必要之惡?

最近公司在推廣環保月，有電郵和luncheon提醒我們每年浪費了多少能源、製造了多少CO2，我們如何如何可以節省/救多少棵樹，等等。本來這都很好，可是為了宣傳，公司又每人派發了一疊post-it，又賣環保袋（收益全捐給WWF）。

據說世上有一種東西叫必要之惡（necessary evil），難道這是其中之一?

錢鋼與前進

錢鋼說的是新聞自由，可這話又豈止於此？

「如果我們不能百米百米地前進，我們就一米一米前進；不能一米一米前進，我們就一寸一寸前進，一寸一寸也不行，我們就一毫米一毫米地前進。」

Until and Unless...

"I find that moralizing is totally ineffective and
inappropriate. People aren't going to be scolded into looking at what's happening, which is still the tack that most activists are taking." - Joanna Macy from "In the Footsteps of Gandhi".

以前阿媽日夜不停叫我不要把東西亂放，完全被當成耳邊風，可見嘮叨責罵是無用的。現在無需人提，自動自覺會收拾，可見除非事情給internalized，nothing will really happen.

註：見環保分子樣樣都提議立法有感。

Elephant Memories

Cynthia Moss 的“Elephant Memories” 讓我想起以前見過的大象。在肯雅safari見過一字（阿拉伯數目字“1”）排開有大有小的大約6、7只。最近距離是在resort。我站在木橋上盯著她吃樹葉，我們之間只有2、3米。很大，真的很大。那個頭、那雙耳朵，大的使我的視線範圍只有灰色。皮膚看上去很粗很厚，有皺紋，眼睫毛很長（雖然只有幾條）。她的鼻子很靈活，簡直像我們的手一樣。她“顧住食”，眼尾也沒看過我。

這就是我的"Elephant Memories"了...

Life of a Female African Elephant

The life of Teresia (1922 – 1984), once the matriarch of an elephant family in Amboseli, Kenya

When Teresia was born in 1922 she weighed about 260 pounds and stood approximately two feet nine inches at the shoulder. Her brain weighed 35 percent of what it would weigh as an adult. (The human brain is 26 percent of its adult weight at birth; most other mammal brains are 90 percent of the adult weight at birth.)

Teresia probably spent the first four years of her life in very close proximity to her mother and her siblings and other relatives in the family. She depended on her mother for both milk and care. When she was around four [4] years old, a younger sister or brother was most likely born and Teresia was weaned. At four [4] she would have taken great interest in her new sibling and lavished it with attention. At the same time she was developing her own social relationships within the family and learning elephant protocol. As a young calf she would have been tolerated in most situations, but as she got older she had to learn about dominance and aggression as well as affiliation. She would also have begun to know elephants from other families and her own family’s position in relation to them…

Starting sometime in her ninth [9th] or tenth [10th] year Teresia’s body began to go through changes and in her eleventh [11th] or twelfth [12th] year, if conditions were adequate and there was not a drought, she probably came into estrus (發情期) for the first time and experienced all the confusion, fear, and excitement of that event… Her body went through further changes as the fetus grew and various hormones went into action. Her breasts filled out gradually over the months. By the time she was 18 months pregnant her sides were bulging and the weight of the fetus slowed her down. She probably had to feed more than before, because she, as well as the fetus, was continuing to grow. At her age she was only about two thirds [2/3] the size of a full-grown adult female.

At 13 to 14 years old Teresia probably gave birth to her first calf…

If her first calf lived out its early years, then Teresia would have come into estrus again when it was about two [2] and given birth to a new calf when it was four [4] and she herself was 17 to 18. For the next three [3] decades of her life Teresia was either lactating or pregnant or both, as she would continue to suckle her youngest calf until the next one was born. After 50 Teresia’s breeding slowed down considerably…

In those middle years, when she was reproductively most active, important social changes were also occurring. Whoever was matriarch when she was born, possibly her grandmother, would have died and the next-oldest female taken over…

I think it could be said that in the last decade of her life Teresia was in her old age. I do not know if elephants become senile. Teresia always seemed to have all her faculties intact. She stayed with her family, continued to interact with them, and was as tolerant
and sweet-natured as she was when I first knew her. Teresia must have been a particularly caring and in some way attractive grandmother because Theodora’s
[Theodora is one of Teresia’s daughter] calf spent far more time with her than with his own mother. I those last two years, whenever I saw the family, he was often following Teresia or standing next to her… Teresia was still a vital part of the family in her old age.

Source: “Elephant Memories” by Cynthia Moss

Ivory Trade

From "Elephant Memories" by Cynthia Moss:

These facts and figures on ivory, even in my mind, tend to distance one from the elephant, but ivory statistics... represent a definite number of dead elephants... natural mortality at this point cannot possibly feed the current demand for ivory. To meet the demand for 825 tons of ivory per year a minimum of 70,000 elephants have to die... And that is only the elephants with tusks; thousands of calves also die because of the loss of their mothers, bringing the estimated total up to at least 80,000 elephants each year...

It is not the numbers alone that are depressing; equally disturbing is what has happened to the populations that remain. Poachers systematically take the animals with the largest tusks, so the first to go are the males and the older matriarchs... When the older elephants are finished they start on the medium-sized ones and eventually have to do with the young elephants with very small tusks... According to the Wildlife Trade Monitoring Unit of IUCN, the mean tusk weight of ivory imported into Japan dropped from 35.8 pounds in 1979 to 21.3 pounds in 1982...

Facts about African elephants:

• Gestation period (懷孕期): 22 months
• Life span: Up to 70 years

Additional source: WWF