Who is responsible for oceanic pollution

The end of this financial year has seen all the major chain supermarkets phase out single-use plastic bags, in an effort to deal with the problem their ingestion poses to extremely long-lived marine mammals and birds like whales and albatrosses.

Most species of whale and albatross are “Endangered” and many are “Critically Endangered” or even “Possibly Extinct”

In reality, I have taken the change with a grain of salt – in our home, plastic bags invariably have a life cycle of being used as shopping bags and ending either when they rupture. Rupture ultimately happens even to the less fragile cloth bags we use for major shopping trips to Barkly Square, but it can happen extremely easily to bags not designed for heavy items like milk, as I discovered a week ago when shopping for coffee in Balaclava. All that had changed it that we have to pay fifteen cents for a bag every time we shop, or take a used plastic bag for small shaping trips.

This morning, however, I have read a list compiled from the article ‘Plastic Waste Inputs from Land into Ocean’ that had been published in the journal Science three years ago. Although it is undeniable Australia is the planet’s worst offender regarding greenhouse gas emissions, at least when one factors in per capita and indirect emissions, it does not rank amongst the top twenty nations in ocean pollution despite its large coastal area:

As we can see, Australia does not rank amongst the top twenty nations in terms of plastic waste emissions into the ocean. Almost all the actual top twenty are Tropical World nations where waste is mismanaged. Only South Africa is a comparable Unenriched World nation, and even it does not mismanage so large a proportion of its waste. However, alongside its high total greenhouse gas emissions (higher than any single EU nation), South Africa’s figure for a nation which borders on large areas of cold nutrient-rich sea containing many endangered marine mammals and birds suggests it bears considerable responsibility for whale, albatross and penguin declines.

It is untenable that South Africa and the mineral-rich Middle Eastern states were missing from the Kyōtō Protocol in 1996 – their per capita emissions and even total emissions were and are much higher than many EU nations who were part of that botched treaty. Their absence is already affecting the Earth’s climate, by spreading the Hadley cell at such a rate that – according to the Sydney Morning Herald’s ‘“Time bomb”: Tropics expansion nudges cyclone formation into new areas’ – in 2090 Perth is likely to possess the climate Onslow did before the expansion began five decades ago. Matt Walsh and J.R. Jambeck show that the globe’s ignorance of and inability to rein in the pollution produced by these powerful states – which began not with Kyōtō but with apartheid in the 1950s and the energy crisis of the 1970s – is costing all of us.

Missing the reality of climate change

This January, Care2Causes published a list of the ‘8 Top Species Threatened by Climate Change’ which it reprinted a few days ago.

 The list comprised:

1. Bearded Seal (Erignathus barbatus)
2. Bees (Apoidea)
3. Waved Albatross (Phoebastria irrorata)
4. Baltimore Oriole (Icterus galbula)
5. Northern Hairy-Nosed Wombat (Lasiorhinus krefftii)
6. Polar Bear (Ursus maritimus)
7. Acropora cervicornis (coral species)
8. American Pika (Ochotona princeps)

Whilst this list does include many species threatened by Australian road building and land clearing, it has much too little focus on the Mediterranean-climate biomes of the Cape, Southwestern Australia and Central Chile that are the true locus of runaway climate change today. The three species of tingle (uniquely buttressed eucalypts), along with the Noisy Scrub-bird and Western Bristlebird (two species on whose protection large amounts of money have been spent) are at extreme risk from shifts of winter storm tracks in the Southern Hemisphere. So too are the unique fynbos and renosterveld of the Cape region, and many species of Mediterranean Chile that cannot easily move through relatively dense populations to escape to more nearly analogous climates to the south.

One problem that these regions – especially southern Australia and central Chile – face is that the lack the iconic large species found in Africa and most of the northern hemisphere. The giant karri and tingle forests – whilst a noted attraction – are simply much too localised to be of significant use in protecting what must rank as the globe’s most urgent conservation priority and the region with the worst environmental policies anywhere in the globe. The lack of megafauna means there exists no incentive to preserve the most ancient species on the planet, and thus land clearing and road building in southern Australia are free to devastate the atmosphere until some country abroad says “enough” – which seems only a faint possibility even today.

European toad versus cane toad: a study in contrasting research

Rivalled by only the rabbit and red fox as worst and most dangerous introduced species in Australia is the cane toad (Rhinella marina; historically and familiarly Bufo marinus).

Adult female cane toad with human hand for comparison

The toad is absolutely lethal to the unique marsupials of the genus Dasyurus (quolls) which have evolved for 150,000,000 years with zero exposure to toad toxins, and demonstrably cannot coexist with bufonids anywhere.  This is seen in the fact that toad invasion has throughout the monsoonal tropics caused 97 percent declines in Northern Quoll (Dasyurus hallucatus) populations within a couple of years without any later recoveries. Bufonids also extremely dangerous to a number of predatory reptiles, such as goannas (Varanus) and elapid snakes, though unlike quolls these species can undergo behavioral or morphological changes to permit them to avoid eating toads.

Northern Quoll (Dasyurus hallucatus) – went from “Least Concern” to Endangered in a decade due to the spread of cane toads

It is well known that the cane toad was introduced into Australia to control a number of species of native “cane beetles” that were killing sugarcane by feeding on the plant’s sweet roots. It is also well known that, besides extirpating quolls and goannas, the cane toad did not reduce the numbers of cane beetles. In fact, the year 1946 saw the worst outbreak on record although toads had been released a decade beforehand!

