Rhino horn: a precious, marketable commodity?

In an article from Sind Today, it says that (Indian) rhino horn is more expensive than gold for the first time in a decade.

The present prices, according to Sind Today, are:

• Indian rhino horn: $65.46 per gram
• gold: $44.36 per gram

What is really shocking, though, is the revelation that Communist politicians in Vietnam actually support rhino poaching! I had always assumed that the wealth of politicians would eliminate the incentives provided by poverty to poach rhinos - but apparently this is not the case even though Vietnam's economy has recovered from 1980s hyperinflation.

Although political support for poaching of rhinos is not in my opinion as criminal as Australia's politicians support for wasteful freeways to appease a dictatorial road lobby, it is still something which the international community should take seriously. Even if sanctions against Vietnam are not justified, people should be wary of buying Vietnamese goods or visiting the country.

A surprising revelation about tiger and giant panda parts

Although my main focus in studying endangered species has always been the poaching of rhinos for their horn, I have long known that trading in tiger parts has been just as much a threat to tigers as rhino horn is to rhinos. However, tiger bone is much less expensive than rhino horn, costing as little as 38¢ per gram.

This cheapness has a mixed impact:

• on one hand it discourages sellers from killing tigers
• on the other hand it gives less incentive and money to conserve them

I discovered surprising news today searching for information of the current rhino poaching epidemic: that China alone - not including Taiwan or Hong Kong - is resposnible for over 90 percent of trade in tiger bone and skins.

What this article reveals much mroe surprisingly, and which the average person interested in wildlife conservation would never have been told, is that for a time giant panda parts were sold as regularly as tiger parts for use in traditional Chinese medicine. However, under Deng Xiaoping in the 1980s, the Chinese government cracked down on panda poachers to the point of even executing people for poaching giant pandas. It says that, despite Deng's crackdown, lack of habitat has prevented the giant panda from recovering.

However, the article shows that orders of magnitude more tigers could be supported in the available habitat without numbers kept very low by poaching. It also says that tigers are just as endangered as even Asiatic rhinos as a result of such poaching.

What is really interesting and even more surprising in this context is that the article argues that tiger farming is likely to make the problem worse. This is opposed to the argument of Robert P. Murphy in The Politically Incorrect Guide to Capitalism, where he says that if tigers were completely privatised and deregulated incentive to conserve them would appear. Private owners would - and Murphy does not exclue violent means - stop poaching because they would be interested in long-term financial gain from tigers. This quest for long term financial gain would stop tigers becoming extinct and allow them to breed sufficiently to reach something approaching their carrying capacity. People liek Hans Hoppe argue that private ownership without any government regulation will eliminate incentives to waste resources. However, the fact that animals like the passenger pigeon became extinct before the first Progressive wave makes one question the stricted interpretation of what Hoppe says.

The misnamed "Nanny State" should be called "Daddy State"

One of the most typical criticisms of Europe by the American Right is that Europe's big governments constitute a "nanny state" that serves to cause:

1. regulation of every aspect of people's lives, including trivial matters like obesity of parents or the beliefs of children
2. lack of responsibility
3. dependence of the elderly on the young
4. inability to innovate due to a "sedating cocoon" protecting people
5. people being told what they can and cannot think, in order to exclude traditional values of Western Civilisation regarding sexuality, marriage, traditional culture and the unregulated market
6. a point where it is impossible for people to "live free" because of government regulation and the State gives people exactly what they want - at the cost of responsibility and commitment to the point of total self-interest

Although I am aware that an unrestricted free market can have very undesirable ecological effects in fragile environments like Australia and sub-Zambezian Africa and of itself encourage things like mass migration (and I presume mass tourism) often criticised by conservatives, I have long had sympathy for direct action rather than relying on government to deal with problems and so can be very suspicious of the situation Steyn says Europe is in.

There is one issue here I have long been wanting to speak about, that being the misuse by Steyn of the terminology "nanny state". Steyn and too many other conservatives often speak wrongly of "feminising the males". Whilst on the surface the low levels of violence and conflict in European cultures can give an impression of a gentle, compassionate society, Arthur Brooks completely annihilates that idea with his research in Who Really Cares, showing that Europe is an extremely tough society in which compassion is more or less viewed as a sin. In the process he confirms a long held suspicion of mine that "secularisation" and "masculinisation" are synonyms for one process. It is in fact the hatred of passive acceptance and helping others voluntarily that makes Europeans unwilling to accept even a small pruning of from their huge welfare states. Politicians in nations like Sweden would know there is the potential for enormous bloodshed if they carried out policies recommended by the likes of Hans Hoppe or Thomas Woods. Following upon Europe's working-class radicalism between the earliest Industrial Revolution, governments have been forced to develop generous welfare states even where, as in Italy and Spain, they were long resistant to secularisation and their policies created entirely false impressions of strongly Catholic and traditional cultures.

