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The empathy of rats, and their urge to liberate companions
Tom Kennedy, Telegraph
Rat rescues are thanks to mum
Not many animals have a worse reputation than rats. So how is it that a new study has revealed that they actually feel empathy for their fellow creatures?
Scientists say it is all part of their biological instincts. They say such “empathic” behaviour is rooted in the relationship between a mammalian mother and her helpless offspring.
Research showed how rats opened a door to free cage mates trapped in a tube – even when given the alternative option of getting at chocolate chips inside a second tube.
… researchers at the University of Chicago concluded that … it appeared that they acted out of empathy to end the distress of their cagemate.
It seemed that the animals have a caring nature, as “in the current study, the free rat was not simply empathically sensitive to another rat’s distress but acted intentionally to liberate”.
The report found that “rats behave pro-socially in response to… distress, providing strong evidence for biological roots of empathically motivated helping behaviour”.
(9 December 2011)
Localization v. Globalization: A False Dichotomy
Zoe Weil, CommonDreams.org
The economic localization movement is growing. Locavores have become widespread, with the “100 mile diet” representing the new eco-conscious food trend. Author Helena Norberg-Hodge begins her TEDx talk, The Economics of Happiness, with this impassioned plea: “For all of us around the world the highest priority, the most urgent issue, is fundamental change to the economy,” and goes on to say, “The change that we need to make is shifting away from globalizing to localizing economic activity.” This, she suggests, is the economics of happiness. Even in my own town, a yoga studio has a sign on the wall urging yoga practitioners to shop locally.
As a humane educator who teaches about the interconnected issues of human rights, environmental preservation and animal protection, I am uncomfortable with the fervor surrounding localization. While the farmer’s market and local food movements have certainly been beneficial – helping farmers, communities, and individuals alike – it’s not realistic, desirable, or responsible to reject global trade out of hand or to advocate localization as the urgent answer for our times.
A full commitment to local economies would mean that in Maine, where I live, people would need to give up coffee, citrus, rice, cotton and synthetic fabrics (among many other things) and rely on potatoes, wheat, lobsters and clams, canned food stored from our brief summers, and wear linen clothing and deer hides. It would also mean that medicines discovered and produced by scientists working in New England would no longer be exported to places where they are most needed. Perhaps they wouldn’t be discovered or produced at all, given that many ingredients and processes are derived across the globe.
Imagine what would happen to the Ethiopian coffee farmers depicted in the film Black Gold whose organic, fair trade coffee would no longer have a market outside their communities, or to the sustainable and fair trade collectives Central and South America which are exporting goods, foods, and clothes to the north. These collectives are lifting countless individuals out of poverty. Many of them would simply go out of business if their products had to be sold only locally.
The choice between localization and globalization is a false one. Too often the phrase “local economy” is associated with small, just, sustainable, and humane, and “global economy” with big, impersonal, cruel, and destructive. Yet plenty of local companies are large, exploitative, and cruel (like Maine’s biggest chicken producer), and plenty of companies overseas are sustainable, humane, and just (like many fair trade businesses). We need to make more nuanced choices.
Zoe Weil is the president of the Institute for Humane Education, www.HumaneEducation.org, which offers the first and only M.Ed. and M.A. programs in Humane Education and online programs for teachers, parents, and change agents. She is the author of Most Good, Least Harm: A Simple Principle for a Better World and Meaningful Life; Above All, Be Kind; and The Power and Promise of Humane Education. She has given a TEDx talk on solutionary education and blogs at www.zoeweil.com.
(6 December 2011)
Food for Thought: Food Sovereignty in Europe
Dan Iles, Red Pepper Magazine
Dan Iles hears from food sovereignty activists from across the continent
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‘Food systems have been reduced to a model of industrialised agriculture controlled by a few transnational food corporations together with a small group of huge retailers. It is a model designed to generate profits, and therefore completely fails to meet its obligations. Instead of being dedicated to the production of food … it focuses increasingly on the production of raw materials such as agrofuels, animal feeds or commodity plantations. On the one hand, it has caused the enormous loss of agricultural holdings and the people who make their living from those holdings, while on the other hand it promotes a diet which is harmful to health and which contains insufficient fruit, vegetables and cereals.’
So states the final declaration of the Nyeleni Europe food sovereignty forum, which took place in August when 400 delegates from 34 countries met in the town of Krems in Austria. The forum was structured to break the delegations into interest-specific groups and then facilitate inclusive and participatory discussion so as to form the basis for a declaration that would provide direction for the European food sovereignty movement. However, as with most such forums, the most important element was the opportunity for producers, consumer organisations, workers, activists and campaigners to meet up, share their stories and plan the future.