However, it is almost unknown that at the very time the cane toad was released into Queensland, the CSIR was experimenting with the European Common Toad (then Bufo vulgaris; now Bufo bufo) as a pest control agent for Oncoptera grass grubs that were eating pastures in southern Australia. Proposals to import Bufo vulgaris (as I will call it for the rest of this post) and also the natterjack toad Bufo calamita date back to Western Australia in 1897. They were never executed in the first third of the twentieth century, but with increasing pest problems in the 1930s, the CSIR imported several specimens of Bufo vulgaris for a thorough test as a biological control agent against various Oncoptera. The CSIR found that Bufo vulgaris devoured all stages of Oncoptera (except, perhaps, the eggs) but that it could not dig down to reach them in their burrows. Consequently, the CSIR did not release Bufo vulgaris into southern Australia.

European common toad (Bufo vulgaris; now Bufo bufo)

If Bufo vulgaris (or the natterjack toad) had been released, it would have been likely more disastrous than the cane toad. This is because those few Australian species able to handle toad poison are almost all (Podargus frogmouths being a possible exception) immigrants from west of Wallacea – a group of islands with neither toads nor those predators (e.g. quolls) most affected by bufonid poison. Such species stand less likely to migrate into the Eyrean and Bassian faunal regions of central and southern Australia.

Eastern Quoll (Dasyurus viverrinus) now extinct on the mainland due to cane toads, and “Endangered” even in toad-free Tasmania due to rapid anthropogenic climate change

Were either Bufo vulgaris or the natterjack released it is practically certain that the spotted-tailed quoll (Dasyurus maculatus) and eastern quoll (Dasyurus viverrinus) would have been extirpated extremely quickly except – perhaps – from small islands where the toads might not have been released. Most likely those two species would have gone “Extinct” before the middle 1970s when the first studies of the cane toad’s impact on native fauna was published by Mick Archer and snake specialist Jeanette Covacevich. Even the Western Quoll (Dasyurus geoffroii) could quite possibly have been extirpated by toads before 1974 – although the drastic (87 percent around Perth) enhanced greenhouse gases decline in streamflow over southwestern Australia since then might ironically have protected it from introduced Bufo vulgaris. I have also imagined that poison in Bufo vulgaris eggs and/or tadpoles would have been a threat to the iconic platypus (Ornithorhynchus anatinus) which hunts purely by touch and possesses as little exposure in its evolution to toad toxins as Dasyurus.

Spotted-tailed quoll Dasyurus maculatus – the largest Dasyurus. The CSIR’s prudence in not releasing Bufo vulgaris has so far saved this species from either extinction or being “Critically Endangered” and confined to small islands

In contrast to the CSIR’s serious study of Bufo vulgaris – although it quite naturally failed to test the toad’s toxicity toward those species probably saved thereby – Bufo marinus was released into Queensland with absolutely zero testing on the cane beetles it was supposed to control! Rather, the release of Bufo marinus was done as an act of faith that it would eat the beetles consuming sugar cane – a method used to sell toads to farmers and gardeners for several centuries before 1935.

Belief in the magical power of toads to control pests was dogma among the globe’s closely-knit sugar growing fraternity in the 1930s. It is highly plausible that this fraternity feared science for the same reason that large landowners in Catholic Europe did – that it would undermine their political power by providing justification for wealth redistribution from them. While the large landowners of Catholic Europe turned to stigmata stories and Marian apparitions as their means of countering class war, sugar planters held firmly onto beliefs about certain predators as effective pest control agents whether they worked or not. Thus, when the release of Bufo marinus in Puerto Rico coincided with reduced grub density and Raquel Dexter’s dissections showed Bufo marinus to eat beetles, it became dogma among the global sugar fraternity that toads would control beetles everywhere they be introduced. However, as demonstrated by Nigel Turvey in his Cane Toads: A Tale of Sugar, Politics and Flawed Science, the actual reason for the (temporary) decline in grubs in Puerto Rico was due to unusually wet rainy seasons pinching breeding by waterlogging soils.

The cost of this false belief to Australia’s unique native wildlife has been qualitatively different from other landmasses without native bufonids. Oceanic island predators – even when living on a landmass without toads – were chiefly predatory raptors that evolved on continents with toads. Thus, unlike quolls or Pseudechis snakes, other landmasses where Bufo marinus was introduced had predators who could effectively regulate its numbers – not to mention merely one-thousandth to one-hundredth the space to expand. Thus even with uniquely bad soils, uniquely low secondary productivity and uniquely unreliable runoff toads in Australia can reach higher densities than anywhere else in the world – further condemning those who introduced the cane toad based purely upon dogma.

Stockpiles have to go

The problem that stockpiles of ivory and rhinoceros horn pose for the conservation of these species is one not new to me. There is definite evidence that poachers and holders of rhinoceros horn are banking upon the extinction of both the Sumatran Rhinoceros (Dicerorhinus sumatrensis) and the Black Rhinoceros (Diceros bicornis), as once these species are completely extinct, their horn is a completely non-renewable resource like ores of antimony, mercury or lead. With no new supplies, the already-high price of rhinoceros horn, especially that of the Sumatran species, would rise further – it’s currently around $75 per gram but who knows what it could rise to once the species is confirmed “extinct”?

