It’s prairie dog deadline day and that means PANIC! And no Whitworth blogging (crowd cheers). But here’s something to read before — a story from last week that somehow escaped mention on the blog. It’s important, because it shows how the plants are scheming against us. They’re also scheming against tits*. From the BBC:
A plant has killed and “eaten” a great tit at a garden nursery in Somerset. Nurseryman Nigel Hewitt-Cooper, from West Pennard, was inspecting his tropical garden when he discovered one of his pitcher plants had trapped the bird. He said he was “absolutely staggered” to find it had caught the creature. It is believed to be only the second time such a carnivorous plant has been documented eating a bird anywhere in the world.
*Tee hee hee hee hee!
And, uh, more importantly and totally unrelated, here’s a frightening story you should read in The Guardian to be informed about critical problems with fish stock management. Long excerpt:
Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish and you feed him for a year, after which no one will ever eat fish again. Almost everywhere fish stocks are collapsing through catastrophic mismanagement. But no one in the rich world has managed them as badly as the European Union.
So when the EU tells Iceland and the Faroes that they should engage in”responsible, modern fisheries management”, it’s like being lectured by Attila the Hun on human rights. They could be forgiven for telling us to sod off until we’ve cleaned up our own mess. Unfortunately, this is just what they’ve done, with catastrophic results.
A feeding frenzy is taking place in their territorial waters, as they rip into the North Atlantic’s last great stock: mackerel. As the seas have warmed, the fish have moved north. When they arrived in Icelandic and Faroese waters, those nations argued that their mackerel fishing agreement with Norway and the EU should be changed to allow them to catch more. Norway and the EU refused, so Iceland and the Faroes tore the agreement up and each awarded themselves a unilateral quota of 150,000 tonnes. As a result, the north-east Atlantic mackerel catch has risen almost 50%, and is now well beyond the replacement rate. If the mackerel go, so do the many links of the food chain which depend on them.
George Monbiot’s article is scary but we gotta keep up with this stuff. Especially since we live in a country where our government does bad stuff like fire 700 Environment Canada workers. Politicians are nightmarishly bad at listening to scientists, they seem to deliberately deprive themselves of access to information and that’s gotta change. (Actually, it doesn’t gotta do nuttin’ but there will be awful consequences.)
And now I must dive into copy like it’s a freshly-raked pile of leaves. I have headlines to write and typos to add!
