New Zealand—Aotearoa, as it is known to the indigenous Maori people—the Whanganui River is now a legal person. Photo By Aidan

In a land where corporations are considered people, it’s a bit of a leap to imagine nature attaining the same status. But as Brendan Kennedy reports for Cultural Survival Quarterly (December 2012), in New Zealand—Aotearoa, as it is known to the indigenous Maori people—the Whanganui River is now a legal person.

“Indigenous peoples around the world often struggle with governments that do not recognize their view of the natural environment,” writes Kennedy. Where the Maori strive to conserve and enhance, non-Maori typically seek to industrialize and maximize profit. Thus, indigenous worldviews often directly conflict with non-indigenous practices of property ownership. Awarding the river personhood status, then, is a significant victory for the Maori.

According to the new agreement, the river will have two guardians—one appointed by the Whanganui Iwi tribe and one by the British Crown—that promote the physical, ecological, spiritual, and cultural rights of the river.

Such an agreement has few precedents, however. While the news brings hope, Kennedy warns of the possibility that the river’s guardians might restrict Whanganui Iwi rights to the river with no room for recourse. Still, he calls the agreement cause for “cautious optimism as Indigenous Peoples continue to fight for the recognition of their views of the natural world.”

Here is another article about this river and topic: https://www.culturalsurvival.org/publications/cultural-survival-quarterly/i-am-river-and-river-me-implications-river-receiving

May 24, 2013

Dolphins gain unprecedented protection in India

India has officially recognized dolphins as non-human persons, whose rights to life and liberty must be respected. Dolphin parks that were being built across the country will instead be shut down.

India’s Ministry of Environment and Forests has advised state governments to ban dolphinariums and other commercial entertainment that involves the capture and confinement of cetacean species such as orcas and bottlenose dolphins. In a statement, the government said research had clearly established cetaceans are highly intelligent and sensitive, and that dolphins “should be seen as ‘non-human persons’ and as such should have their own specific rights.”

The move comes after weeks of protest against a dolphin park in the state of Kerala and several other marine mammal entertainment facilities which were to be built this year. Animal welfare advocates welcomed the decision.

“This opens up a whole new discourse of ethics in the animal protection movement in India,” said Puja Mitra from the Federation of Indian Animal Protection Organizations (FIAPO). Mitra is a leading voice in the Indian movement to end dolphin captivity.

Indian officials say it is morally unacceptable to exploit cetaceans in commercial entertainment

“The scientific evidence we provided during the campaign talked about cetacean intelligence and introduced the concept of non-human persons,” she said in an interview with DW.

Indiais the fourth country in the world to ban the capture and import of cetaceans for the purpose of commercial entertainment – along with Costa Rica, Hungary, and Chile.

Dolphins are persons, not performers

The movement to recognize whale and dolphins as individuals with self-awareness and a set of rights gained momentum three years ago in Helsinki, Finland when scientists and ethicists drafted a Declaration of Rights for Cetaceans. “We affirm that all cetaceans as persons have the right to life, liberty and well-being,” they wrote.

Dolphins are naturally playful and curious, which has made them popular with aqurium visitors

The signatories included leading marine scientist Lori Marino who produced evidence that cetaceans have large, complex brains especially in areas involved in communication and cognition. Her work has shown that dolphins have a level of self-awareness similar to that of human beings. Dolphins can recognize their own reflection, use tools and understand abstract concepts. They develop unique signature whistles allowing friends and family members to recognize them, similar to the way human beings use names.

“They share intimate, close bonds with their family groups. They have their own culture, their own hunting practices – even variations in the way they communicate,” said FIAPO’s Puja Mitra.

But it is precisely this ability to learn tricks and charm audiences that have made whales and dolphins a favorite in aquatic entertainment programs around the world.

Seaworld slaughter

Disposable personal income has increased in India and there is a growing market for entertainment. Dolphin park proposals were being considered in Delhi, Kochi and Mumbai.

India’s growing middle class is hungry for entertainment

“There’s nothing like having a few animals on display, particularly ones that are so sensitive and intelligent as these dolphins,” said Belinda Wright from the Wildlife Protection Society of India in an interview with DW. “It’s a good money making proposition.”

But audiences are usually oblivious to the documented suffering of these marine performers.

“The majority of dolphins and whales in captivity have been sourced through wild captures in Japan, in Taiji, in the Caribbean, in the Solomon Islands and parts of Russia. These captures are very violent,” Mitra explained.

“They drive groups of dolphins into shallow bay areas where young females whose bodies are unmarked and are thought to be suitable for display are removed. The rest are often slaughtered.”

Mitra argued that the experience of captivity is tantamount to torture. She explained that orcas and other dolphins navigate by using sonar signals, but in tanks, the reverberations bounce off the walls, causing them “immense distress”. She described dolphins banging their heads on the walls and orcas wearing away their teeth as they pull at bars and bite walls.