In this context, it is a great advance to demand the sale of stockpiles of ivory as soon as they are found – though because elephants are less severely endangered than the Black, Javan or Sumatran Rhinoceroses the gain is certainly less. This demand – although it contradicts CITES regulations upon trade in endangered species – has been made by South Africa’s Southern Times in an article ‘CITES Must Allow Once-Off Ivory Sales’. It is clear to me that sales of ivory stockpiles – if captured – would be a very good and efficient means of providing reasonable protection for endangered wildlife in these poor Tropical and Unenriched nations.

The most crucial thing, though, especially for Asian nations where dense populations provide incentives to clear more land, is to actually do something to remove rhinoceros horn stockpiles, as was done by poor Mozambique of all countries last July. This is not thought of no doubt because the stockpiles of Javan and Sumatran rhinoceros horn – whose removal and sale would no doubt reduce the incentive to bank upon extinction of these animals – are in nations far removed from where these rhinoceroses live. Thus, it would be very difficult for those nations – chiefly Vietnam and Taiwan – who hold stockpiles of Javan and Sumatran rhinoceros horn to given them up to Indonesia to pay for urgently overdue reserves and policing to protect the tiny number of remaining individuals of these species.

Moreover, politicians in Southeast and East Asia possess absolutely no interest in preserving these species – it is known that some of them, at least in Vietnam, involve themselves heavily with the poaching and habitat that saw the Javan Rhinoceros go extinct in Vietnam a few years ago. In this sense, they are even worse than in Africa where there is simple negligence and the tourist trade offers some demand to preserve rhinoceroses. Just like with Australian greenhouse gas emissions, we are faced with a barrier between needed policy changes, vested interests standing dictatorially against them, and a very short timeline for utterly radical changes.

The hope is that people might appreciate that, even if contrary to CITES dictates, cleaning out and selling stockpiles could be a remarkable positive step if the money be wisely used.

Is destruction rather than sale possible

Today, Swaziland – a small African nation almost never in the headlines – has announced it will be selling its stockpiles of white rhinoceros horn in an effort to gain needed and scarce revenue for protecting its small remaining rhinoceros population. South Africa itself has refused to accept this proposal, arguing that rhinoceros populations would be placed at even greater risk if horn could be legally traded.

The Swazi government has also announced that it will be trying to collect horn from illegally poached rhinoceroses in order to further aid its ability to pay for the conservation of its remaining animals – which as with all of Southern Africa are the major drawcard for tourism to provide foreign currency.

A dead rhinoceros in a game reserve in Swaziland.

On the surface, removing rhinoceros horn stockpiles is a good idea – it reduces the incentive to bank upon extinction of rhinoceros species in the expectation that the now-strictly-nonrenewable resource of rhinoceros horn will increase so much in value that the speculators make large long-term gains. There is a major problem though – that it is probable that a public stockpile could if sold be transferred to one of the big speculators in rhinoceros horn. If this happened, it would not only give the speculators more power but also more reason to bank on rhinoceros extinction: their post-extinction profits would become greater than with extant stockpiles.

For this reason, destruction of private rhinoceros horn stockpiles needs to be a critical goal: this, and only this, reduces the incentive to bank upon rhinoceros extinction.

Evidence for banking on extinction of Sumatran rhinoceros

In a previous post, I argued that contrary to what Robert P. Murphy claims in Chapter 6 of his 2007 The Politically Incorrect Guide to Capitalism, speculators and holders of stockpiles of rhinoceros horn have a very strong incentive to wish for the extinction of these species to increase the value of the horn they presently hold.

The thesis was outlined five years after Murphy’s book in the Oxford Review of Economic Policy’s ‘Banking on Extinction: Endangered Species and Speculation’ by the team of Erwin H. Bulte, Richard D. Horan, and Charles F. Mason. ‘Banking on Extinction’ provided a valuable previous example with the Dutch destruction of nutmeg trees, and also discussed banking upon extinction of less critical species like the sloth bear (Melursus ursinus).

Now,  as the Sumatran rhinoceros is extinct outside Sumatra itself and numbers have fallen almost as low as the Javan Rhinoceros, it has become clear that poachers in the primary horn consuming nations of Vietnam and China are deliberately trying to hunt the species to extinction. Although older articles on rhinoceros population declines argued that the crisis facing the Sumatran Rhinoceros has little to do with poaching and was dictated by large-scale habitat destruction for agriculture, in fact there remains a lot of suitable habitat within the historic range of the Sumatran Rhinoceros that is entirely unoccupied by the species.

The fact that the Javan Rhinoceros was poached in Vietnam until the very last individual was dead implies that those who carry out poaching know their superiors’ demands to ensure that the limited remaining horn of these species will sell for the highest price possible – which even for low-level hunters means greater long-term income as the stockpiled horn sells for prices much higher than the  $75 per gram that Sumatran rhinoceros horn presently sells for. What Sumatran horn will sell for once the species is extinct nobody so far as I am aware has ever estimated, but it could be orders of magnitude higher than the present price which no doubt is depressed by stockpiling in the expectation of extinction. Given the rarity of the commodity even today, and the potency traditional East Asian pharmacists associate with the Asiatic rhinoceros species, it’s possible I feel that post-extinction Sumatran horn could sell for $750 or even $7500 a gram. At such prices, only a tiny amount of horn would make the speculators who hold Sumatran horn stockpiles very rich indeed, and the prestige of the commodity would no doubt rise once it becomes via extinction non-renewable.

‘The Operatives’’ study is a very revealing argument against Austrian School claims that free markets will actually protect endangered species in all situations – exploitation can, and not only on cheap farmland in Australia and Africa, be too efficient an alternative.

