My mother is one of these – she has been putting up with a flying fox colony that likes to roost in a eucalypt just outside her bedroom window for nearly 10 years. The colony started off small and only visited occasionally. Over the last few years their numbers have swelled and their loyalty to mum’s tree has been cemented. She averages about 3 or 4 intermittent hours of sleep a night and spends hours most weeks scrubbing bat excrement off her roof, to no avail (her water supply is from a rainwater tank).

Biofuel is not the answer

I saw an article today in the journal Energy and Environmental Science that claims to have the answer to the biofuel problem. Apparently agave, the plant that has provided a sugar alternative, rope, food, soap and tequila to centuries of human communities, has a bright new future as a bioethanol producer.

Biofuels are one of those contentious issues that everyone loves to argue about, so as to procrastinate the task of actually doing something about our increased fuel consumption. They’re wonderful in concept (plants take up CO2 from the atmosphere and then provide a ‘natural’, ‘renewable’, non-fossilised fuel source), but come with a whole suite of problems and unanswered questions, just like every other ‘quick-fix’ solution we’ve come up with in the past (and haven’t learnt from).

The C Word

I don’t think I’ve ever heard so much coverage of a topic, over so many months, and still be so much in the dark about the details. I don’t even think some of the journalists who cover the carbon tax really know what’s going on.

The word ‘Tax’ is what sets people off – I think a lot of people had decided they didn’t like it from the very first mention, and then never bothered to change their mind. And now we’ve entered a world of confusion, contradictions, squirming politicians and general bewilderment that is hard to get out of.

Science is not a corporate ladder

I wrote this a few weeks ago in response to the frustration I (as a PhD student) was feeling with the current state of the scientific research “industry”, similar frustrations and experiences that a number of my PhD friends were also having, and a growing voice in the scientific literature echoing our feelings.

I submitted it to an international peer-reviewed journal, but it was not accepted – the editor thought that I had an interesting idea worthy of discussion, but it needed more “focus” and “would irritate people to no good end” if they published it. Fair enough…I won’t argue with that!

This idea is definitely “worthy of discussion”. Many people, both scientists and non-scientists, have expressed opinions along similar lines recently, and I doubt it is the last you will hear of it.

(I’ve made a few edits of the original to make it more readable – science prose, by requirement, can often be a bit aloof!).  

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Public conversations conducted in the peer-reviewed literature recently indicate that many of the eco/biological concepts and terminology developed over recent decades have become lost in a minefield of public misunderstanding and policy pandering – often to the detriment of the causes they were intended for.