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[Sorry I've been away from the board for a bit--that time of year for this particular teacher]
Looking back at my childhood, in light of the class, I think I have found a source for a lot of my disconnection with nature. I’m not saying that this is the sole source, but that humanism pervades our childhood entertainment even, blurring the line between the human and nonhuman animal. How, then, can we truly see the animal for what it is worth?
Now, I am not going to avoid these. In fact, my little boy will watch these shows and see these images. I just find it interesting how we use these nonhuman animals in human ways as a way of educating.
I was doing some research for our upcoming projects and ran along this site. It’s pretty weird and amazing stuff and very relevant to our discussions. Check out some of the other links on the page too — maybe it would help with research?
I was so excited about this, I just had to share! I have been passionate about composting and recycling since my Heifer days (lol, last summer, but I learned a lot!) I think statistics show that about 1/3 of the waste in landfills is food products and another 1/3 is recyclable. Can you imagine how fabulous this would be if it caught on in all major cities?!!!
http://www.cnn.com/2009/TECH/04/17/gsif.atlanta.zero.waste.zone/index.html
Seems that CNN is capable of producing post-natural literature as well.
http://www.cnn.com/2009/POLITICS/04/17/king.sotu.chesapeake/index.html
Did anybody else notice that the fisherman did not cite overfishing as a cause for the decline?
Was the bay really all that great in 1970?
What do you think?
Ok, yes, I do get much of my news from Stephen Colbert. What can I say, I think he’s fabulous 
Anyway, I saw this the other day and have been thinking about it ever since…and then, this week’s book just so happened to deal with nukes, so here it is! This is a video clip of Queen Noor of Jordan speaking on the Colbert Report about her new global nuclear disarmaments movement called Global Zero.
http://www.colbertnation.com/the-colbert-report-videos/224012/april-07-2009/h-m–queen-noor
Over 23,000 nuclear warheads in 9 countries and 96% of those are in Russia and the U.S. and 40 other countries have or will soon have nuclear capabilities. This movement is calling for total global nuclear disarmament (brief summation of the video).
Here is a link to the Global Zero website. It explains what they are for, who is supporting it, and even allows you to add your name to the declaration.
Now, two questions:
1. Is it possible?
2. What happens to all the leftovers? How and where do we dispose of these weapons and the chemicals/radiation, etc. they are composed of? Will we create a toxic environment while striving for peace?
There is no known source for Uranium around Punjab, yet many people are becoming sick from uranium. I wonder why this wasn’t on CNN (as far as I could tell)? I will be very interested to learn where the source of uranium is coming from. Are there any bomb testing sites near there maybe? It’ s interesting to see how the two following sources differ in their reactions.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/7979022.stm
http://www.punjabnewsline.com/content/view/15998/38/
I was very excited to open this week’s book, the Refuge, and find that all the chapters have been named after birds. Birding is one of my favorite activities and the opening chapter of the book did not disappoint me in describing this passion. I thought I would share some visuals of these birds Williams names each chapters for. I retrieved all of these pictures from www.enature.com. It is an excellent website for species identification. It also includes the calls for each of these birds if you would enjoy hearing them as well.
I also wanted to address a quote from page 8, “There are those birds you gauge your life by.” This is something I absolutely believe, especially since I have lived here in the Arkansas River Valley. Here we are blessed with being right in the center of the Mississippi Flyway. This is a path followed by countless bird species as they make their trek North and South each year. Each spring I await the day when I see the first of these migratory birds fly into our area. One such bird is the scissor-tail flycatcher. This creature is truly amazing. If you have never noticed them flying near the lake (and ocassionally in the Walmart parking lots) please take the time to notice and enjoy one of our world’s marvels. I saw my first scissor tail for this spring just last week. I have included a couple pictures of the scissor-tail flycatcher as well.
A final note: many of the birds Williams references in her book as visitors and residents in Utah are also present here in Arkansas, including: barn swallows (common), snowy egrets (common), peregrine falcon (rare), california gulls (rare), snow bunting (rare), white pelicans (annual visitors on Lake Dardanelle), killdeer (common), great-horned owl (common, often referred to locally as a “hoot owl”), roadrunner (common).