The potential for a worse tragedy than Australia’s road lobby has created

The sixth extinction crisis due to the industrial revolution – produced by the discovery of how to smelt metals more reactive than iron – has become a tragedy as Australia’s greenhouse emissions soar under no international pressure. However, it has recently dawned on me that, aside from Australia’s horrifically poor greenhouse gas emissions, there has been a major epidemic of poisoning in the Old World tropics that could very nearly compare in potential for extinctions with the mistreatment of Australia, even taking into account the secondary productivity being many times higher.

It is well-known that Rachel Carson in Silent Spring exposed the potential for pesticides to kill birds, although the birds Silent Spring documented to be affected are very short-lived (averaging around 50 percent annual mortality) and hence their populations can recover very swiftly once poisons such as DDT are removed from the environment. Bald eagles are an exception, but even they live for an average of only five or six years in the wild. In contrast, Indian vultures lay only one egg every two years and have an average lifespan well in excess of the oldest known individual of small Enriched World songbirds – which for species with a million or more banding records is typically around fifteen years. The discovery by Lindsay Oaks in 2003 that diclofenac poisoning had caused a 99.9 percent reduction in numbers of three Indian vulture species – Gyps bengalensis and the recently split Gyps indiens and Gyps tenuirostris – over less than one generation thus dwarfs Carson’s work.

Nonetheless, even in the 1960s Silent Spring was much better known than Lindsay Oaks’ writings are now, and with time that book’s fame has increased despite its distinctly specialised subject matter. Eleven years after Oaks’ groundbreaking vulture discovery, Darcy Ogada of National Geographic shows that the use of poisons to poach rhinoceroses and elephants on the African savannas is taking over from guns. Cyanide ion (CN^–) has indeed taken over from guns, and Ogada shows it has the potential to create a crisis equal to that produced by diclofenac in India.

As poisoning takes over from guns to kill elephants, Africa’s vultures face a decline similar to that observed in India when diclofenac was used to ease pain in dairy and draft cattle.

Species richness of predatory and scavenging birds.
Note the high diversity in East African savannas.

As elephants and rhinoceroses are poached more and more via poisoning, Africa’s large communities of scavenging birds face extinction in a very short time and it is likely less could be done than even India’s very moderate achievements in reducing sale of diclofenac, given the political problems faced by most of sub-Saharan Africa. Thus, there is the potential for entire communities of raptors to become entirely extinct with no survivors – and East African savannas have the world’s highest species richness of these birds, as can be seen from the attached diagram.

Such a loss would be equal to the virtually certain loss – unless the Enriched World can eliminate petty policy quarrels and unite to demand a no-compromise zero-emissions target from Australia – of the supremely rich plant communities of southwest Western Australia to runaway drying of the winter climate. Like the devastation created by freeway-based transport and coal-based energy policies in Australia – instead of a plan for and vision of a continent with equal or greater mobility for every inhabitant without one single private motorised vehicle – poachers in Africa are producing a policy that will exterminate every large scavenger and possibly many large predators in addition to their “target” elephants and rhinoceroses. The consequences for this would be disastrous, because vultures in all but the coldest or most oligotrophic environments pay critical roles in destroying microbes that cause diseases like rabies in dogs and humans.

If Africa was to lose its vultures completely, it would face disease outbreaks that would be exceedingly difficult to control, since its resources are more thinly spread than India’s and it has much larger areas of wild animals that could potentially infect humans. There is also the possibility that other dangerous herbivores could grow in numbers without elephants and rhinoceroses – or that the many smaller species that have mutualistic relationships with elephants would also become extinct, multiplying the crisis.

That the time to start on preventing mass wildlife poisoning in Africa – just as much as on making Australia pay the entire cost its appalling and worsening energy and transport policies have or will have for the climate of the rest of the world – is now. The Indian vulture crisis shows that, in the Tropical and Unenriched Worlds, consequences must be much more carefully considered than in the Enriched, owing to the orders-of-magnitude greater antiquity of their ecosystems.

Murphy called into question: speculators do want rhinoceroses extinct

In his 2006 The Politically Incorrect Guide to Capitalism, Austrian school economist Robert Patrick Murphy said that private owners of rhinoceroses and rhinoceros habitat would always wish for the species to prosper and would crack down completely on poaching that could reduce their numbers – instead creating a system of trade that would allow profits to be made from rhinoceros products whilst maintaining their numbers.

Such a trade, given the slow breeding rate of rhinoceroses, would necessarily be very restricted and who knows how few people would be allowed to kill rhinoceroses for their horns and other parts?? What this would do for the working masses of rhinoceros range states is unclear even if it did keep rhinoceroses from declining, and Murphy never looks at how Javan and Sumatran rhinoceroses suffered catastrophic declines in pre-industrial Indochina and even in Táng Dynasty-period China. (The last rhinoceros in Thailand was not killed until circa 1989, but trophy hunting by the ruling classes of Britain and Asia had made them rare one hundred years before that).

Today was a first visit for several years to my eldest half-sister in Sunshine – planned two weeks ago because my mother was visiting Canberra where my uncle is ill. Despite the house being even more cluttered than I remembered it, I managed after a nice leek soup lunch to discover a 2012 article titled ‘Banking on Extinction: Endangered Species and Speculation’ by Oxford Review of Economic Policy that shows using the example of the Black Rhinoceros that for species that are already “rare”, it will always be economic for financial speculators to drive that species to extinction.

