PATRICE GREANVILLE—Here we have an academic who sounds (like most academics do) reasonable and balanced,” but who is in actuality neither, when we realise the context of his remarks, and his allegiance, witting or not, to the corporate status quo. For one thing, all meat production—especially in its industrial forms— is a major contributor to global heating. It should not be accorded respectable treatment but outright condemnation. This man fails to recognise that “business as usual” cannot go on; that the planet in this age of acute crisis detonated by an immoral capitalism MUST at the least have sanctuaries from capitalist exploitation.
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BILL VILLERS—The prospect of the Green New Deal becoming morphed into Sustainable Development by another name is real, given the powerful forces so adept at co-opting and repackaging things to serve their own ends. The development/growth debate has long been dominated by business interests, economists, advertisers and corporate journalists, with biologists neglectfully absent. And yet, it all boils down to biology, for when species “overshoot” the capacities of their environments to support them, collapse is the result.
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WAYNE MADSEN—Trump’s blood lust for animals does not end with scaling back domestic and international protections for endangered species. The Trump administration is also giving authorization to the Department of Agriculture’s Wildlife Service to use M-44 spring-loaded traps filled with sodium cyanide to kill bears, foxes, wolves, coyotes, birds, mountain lions and other animals that ranchers and farmers consider to be pests.
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DAVID MATTSON—All of this begs the question of what to do about Felicia and, more importantly, her surviving cub. Indeed, this question is on a lot of peoples’ minds. Perhaps more importantly, though, this challenge broaches the broader issue of what to do about increasing numbers of similar bears in similar situations—but where ultimate authority is held by dysfunctional and undemocratic state wildlife management agencies in a world overrun by humans.
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Today, PETA purchased shares in Facebook, enabling the group to submit a shareholder resolution, attend the company’s annual meetings, and ask questions of executives there. The move comes after the social media platform upped its use of warning screens on PETA videos showing real-life incidents of routine cruelty to animals, significantly limiting the group’s ability to expose animal suffering to a wide audience.