Enjoy!
Okay here’s another one because the subject is interesting to me. As a person who used to raise and personally kill livestock for food, I think this subject is worth exploring a little. I like to eat meat but I don’t like having to kill for it. I wonder just how many vegans would go for this in the end. Do you think there are very many animal rights objections to this? What about using embryonic stem cells from animals? Would that cause as much argument as human embryonic cell research does? Alright, enough questions…here’s the article.
The Future of Food: The No-kill Carnivore
Wired.com reports: Test tubes have already yielded a meat slurry that, with the proper seasonings, will taste like a Chicken McNugget.
In this two-sided look at the future of food, Portfolio.com explores how GM farm animals can avoid the Frankenfood label; while Wired.com peeks into the lab to find seed cells that grow into Chicken McNuggets. Read More
In a 1932 essay about the future, Winston Churchill predicted: “Fifty years hence we shall escape the absurdity of growing a whole chicken in order to eat the breast or wing by growing these parts separately under a suitable medium.” He was wildly optimistic about the date, but basically correct about everything else.
In 2000, scientists working on a NASA-funded project coaxed extracted fish cells to grow into something that resembled fish fillets in vitro. NASA was looking for ways to feed a crew during an extended space expedition, but as it turns out it’s not just astronauts who are interested in the technology. There are also vegetarians. So-called “vegetarian meat” technology could someday supply animal flesh to the table without the messy business of actually slaughtering them. Last year PETA offered $1 million to the first scientist who brings cultured chicken meat to the market.
“Once you grow meat in a lab, you’re no longer talking about individuals with interest, you’re talking about a slab of flesh no more sentient than tofu,” PETA spokesman Bruce Friedrich said. “This would be the best thing for vegetarians since sliced bread.”
Environmentalists and the health-conscious may also be drawn to the technology. Lab-grown animal tissue doesn’t emit greenhouse gases in the way a belching cow does. “And a hamburger produced in vitro can have the fatty acid composition of salmon,” said Jason Matheny, director of New Harvest, a five-year-old nonprofit organization devoted to promoting cultured meat and funding further research.
The basic technique behind in vitro meats is relatively straightforward. Stem cells are suspended on plastic or silicon sheets and bathed in a nutrient-rich soup; as they grow, the material is stretched to mimic the flexing that gives in vitro meat its texture. The result is creamy in color with a texture that falls somewhere between Jell-O and SPAM.
Before the meat can move from petri dish to the dinner plate, however, there’s much that must still be learned. Firstly, researchers are still unsure which type of starter cell will prove most efficient: myoblasts that already form muscle tissues but have limited ability to proliferate, or embryonic stem cells that multiply abundantly but must be nudged into producing muscle.
Then there’s the question of cost, which boils down to the nutritive broth. The NASA study employed fetal bovine serum, which aside from being frowned upon by PETA members, is also highly expensive. There are vegetarian alternatives, but they are similarly costly. A study last year by the In Vitro Meat Consortium surveyed all the available broths and concluded that producing cultured meat, even after it’s ramped up to an industrial scale, would be nearly twice as expensive as unsubsidized chicken. One option is using genetically engineered E. coli bacteria to produce the protein needed to make the broth.
Once the manufacturing issues are sorted out, there are still the questions of texture and taste. Independent of other advances, in vitro technology will never produce filet mignon or a pork chop. The mouth feel in traditional cuts has as much to do with intermixed blood vessels and fat, as the muscle itself. Adding vascular structures to engineered tissue is certainly a goal of scientists, particularly among medical researchers looking to grow transplant organs, but it’s a long way away.
As for taste? Officially, researchers can’t sample any food that hasn’t been OK’d by regulators, but off-the-record it’s clear some have taken a nibble and didn’t exactly rush back for seconds. Yet bland taste and mushy mouth feel may not matter. Matheny notes that the slurry that becomes chicken nuggets doesn’t taste very good either. But give the technology five to 10 years, he says, and in vitro meats will reach the supermarket. Vegetarian meats will be flavored and molded into shapes that resemble today’s McNuggets, ground beef, and—in a form that echoes cultured meat’s test-tube origins —the hot dog.