Whilst the Black Rhinoceros is the best-studied example, it is likely that the current rhinoceros poaching crisis is “banking” much more on the extinction of the Sumatran and Javan Rhinoceroses – not studied at all in academic literature on poaching. There are several reasons for supposing such:

1. The Sumatran and Javan Rhinoceroses are much less numerous than the Black Rhinoceros, with wild populations likely under 100 animals in one or a few locations
2. Owing to their short and stubby horns, each Javan or Sumatran rhinoceros produces only a fraction the volume of horn produced by each African rhinoceros.
• Approximately, a Sumatran Rhinoceros’ two horns total a quarter the length of a Black Rhinoceros’
• whilst a male Javan Rhinoceros’ total only a tenth and the female has no horn at all
3. The Sumatran and Javan Rhinoceroses have been exploited for “trophy hunting” and horn for at least ninety years longer than the Black Rhinoceros.
4. From (3), it is likely many untested (to determine which rhinoceros species) or undiscovered stockpiles of Javan and Sumatran horn exist among these speculators
5. From (4),the price of Javan and/or Sumatran rhinoceros horn may be currently depressed by these stockpiles
6. The potentially imminent extinction of these species will mean profits beyond anything seen in the rhinoceros horn industry to today even for small amounts for horn or other rhinoceros parts

The fact that Vietnamese poachers killed the last mainland Javan Rhinoceroses in Cát Tiên National Park suggests firmly that Vietnamese, Taiwanese and Chinese speculators indeed possess substantial stockpiles of Javan and Sumatran horn, despite the fact that the extreme rarity of Javan Rhinoceroses pre-dates the explosion of poaching in the 1970s – the species was almost unknown outside Ujung Kulon as early as the 1930s. These stockpiles would have a much higher present value were no individuals of these species present than if conservation efforts were more successful.

Whilst ‘Banking on Extinction’ does mention that stronger private property rights would actually mean Javan and Sumatran rhinoceroses would no longer be in danger of immediate extinction, the author give no suggestions as to how to achieve this or even whether it could be done.

The new criminals of the Tropical World

Today, despairing news that rhinoceroses will be extinct by 2022 (in eight years) if current poaching rates continue is saddening but revealing.

The article reveals how the demand for rhinoceros horn is coming from a small group of nations in tropical and subtropical Asia which are regarded as newly industrialising: Vietnam, Thailand, China and Taiwan. In all these nations, rhinoceros poachers maintain very strong connections with governments and as these nations become richer, rhinoceros horn has become a symbol of the “nouvelle riche”who are growing in number even with below-replacement fertility. Its symbolic status is probably be increased by the fact that Thailand and more recently Vietnam once had rhinoceros populations of their own, so that previous generations could have used rhinoceros parts before African horn was ever shipped to Asia.

The business skill of East Asians means that the number of rich could grow very rapidly in the future. Whether or not there is a poor underclass there is the likelihood the rest of East Asia's populace will envy them enough to wish for it themselves rather than understand the fragility of African ecosystems. Notably, the megafauna of East Africa serve to raise the rainfall at which soil fertility peaks from 800 millimetres (32 inches) up to 1200 millimetres (47 inches). If rhinoceroses go extinct this extinction could affect the potential numbers of other species.

In a sense, the problem with rhinoceros poaching is similar to the lenience with which the Enriched World treats Australia's and South Africa's greenhouse gas emissions, inasmuch as solving both problems is dependent on a change of ways from politicians in the rest of the world.

Compared to its greenhouse gas emissions, however, wildlife poaching in the Unenriched World is easier to stop because its source is completely external: there is essentially no local demand for rhinoceros products in South Africa, Mozambique, Botswana or Namibia. Thus, if we isolate those nations buying rhinoceros horn, there is some hope that the problem could be stopped. However, as with the Unenriched World's ecological record, what to do to make rhino horn importers change their ways is another question: it could so easily create more problems.

How should we treat rhinoceros poachers?

Today, after a long and depressing run of severe failures in the fight against the poaching of rhinoceroses in Southern Africa, it is refreshing to note that some progress has been made to deal with the poachers.

Dineo Mphalehle of EWN says that three poachers have been shot dead in Kruger National Park, in a year that has seen 362 rhinoceroses, or two percent of the total world population of five species, shot dead there. In Mozambique, a country much poorer that South Africa, Namibia or Botswana, there has been similar success finding probable rhinoceros poachers.

With the large number of rhinoceroses killed in Southern Africa in recent decades, it is tempting to think that there is justice in shooting poachers, although there is by no means one hundred percent certainty that in fact those shot dead were actually critical to the success of rhinoceros poaching in recent years.

If Southern Africa could become organised enough, it could treat definite rhinoceros poachers very severely, with life imprisonment without parole a fair punishment for such egrerious crimes against wildlife that is extremely valuable on many grounds. The question is how its political system is to do this, and whether what is actually done may be more practical?

Is this a breakthrough for rhinoceroses?