Tanks terminated

In response to the new ban, the Greater Cochin Development Authority (CGDA) told DW that it has withdrawn licenses for a dolphin park in the city of Kochi, where there have been massive animal rights demonstrations in recent months.

Will the ban on captive dolphin exploitation lead to more protection for other highly intelligent non-humans?

“It is illegal now,” said N. Venugopal, who heads the CGDA. “It is over. We will not allow it anymore.”

He said the government hadn’t lost money on the development but declined to comment on how much the dolphin park was worth.

Boost for Ganges River dolphin

It’s possible that India’s new ban on cetacean captivity will lead to renewed interest in protecting the country’s own Ganges River dolphin.

“I hope this will put some energy into India’s Action Plan for the Gangetic Dolphin, which is supposed to run until 2020,” said Belinda Wright from the Wildlife Protection Society of India. “But there’s been very little action.

She said the ban was a good first stop, but warned against excessive optimism. “I’m very proud that India has done this,” she said. “I’m not trying to be cynical but I have been a conservationist in India for four decades. One gets thrilled with the wording, but I don’t think it’s going to turn to the tables.”

“But dolphins for now are safe from dolphinariums, and that’s a good thing,” she added.

Betty just called to say that Lonesome George died on Sunday. We saw him in Galapagos Islands in 2005. Though he had lots of girl friends he never had any viable babies. His species is gone forever with his passing.

www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-18574279

The sign, below, reads:

“Many of the endangered populations of Galapagos tortoises have been brought back from the edge of extinction through our breeding, rearing and repatriation program. But others, like the Pinta Island tortoise, face a precarious future. Lonesome George, the last tortoise found on Pinta Island, is a sad reminder of the results of thoughtless exploitation by humans.”

It continues:

“In the 1800s whalers carried off thousands of Pinta tortoises for their “sweet meate”. Tortoises were also hunted for their oil. Oil hunters slaughtered the animals where they found them, leaving scenes of grim devastation.   (A picture of the slaughter on a sign at Galapagos.)  In the 1950s, goats* were introduced to Pinta; changing the island’s environment forever. In their wake, they left little food and no shelter for the Pinta tortoise, and destroyed their nesting sites.” 

And continues, below the center photo (with blue sky) on the sign:

“Alone and surrounded by devastated vegetation, Lonesome George spends his last days on Pinta (Island) before being moved to the Tortoise Rearing Center in 1972.”

And continues, to the right of Lonesome George’s big photo:

“The Search for a Suitable Mate – The search for any females on Pinta and among other captive tortoises in the world continues in the hopes of finding a mate for George. George lives with two females (who are) from Wolf Volcano on Isabela Island; they are considered his closest genetic relations. However, George, for unknown reasons, will not breed.”

It finishes, lower right of the sign:

“Can we save the Pinta Island Tortise? Scientists use blood samples from giant Galapagos tortoises and others found worldwide to study genetic variation. In the future, this information will be used to choose a close genetic match for Lonesome George. Less than one in several thousand attempts at cloning succeed. Since cloning George would be extremely costly and likely fail, it will only be considered when all other potions have been exhausted.”

*Introduced goats still ravage  the various islands. A goat was caught by one of our guides on one of the islands we visited. I watched it be killed (she was pregnant with twins), skinned, and roughly cleaned on the island. Back on the boat fresh goat curry was served for dinner that night. Tasty! Was that mutually enhancing?

from the New York Times

www.nytimes.com/2011/11/25/science/lynn-margulis-trailblazing-theorist-on-evolution-dies-at-73.html

Lynn Margulis, Evolution Theorist, Dies at 73
By BRUCE WEBER
Published: November 24, 2011

Lynn Margulis, a biologist whose work on the origin of cells helped transform the study of evolution, died on Tuesday at her home in Amherst, Mass. She was 73.

Paul Hosefos/The New York Times

Lynn Margulis, wearing her National Medal of Science Award.

She died five days after suffering a hemorrhagic stroke, said Dorion Sagan, a son she had with her first husband, the cosmologist Carl Sagan.

Dr. Margulis, who had the title of distinguished university professor of geosciences at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, since 1988, drew upon earlier, ridiculed ideas when she first promulgated her theory, in the late 1960s, that cells with nuclei, which are known as eukaryotes and include all the cells in the human body, evolved as a result of symbiotic relationships among bacteria.

The hypothesis was a direct challenge to the prevailing neo-Darwinist belief that the primary evolutionary mechanism was random mutation.

Rather, Dr. Margulis argued that a more important mechanism was symbiosis; that is, evolution is a function of organisms that are mutually beneficial growing together to become one and reproducing. The theory undermined significant precepts of the study of evolution, underscoring the idea that evolution began at the level of micro-organisms long before it would be visible at the level of species.