I found this article on the University of Maryland website. I saw that episode too! I think there is more real news on Comedy Central than on CNN…
Maybe they will just become some sort of show/ pleasure animal much like the horse has become.
http://www.newsdesk.umd.edu/scitech/release.cfm?ArticleID=1098
Paper Says Edible Meat Can be Grown in a Lab on Industrial Scale Experiments for NASA space missions have shown that small amounts of edible meat can be created in a lab. But the technology that could grow chicken nuggets without the chicken, on a large scale, may not be just a science fiction fantasy. In a paper in the June 29 issue of Tissue Engineering, a team of scientists, including University of Maryland doctoral student Jason Matheny, propose two new techniques of tissue engineering that may one day lead to affordable production of in vitro – lab grown — meat for human consumption. It is the first peer-reviewed discussion of the prospects for industrial production of cultured meat. “There would be a lot of benefits from cultured meat,” says Matheny, who studies agricultural economics and public health. “For one thing, you could control the nutrients. For example, most meats are high in the fatty acid Omega 6, which can cause high cholesterol and other health problems. With in vitro meat, you could replace that with Omega 3, which is a healthy fat. “Cultured meat could also reduce the pollution that results from raising livestock, and you wouldn’t need the drugs that are used on animals raised for meat.” Prime Without the Rib The idea of culturing meat is to create an edible product that tastes like cuts of beef, poultry, pork, lamb or fish and has the nutrients and texture of meat. Scientists know that a single muscle cell from a cow or chicken can be isolated and divided into thousands of new muscle cells. Experiments with fish tissue have created small amounts of in vitro meat in NASA experiments researching potential food products for long-term space travel, where storage is a problem. “But that was a single experiment and was geared toward a special situation – space travel,” says Matheny. “We need a different approach for large scale production.” Matheny’s team developed ideas for two techniques that have potential for large scale meat production. One is to grow the cells in large flat sheets on thin membranes. The sheets of meat would be grown and stretched, then removed from the membranes and stacked on top of one another to increase thickness. The other method would be to grow the muscle cells on small three-dimensional beads that stretch with small changes in temperature. The mature cells could then be harvested and turned into a processed meat, like nuggets or hamburgers. Treadmill Meat To grow meat on a large scale, cells from several different kinds of tissue, including muscle and fat, would be needed to give the meat the texture to appeal to the human palate. “The challenge is getting the texture right,” says Matheny. “We have to figure out how to ‘exercise’ the muscle cells. For the right texture, you have to stretch the tissue, like a live animal would.” Where’s the Beef? And, the authors agree, it might take work to convince consumers to eat cultured muscle meat, a product not yet associated with being produced artificially. “On the other hand, cultured meat could appeal to people concerned about food safety, the environment, and animal welfare, and people who want to tailor food to their individual tastes,” says Matheny. The paper even suggests that meat makers may one day sit next to bread makers on the kitchen counter. “The benefits could be enormous,” Matheny says. “The demand for meat is increasing world wide — China ‘s meat demand is doubling every ten years. Poultry consumption in India has doubled in the last five years. “With a single cell, you could theoretically produce the world’s annual meat supply. And you could do it in a way that’s better for the environment and human health. In the long term, this is a very feasible idea.” Matheny saw so many advantages in the idea that he joined several other scientists in starting a nonprofit, New Harvest, to advance the technology. One of these scientists, Henk Haagsman, Professor of Meat Science at Utrecht University, received a grant from the Dutch government to produce cultured meat, as part of a national initiative to reduce the environmental impact of food production. Other authors of the paper are Pieter Edelman of Wageningen University , Netherlands ; Douglas McFarland, South Dakota State University ; and Vladimir Mironov, Medical University of South Carolina. # Read the Tissue Engineering paper at http://www.liebertpub.com/publication.aspx?pub_id=56. For more information on cultured meat, see the New Harvest website, http://www.new-harvest.org .