According to the British Broadcasting Corporation, South Africa has found a kingpin smuggler of rhino horn in Thai Chumlong Lemtongthai, and wants to sentence him to forty years jail for illegally obtaining hunting permits. Forty years jail is a very severe penalty - from what I have recently read about murder and manslaughter it is more severe than any legal penalty for manslaughter and even for some forms of murder. On the other hand, like Australia, South Africa has unique duties in terms of environmental protection since South Africa is:

1. overall the seventh most biologically diverse country in the world
2. easily the most biologically diverse country without tropical rainforests or coral reefs, having twice the number of species of any other
3. an exceptionally fragile land with extremely old soils and an average runoff ratio of less than 10 percent, making its water systems exceedingly sensitive
4. features frequent occurrences of many presently rare and little studied ecological phenomena such as cooperative breeding, unusually low metabolic rates and daily heterothermy

For this reason, punishments for wildlife killing in South Africa have a right to be much more severe than in either the humid tropics or the northern and western hemispheres (the latter of which for ecological purposes includes New Zealand). In fact, given the important ecological role of megafauna like rhinoceroses in reducing the leaching of the very old soils of southern Africa, it is fair to punish people who obtain illegal licences to hunt them with something as severe as forty years - or perhaps even life - imprisonment.

Such killing is ecocide in a way killing in the northern or western hemispheres never can be, so a due punishment stands very different from what people used only to dealing with illegal killing in those sections of the globe would expect. If such punishments were consistent in southern Africa, then rhinoceros poaching would be something few would dare to engage in and rhinoceroses would have a chance of survival.

A reversal on the rhino poaching debacle?

In the early months of this year, as I have documented in a number of posts, it has been shown that the Vietnamese government has played a major role in the recent rhinoceros poaching epidemic in southern Africa that is severely threatening these species.

Now, however, after relatively minor attempts to apprehend poachers in South Africa, which holds the vast majority of surviving rhinoceroses, is news that the governments of South Africa and a seemingly reformed Vietnam are going to sign a deal to stop the poaching of rhinoceroses for their horn.

The deal encompasses:

1. sharing details of rhinoceros hunts involving Vietnamese citizens
2. bilateral cooperation to investigate presumably uninvestigated crimes by Vietnamese citizens
3. education in Vietnam on the endangered status of rhinoceroses

One hopes that the formerly Stalinist government of Vietnam really is sincere about doing something to stop poaching of endangered rhinoceroses. The trouble is that so many governments have the problem of people like rhinoceros poachers donating money in such a manner that one is hard pressed to tell whether it is legal or not. More than that, the Herald Sun suggests that only mass political pressure has caused the South African government to do anything about the Vietnamese government’s purchase of rhinoceros products. If public pressure eases, then it is easy to see how rhinoceroses could be killed in even greater numbers than is occurring at present, even with treaties between the two nations’ governments firmly in place.

A dreadful move to save money

As Perth’s July rainfall is almost certain to reach a record low after 45 years of steady decline, comes news that the very minor potential gains in greenhouse gas emissions and land conservation during the last decade are likely to be lost in a very short time.

Robyn Parker, the New South Wales Environment Minister, has stated in the Sydney Morning Herald yesterday that large numbers of unspecified national parks will now go unstaffed, and that amateurs will now be allowed to hunt kangaroos. Whilst hunting of feral animals is a definite and possibly profitable necessity there is no certainty that it will be limited to feral animals and there is the dangerous possibility that with inadequate policing native animals, including endangered species, could be poached.

Still worse is that with the likelihood that the Liberal Party will be able to phase out the inadequate carbon tax in 2013, leaving Australia with no plan to reduce greenhouse emissions that remain the highest per capita in the world. Without a plan to reduce greenhouse emissions and extremely limited government regulation compared to countries generally considered major threats, it is possible that Australia will become not only the highest per capita emitter but, with its high immigration and fertility, the highest overall emitter.

More than that, there is a lot of evidence many endangered species in the cooler regions of Australia are likely to decline rapidly as the climate warms. In the case of the rufous scrub-bird, there has already been a raising from Vulnerable to Endangered, as there has been for that species’ only close relative the Noisy Scrub-Bird. Although this has been denied by IUCN, there is genuine danger of all species from the southwestern karri and tingle forests becoming extinct very soon. Present rates of rainfall decline are around a linear 1 percent per year — maybe a little more given that Mount Pinatubo’s eruption temporarily improved southwestern Australian rainfall between 1991 and 1996.

If we assume such a linear decline continuing, by 2050 southwestern Australia would receive less than 20 percent of the wet season rainfall expected before anthropogenic global warming took hold. Perth would receive only around 30 millimetres per month, and even historically rainy Northcliffe no more than 40 millimetres. This would correspond to an annual rainfall of no more than 350 millimetres in the far southwest, inadequate even for many kinds of heathland! Species such as the Noisy Scrub Bird and Baudin’s Black Cockatoo, which are already endangered and depend on these wetter habitats, could logically be premeditatively uplisted to Critically Endangered on such grounds. Contrary to what the IUCN told me in a recent email, climate change data are too convincing to reject such moves, and they are a threat even to forest species holding their own for now.

Australia must find other ways to deal with its financial problems, and face the hard truth that its government policies remain one cause of its extremely poor record of species extinctions and land degradation. Cuts need to be made to funding the vested interests — fossil fuel, car, aluminium and aviation industries — responsible for the problem.