“She talked a lot about the importance of micro-organisms,” said her daughter, Jennifer Margulis. “She called herself a spokesperson for the microcosm.”

The manuscript in which Dr. Margulis first presented her findings was rejected by 15 journals before being published in 1967 by the Journal of Theoretical Biology. An expanded version, with additional evidence to support the theory — which was known as the serial endosymbiotic theory — became her first book, “Origin of Eukaryotic Cells.”

A revised version, “Symbiosis in Cell Evolution,” followed in 1981, and though it challenged the presumptions of many prominent scientists, it has since become accepted evolutionary doctrine.

“Evolutionists have been preoccupied with the history of animal life in the last 500 million years,” Dr. Margulis wrote in 1995. “But we now know that life itself evolved much earlier than that. The fossil record begins nearly 4,000 million years ago! Until the 1960s, scientists ignored fossil evidence for the evolution of life, because it was uninterpretable.

“I work in evolutionary biology, but with cells and micro-organisms. Richard Dawkins, John Maynard Smith, George Williams, Richard Lewontin, Niles Eldredge and Stephen Jay Gould all come out of the zoological tradition, which suggests to me that, in the words of our colleague Simon Robson, they deal with a data set some three billion years out of date.”

Lynn Petra Alexander was born on March 5, 1938, in Chicago, where she grew up in a tough neighborhood on the South Side. Her father was a lawyer and a businessman. Precocious, she graduated at 18 from the University of Chicago, where she met Dr. Sagan as they passed each other on a stairway.

She earned a master’s degree in genetics and zoology from the University of Wisconsin and a Ph.D. in genetics from the University of California, Berkeley. Before joining the faculty at Massachusetts, she taught for 22 years at Boston University.

Dr. Margulis was also known, somewhat controversially, as a collaborator with and supporter of James E. Lovelock, whose Gaia theory states that Earth itself — its atmosphere, the geology and the organisms that inhabit it — is a self-regulating system, maintaining the conditions that allow its perpetuation. In other words, it is something of a living organism in and of itself.

Dr. Margulis’s marriage to Dr. Sagan ended in divorce, as did a marriage to Thomas N. Margulis, a chemist. Dr. Sagan died in 1996.

In addition to her daughter and her son Dorion, a science writer with whom she sometimes collaborated, she is survived by two other sons, Jeremy Sagan and Zachary Margulis-Ohnuma; three sisters, Joan Glashow, Sharon Kleitman and Diane Alexander; two half-brothers, Robert and Mark Alexander; a half-sister, Sara Alexander; and nine grandchildren.

“More than 99.99 percent of the species that have ever existed have become extinct,” Dr. Margulis and Dorion Sagan wrote in “Microcosmos,” a 1986 book that traced, in readable language, the history of evolution over four billion years, “but the planetary patina, with its army of cells, has continued for more than three billion years. And the basis of the patina, past, present and future, is the microcosm — trillions of communicating, evolving microbes.”

From Earth Science Picture of the Day at epod.usra.edu/blog/2011/07/mycorrhizal-fungi.html for July 24, 2011.

(EPOD is a service of NASA’s Earth Science Division and the EOS Project Science Office (at Goddard Space Flight Center) and the Universities Space Research Association.)

Photographer: Phil Lachman
Summary Author: Phil Lachman

The photo above shows a lovely group of mushrooms nestled against the trunk of a eucalyptus tree. The association between the fungi and the tree however is no accident. This is a mutualistic relationship, where the two species assist each other, and in fact probably would be poorer without each other. Mutualism is any relationship between two species of organisms that benefits both species. Up to a quarter of the mushrooms you see while walking through the woods actually make their living through a mutualistic relationship with the trees in the forest. Remember of course that the mushroom is just the reproductive structure of a far more extensive organism consisting of a highly intertwined mass of fine white threads called a mycelium.

The word mycorrhiza is derived from the Classical Greek words for “mushroom” and “root.” In a mycorrhizal association, the fungal hyphae of an underground mycelium are in contact with plant roots but without the fungus parasitizing the plant. While it’s clear that the majority of plants form mycorrhizas, the exact percentage is uncertain, but it’s likely to lie somewhere between 80 and 90 percent. When the fungus’ mycelium envelopes the roots of the tree the effect is to greatly increase the soil area covered by the tree’s root system. This essentially extends the plant’s reach to water and nutrients, allowing it to utilize more of the soil’s resources. This mutualistic association provides the fungus with a relatively constant and direct access to carbohydrates, such as glucose and sucrose, supplied by the plant. In return the plant gains the benefits of the mycelium’s higher absorptive capacity for water and mineral nutrients (due to comparatively large surface area of mycelium-to-root ratio), thus improving the plant’s mineral absorption capabilities. Photo taken on May 7, 2011.

Lester R. Davis State Forest

Posted: 16 Feb 2011 12:01 AM PST