The very essence of the welfare state is not gentle and soft, but tough, even manly. It should thus not be called a "Nanny State" but a "Daddy State", to show the reality of a culture where being gentle and nurturing is effectively viewed as sinful.

The term "nanny state" can be far more accurately used to describe the traditional Australian state with its limited subsidies to help people in the dire trouble that Australia's erratic climate and rivers cause. A "nanny state" would never interfere in the personal affairs of its citizens as most European states (and those of Canada and New Zealand) do today. It would allow for general freedom in education, religion and development, quite unlike the "Daddy States" of Europe today. One can see such a true "Nanny State" in Australia's combination of unsubsidised farming with drought subsidies that are of themselves destructive because they stop farmers from suing ecologically vandalous car and fossil fuel corporations for the changes they have caused to our climate.

It really is time people see that even the intention of the big governments of Europe, Canada and New Zealand is in no way gentleness but responding to working-class (and student) militancy that is the opposite of the gentle marianismo that is the essential value preached by the Right. A writer who uses mistaken terminology should be properly criticised.

Koalas dying out, but no hard solution

According to this article, oddly published by a newspaper in Iran, koala numbers have fallen by as much as fifty percent since 2003. The article calls for their listing as an endangered species.

Whilst the article admits climate change is the problem, it simply fails to deal with discussion of how Australia must be at the very least punished by a total ban on trade unless its greenhouse emissions are reduced to a respectable level of around one percent the per capita world average. Alternatively, given Iran's oil resources, it could consider whether it is fair, owing to the high climate sensitivity of Australia's water resources and its unique flora and fauna, that oil be sold to Australia at greatly higher prices than it is to Europe or North America or New Zealand.

Nor does it discuss - a little strangely given Iran has itself had to deal with sanctions - whether Australia's appalling greenhouse emissions justify something like trade sanctions (they certainly do). Nor does it consider that the majority of Australians have much less incentive to preserve koalas than Europeans or North Americans do the preserve "iconic" species.

Nor does it discuss how paleoclimate data collected no later than 2004 show that even Tasmania will be within the descending limb of the Hadley circulation as soon as 2020 under present climate trends, so that even the dry schlerophyll forests in which koalas live will die out.

In such a scene of ignorance, the koala will go extinct. What Tim Flannery showed in The Future Eaters about how koalas are adopted to a food source that is reasonably typical of most plants in the three hundred and thirty million years since the land first became vegetated will be lost forever if they die out. This is vital knowledge that we must fight the corporate polluters for the zero-emissions Australia that should have been the first thing demanded by any climate change conference.

Explaining why Australia has not produced scientific or artistic genius

Ever since I began to study Australia culture, I have always been curious about the lock of internationally known Australian scientists and artists. Though I first read about this in an EG article back in 1996, it is only recently with the absorption of more serious writing on the topic that this absence becomes so obvious.

Having read a good deal about how unique the achievements of Western Civilisation are, I have wondered even more why Australia has produced so few important artists and scientists (or for that matter social activists or economists). If what is said by people like Anthony Esolen and Charles Murray is at all correct, one might expect Australia to have been a hotbed of creativity in science and the arts. In fact, Australia has produced far fewer important figures than many European nations with lesser populations, and continues to fail to produce really important artists or scientists.

If one looks through the factors Murray says prevent creativity in science and the arts, the only one that might rule out Australia is low population density. Murray does give some suggestion that even urban Australia was and remains much too sparsely populated to develop cities in which intellectual creativity can flourish. His argument could also be applied to White South Africa, the American South and Mountain West, and even to Canada and New Zealand.

He does little to explain why extremely high population densities are so important a prerequisite, however. More than that, Murray cannot contradict my explanation in terms of Australia's extreme resource abundance stifling creative thinking through eliminating incentives to develop new technologies even with a metaphysical basis that is very effective at producing creativity. It also explains why even as people are drawn by Australia's abundant housing space and slow pace of life, how Australia fails to greatly increase the number of awards it wins.

The fact that the only exception to this rule lies in sporting talent, where with the like of Bradman, Clarrie Grimmett and in more recent times the likes of Peter Sterling Australia has long had a prominence far above its population size is itself revealing. Because sport originated as a form of recreation, the mass of Australians tended to have more time for it than people in other nations. The result seems to be an extraordinary number of talented sportsmen relative to popualtion size.