The recession, poverty, and rhinos

A few months ago, the first significant social study of South Africa's rhinoceros poaching epidemic that has already claimed about 5 percent of all rhinoceroses in the world. It argues that amounts of 200,000 rand or about 25,130 Australian dollars are an irresistible lure to poor people in rural South Africa, who will willingly risk their lives to move out of poverty even if only in the short term. Most “collaborators” in the rhino poaching epidemic are from the Mozambique border and have no work apart from seasonal agriculture. With 210 rhinoceroses killed according to the latest statistics, there is a major problem with simply enforcing laws against poaching, which recent evidence suggests is being largely done by a number of gangs fro South East and East Asia. Whilst it might be thought that if gangs are an issue then poverty amelioration by whatever means is no solution to poaching of rhinoceroses, there is no doubt that when agricultural work is not possible due to being out of season, or if drought or flood affects crop productivity, these poor Mozambicans will have no alternative but to look to criminal syndicates who can offer them better jobs than local businessmen or the government. these syndicates, it is apparent, come from one nation which has recently lost its entire rhino population: Vietnam, with very few from any other nation. Nonetheless, even if foreign governments become brave enough to attack the Vietnamese government for its role in rhinoceros poaching, there is no certainty that rhinoceros poaching syndicates will crop up to serve people in Southern Africa who are too poor to have any other job. Given the fact that the region has a unique combination of extremely high conservation value and iconic wildlife, tourism in southern Africa has more potential than just about anywhere in the world if well-managed. Rhinoceroses are most definitely a part of this, and need to be seen as a job opportunity when alive ratehr than when dead if poverty and ecology are not to compete with each other.

A new rhinoceros poaching syndicate

In recent years, rhinoceros poaching in South Africa has been largely blamed on the Stalinist nations of Vietnam and China, along with Taiwan. As I have noted in a previous post, many politicians in those nations believe rhinoceros horn can cure cancer and other diseases, despite a total lack of serious evidence.

Today, in Eyewitness News, there is a discussion of another rhinoceros poaching syndicate from another Asian country that has lost its entire rhinoceros population: Thailand. Chumlong Lemtongthai allegedly leads this four-man syndicate and was supposedly in South Africa on a tourist visa. Critics argue he actually had government connections with South Africa: if he did, it makes it even harder to argue the South African government can be entrusted with the protection of rhinoceroses, even though three other Thais have been forced behind bars for their efforts smuggling horn in a manner I did not know about.

Journalists in South Africa admit that there are many problems with means used to conserve rhinoceroses. Military patrols - which are much truer “defence” than almost anything modern militaries actually do - are being expanded by the South African government and could make it much more difficult for poachers to get to rhinoceroses. The best bet, however, is to keep and hold poachers far from the animals, so that rhinoceroses are never threatened in the first place. That, however, has the trouble of how to identify poachers and how much “false identification” can be tolerated? There is late news of efforts to do this by DNA screening, but whether as is claimed Vietnam and China will be cooperative is very hard to determine.

First hint of punishment for rhino poachers - what will come?

After a 2011 that saw rhino poaching in South Africa, which has the vast majority of the remaining rhinos in the world, 2012 began quietly but the new month has seen a revelation I did not expect or have any clues about: that the South African government has sentenced three Mozambicans to twenty-five years jail for their involvement in the slaughter of about three percent of the country's rhinos during 2011 and two and a half percent in 2010. The three men's names are:

• Aselmo Baloyi
• Jawaki Nkuna
• Ismael Baloyi

and they have also been sentenced for the possession of illegal firearms (assault rifle, hunting rifle and axe) according to Daly News Reporter.

Owners of private game reserves are very happy with the stiff sentence handed out to the Baloyis and Nkuna, having indeed lobbied the South African government to do this for some time.

Governments in Africa have often had problems with their involvement with rhino poachers, and their incentive to support them under such circumstances is almost certainly a recipe for disaster. If South Africa's government realises that in the long term there is immense value in retaining the country's amazing ancient biodiversity (which, unlike that of Australia does gain some protection under the free market solely because of such "prize" animals as the rhino) it would redirect some of its earnings to more efficient punishment of poachers. Poachers often have friends in high places abroad, and the ultimate goal would be to ostracise those countries whose governments are infested with people trading in endangered species especially in an environment like South Africa's.

A Stalinist-inspired surge?

Although the explosion in rhino poaching in South Africa, which has ninety percent of the world’s total rhino population, is no longer the headline new it was when I first chronicled it in June 2010, it has become catastrophic, with as much as seven percent of rhinos living as of January 2008 having been poached in the past four years.

Whilst efforts to bring poachers to trial have been mixed, and some within rhino range states have independently suggested Robert P. Murphy’s idea of privatising rhinos so that they could be sold for profit or watched by the public for a fee, the new year has seen a fascinating revelation about where the demand for rhino horn was coming from.

It has long been known the Vietnam, which lost its last rhinos in 2011, has been the main source of the upsurge in rhinoceros poaching, has been the source of demand for the horn from South African rhinos. However, this article by Elizabeth Batt has made the sinister suggestion that it is the Vietnamese government of all people who is responsible for the decimation of rhinos.

Increased demand it appeared, was fueled by the rumor from a Vietnamese politician who claimed that his cancer had been cured by ingesting powdered rhino horn.

This is a terrible scene if it is true, and would mean that Stalinism, in one of its last holdouts, has been responsible for an environmental disaster that may rival in long-term effect, if not in scope, what was done to the Aral Sea by Stalinism in Central Asia.

Unless accusations against it can be proven false, the effects of the Vietnamese government on the world’s rhino population over the past four years really do demand a reaction. Although Vietnam has moved towards a globalised market economy, it has never been as high-profile about this as China, and since the death of Hồ Chí Minh and reunification it has never been in the headlines beyond debates over “boat people”. Today’s rhino poaching epidemic ought to change that, besides seeing a dark underside to Asian culture for both Left and Right.

Javan rhino extinct on Asian mainland

This year has been a very bad one for rhinos. Poaching, which increased in 2010, has multiplied by about the same amount this year.