In a direct challenge to the top-down ‘food security’ agenda, which accepts the corporate dominance in our food system that is part of the problem in the first place, the real struggle against global hunger is not taking place in parliaments, financial institutions or scientific laboratories. Instead, it is small-scale farmers and disempowered consumers who are coming together to build a better food system from the bottom up. In line with this approach, the forum included a day of protests at supermarkets around Krems and a market combining farmers’ stalls and political information aimed at the town’s inhabitants. This combination proved to be a powerful outreach tool.
Nyeleni Europe represents the community-supported agriculture collectives, organic farmer unions, local food cooperatives, seed swapping organisations, food activists, farmers’ markets and community gardens that form the front line against the corporate tide.
(5 December 2011)
The Water, Energy and Food Nexus
Shiney Varghese, Think Forward
As I flew back from Bonn last week, on my way back from the Bonn 2011 Nexus Conference (16–18 November), one thing was clear to me. Corporate environmentalism is entrenching itself firmly in the corridors of global governance, and challenging its advance will require new strategies. The “in-your-face” approach of yesterday is being replaced with a softer, albeit more dangerous “corporate responsibility” garb. This softer path also seeks to ensure that civil society stakeholders are seen as party to the decisions.
The Bonn Nexus conference is symptomatic of the way that corporate environmentalism is developing. “The water, energy and food security nexus, Solutions for the Green Economy,” as it is called, is an initiative of the federal government of Germany to develop specific contributions to the Rio+20 Conference. It is an important event because this is the first of several nexus conferences being planned to gain political support for advancing the green economy at Rio+20. The next follow-up conference is being organized by World Economic Forum and will be held in January 2012.
In its recognition of a “nexus,” these conferences could be seen as a step forward. Two years ago, when we published a report on the need for integrated solutions for the water, climate and food crises, the idea of connections between these three sectors was simply not on any official agenda.
But the conference understood the “nexus” through a distinctive lens—that of the “green economy.” This term has been coming to a new prominence over the last year or two. And what it actually means was brought out well in the Bonn proceedings. The majority of experts at the conference were from international institutions (including globally operating NGOs), and for-profit companies, with a limited number of experts and representatives from a broader group of smaller NGOs and the global South. Moreover most sessions seemed to be focused on the technocratic approach of increasing resource use efficiency. In fact, some of these concerns were brought up by us in a letter to the organizers of the Bonn 2011 Nexus Conference.
Resource use efficiency improvement is always a desirable objective, but a lot depends on how it is concretized. At Bonn, while increasing crop per drop was defined as part of green growth in agriculture, the “hows” were left undefined, thus leaving the field open for introduction of GMO crops, nanotechnology and synthetic biology
Shiney Varghese is Senior Policy Analyst with IATP. She leads IATP’s work on global water policy, focusing on the water crisis, its impact on water and food security, and possible local solutions that emphasize equity, environmental justice and sustainability.
(2 December 2011)
Dan Ariely on Defying Logic (video and audio)
Dan Ariely, Big Ideas, ABC (Australia)
The 2008 economic crisis taught us that irrationality is an big player in financial markets. But it is often the case that irrationality also makes it way into our daily lives and decision-making – in slightly different, and vastly more subtle, ways.
In a compelling follow-up to his New York Times bestseller “Predictably Irrational”, Dan Ariely shows how irrationality is an inherent part of the way we function and think, and how it affects our behaviour in all areas of our lives, from our romantic relationships to our experiences in the workplace to our temptations to cheat.
The new book is called “The Upside of Irrationality: The Unexpected Benefits of Defying Logic at Work and at Home”.
Blending everyday experience with groundbreaking analysis and new research into our how we actually make decisions, Ariely explains how expectations, emotions, social norms, and other invisible, seemingly illogical forces skew our reasoning abilities. Using data from original experiments, he draws invaluable conclusions about how — and why — we behave the way we do, and reflects on ways we can make ourselves and our society better.
Dan Ariely is considered to be one of the world’s leading behavioural economists. He is the Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Behavioral Economics at MIT Sloan School of Management, and also head of the eRationality research group at the MIT Media Lab. Currently, Ariely is Visiting Professor at the Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business, where he teaches a course based upon his findings in “Predictably Irrational”. Ariely was an undergraduate at Tel Aviv University and received a PhD and MA in cognitive psychology from the University of North Carolina, and a PhD in business from Duke University.
(11 February 2011)
Recommended by EB contributor Michael Lardelli who writes:
“I hope you can recommend this talk to your readers. It is simply outstanding and very relevant to the issues of irrational societal attitudes to e.g. peak oil and climate change and how we can use our understanding of this irrationality to more effectively modify these attitudes. Brilliant!
“P.S. The talk is almost a year old but I do not think you covered it then and it is still just as relevant.”
