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Contradiction of wildlife tourism – do not kill the wild natural world while cutting your emissions

The world has an unfortunate problem. In many parts of the world we are successfully reducing our carbon footprint dramatically, through cleaning our electricity generation among other improvements.

Unfortunately, in our current setup, often the only way to pay for conserving the wild places on our planet is by visiting them, and for most people, this requires long-distance flights.

Something we must avoid in more wealthy countries is to simply halt all tourism to wild places. If in order to cut a few tons of carbon from our personal emissions, we remove the reason to conserve a large rainforest in Africa or Asia, can we really blame the locals when it gets cut down? In theory, money does indeed get sent to some of these countries to pay for offsetting our emissions. Unfortunately this rarely reaches people on the ground.

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Holiday absence

Hello!

I have been away with my family, and for the time being this is a one man show. I am hoping that as restrictions on travel list, it might become a bigger enterprise – with your support. We have some wildlife destinations already listed but hope to greatly expand this.

Our holiday was in Devon in the south west of the UK, close to the river otter.

This river is famous in the UK as back in 2008 a family of beavers appeared. They became quite a popular attraction.

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Is bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies too energy intensive to be used?

Elon Musk has just announced that Tesla will no longer allow buyers to pay in bitcoin. Why is this relevant to a wildlife and environment blog?

Tesla is there to transition the world to sustainable transport, as a goal. of the roughly 4.1 trillion kwh of electricity used in the USA last year roughly 500 went on bitcoin (roughly 1 in 8) or 13%.

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Reintroducing Jaguars to the south west of the USA?

It might be a shock to many, but Jaguars were once native to the USA. What’s more despite humans biggest efforts, the eradication was not completely successful. The third largest big cat, after Tiger and Lion, was persecuted along with many other native fauna after Europeans started to settle in the USA.

A news report from the last decade, talking about what is thought to have been the last Arizona Jaguar
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Killer whale shows jumping high from the water is a natural behaviour

There is often an argument that Orca (or killer whales) should not be displayed in aquariums as they show unnatural behaviours. While doing trick after trick would not be seen, and in the wild they might roam tens or hundreds of thousands of square miles in a year, many of the behaviours are indeed something that is seen in the wild.

Perhaps the most likely place to see interesting behaviours is during a hunt, and that is indeed what was recently captured.

Orca hunting smaller dolphins in the sea of Cortex off the coast of Mexico

Orcas swim most oceans around the world. Increasingly, humans are recognizing that far from being one species, there is actually many which have not interbred for in some cases millions of years. Furthermore, many populations are geographically isolated rarely meeting up with other members.

However, this demonstrates that while there are a number of effective predators in the sea from dolphins to sharks and whales, the killer whale is usually the undisputed predator. As well as taking dolphins reasonably regularly, killer whales often target other big predators including great white sharks. Indeed, while it is never easy to be sure of the reason that a wild species changes its behaviour, it is thought that the disappearance of the south african great white shark is linked to more regular sightings of the Orca in South African waters during the second half of the year when they are thought to be in residence.

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Silvopasture

Silvopasture is the idea of integrating food crops that grow high such as orchards and grapevines, but allowing grazers to graze underneath on grass. Is also often known as Agriforestry

In theory many farm areas would be capable of producing large quantities of grape vines (or other fruit) without reducing the amount of sheep that they feed on their land.

Open woodland such as this grows grass as fast as meadows, so produces as much grazing for cattle, yet absorbs many tonnes of carbon dioxide per year.
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Agrovoltaics : what what is it and why are they interesting

There is often a concern that advances in efficiency and green technologies use more land and more resources, with these two processes that is not the case. 

Agrovoltaics involve putting solar panels above food crops. Food crops using a very small portion of the light that falls on them, and as such can often grow very effectively under solar panels so long as they don’t cut off too much of the light. Furthermore, while putting solar panels a metre or less of the ground is cheaper, these raised solar panels have a similar cost to roof based solar. 

A wide range of crops can be grown under solar panels

However there are also advantages for the the plants growing underneath. The amount of water evaporation is vastly lower, allowing more water hungry plants to grow well with less. The lower temperature also benefits many of the plant species.

Added to this of course is the ability for the farmer to sell megawatts of electricity each year. If enough farmers entered into this business and we invested in enough battery to store it for use in the evening and at night, we would eliminate the need for gas and coal powered electricity. Perhaps supporting rollout of Silvopasture could end the need for farmers to need additional finance from the government.

In the next article I will look at Silvopasture.

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Lab grown meat saw funding increase 6 fold during 2020

Studies over the last few years show that 80% of of people are open to eating meat grown in bioreactors.

Lab grown meat is still meat, it just does not need to be grown in the animal

Why is this good news? Well one of the important advances with this meat is that it is thought that it could be created with a similar carbon footprint to lettuce.

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