Most tragically, following the extinction of the northern white rhinoceros in 2006, the last Javan rhinoceros has disappeared from Vietnam. The species was known before 1988 only from its remaining stronghold in the extreme west of Java, but the a small population was discovered in Vietnam’s Cat Tien National Park. There were even before the current rhino poaching epidemic began grave concerns that the rhinos in Cat Tien were not breeding, but still this news was very surprising since almost all the news about today’s epidemic of rhino poaching comes from Africa or Nepal. In fact, it is popularly thought that the reason for the Critically Endangered status of the Javan and Sumatran rhinoceroses is purely and simply the immense destruction for timber and agriculture of Southeast Asia’s forests. However, in reality the Sumatran species at all events is actually much more able than is popularly thought to cope with disturbances in primary rainforest – and a huge proportion of its original range was and is much too steep to farm.

Thus, we are left with poaching for horn as the culprit for these two most critically endangered rhinoceros species – this in spite of the fact that the Javan and Sumatran rhinoceroses yield a very small amount of horn and prices for them are not nearly so well-documented as those of Indian and African horn. It is interesting to imagine if rhino horn dealers actually hold stockpiles of Javan and/or Sumatran horn that they do not offer for sale to rhino horn customers even at much more than the typical asking price of $100 per gram for Indian rhino horn??

The battle over rhinos is heating up

2010 saw poaching of rhinos reach levels never seen in the past, as the price of Asiatic rhino horn reached the unimaginable levels of $50 or higher per gram, whilst less expensive African horn reached much higher prices than it has historically been at. Three hundred and thirty-eight rhinos were killed in South Africa alone during 2010, or about one-thirtieth of that country’s rhino population (and South Africa holds 75 percent of the world’s rhinos).

As I have observed the increasing poaching of rhinos through a Google Alert throughout 2010, I have long wondered why the governments of the countries concerned have not been either doing something about rhino poaching or asking themselves whether, as Robert P. Murphy says, rhinos could be handled better by profit-oriented groups? Murphy argues that the political leaders would have to personally benefit from maintaining stocks of rhinos for there to be any possibility of their numbers stabilising. My brother, myself and other relatives doubt this very much because:

1. the conservation of rhinos would need to be more profitable than other land uses
2. those who hold rhino horn have an interest in extinction of rhinos to increase its price as it turns into a rigidly non-renewable resource.
   

For this reason, it is encouraging for me to see that governments in Southern Africa, often viewed as incompetent and tending towards lawlessness, have actually in recent weeks managed to prevent at least nine rhino poachers from killing this year even more than the three hundred and thirty eight rhinos killed in 2010. Since rhinos breed only once every two or three years, at the present rate of increase in poaching all five rhino species would be extinct by 2035.

One cannot question the need for park rangers in areas with such poaching-sensitive species as rhinos to be armed. Rhino poachers are naturally armed, and unarmed park rangers are not likely to be able to simply tell a would-be rhino poacher to move away. Rhino poachers, being generally members of well-structured and well-resourced criminal gangs, are not likely to back down against even someone from the government.

One much deeper ethical issue that these shootings produce is whether it is just to kill proven rhino poachers - or even those who would kill rhinos, which contravenes laws on the trade in endangered species (of course most rhino species are now Critically Endangered). In general, there is a very strong resistance within me to allowing killing of anybody, even the worst criminals. Nevertheless, with rhino poachers, killing may be the only way that can serve even as a deterrent to killing rhinos, so that one can make the most extremely exceptional case here. The killing of rhino poachers as far as I know has not been seen before, though Kenya, with the fourth largest rhino population after South Africa, India and Namibia, began arresting rhino poachers in 2009 and seems not to have been in the rhino poaching news so much (correct me if you can). Although it is not easy to tell how many innocent people could be shot if a really hard-line policy was adopted by those eager to control rhino poaching, it does seem to me that it is not as tough to identify those profiting from the extinction of rhinos as many other criminal cases. This provides further support for a tougher line on poachers than has been taken by governments in Africa and Asia ever since the rhino crisis began over a hundred years ago.

Global warming threatens the koala – ZERO emisisons must be immediate goal

As I have repeatedly emphasised, Australia’s sensitive ecology dictates that its population’s energy use efficiency be much higher than Eurasia, the Americas or New Zealand.

In reality, of course, owing to dirt-cheap coal-fired power that is six times cheaper than any energy in Eurasia, the Americas or New Zealand, Australia is (or ought to be) notorious for its poor energy efficiency and high emissions.

I have noted once previously that the iconic koala is now threatened by disease and global warming. However, today, there is more detail as to what is affecting the koala. It is a disease known as chlamydia, which

causes respiratory infections, incontinence, pink eye and a number of other side effects, most notably, infertility.

It is thought that if chlamydia continues to spread across the koala population, it could cause the species to cease breeding in thirty years. By 2040, too, global warming is likely to mean that Australia’s dry schlerophyll forests will be too dry to support any trees, and extremely hot so that if it ever rains substantially fires would be extremely likely.

Thus, we are at war on two fronts. Whilst scientists may have a solution to the problem of chlamydia in the future, they alone can do nothing about a problem towards which Australia is by far the world’s worst offender. The only people who can do anything are those who would inform – in much more detail than I can by trying to harass people I meet – the public of Australia’s apolitical outer suburbs that without an immediate zero emissions target for Australia iconic species like the koala will be gone within their lifetime.

Whether this zero emissions target should be achieved by pressuring Australia’s apolitical masses or foreign governments is the big question, but that we need it there is no doubt.