The Good, The Bad, The Spin

How wild horse advocates spin-doctor a volatile issue and spread misinformation

They are one of Nevada’s most misunderstood attributes. From long eyelashes in Disney movies to the ongoing anthropomorphic attitudes expressed by all stripes of mostly well-intentioned folks, Nevada’s wild horses are universally admired. They are also endlessly mired in controversy.

This is to be expected. As our “backyard pets,” that appear essentially harmless and carefree, it is easy to understand why people would be offended as the suggestion of removal of horses from rangelands—or human interference of any kind.

These good intentions are driven by emotion and passion, which frequently step in the way of reason and the desire to seek out science-based knowledge of the issue, especially if such information ends up unpleasant or contradictory to one’s beliefs. Nothing exemplifies this more than the uproar recently stirred when none other than Willie Nelson and Snoop Dog recorded audio commercials urging people to call Nevada’s governor to “intervene on behalf of our wild horses.” (more…)

Yesterday could have been fun. One of what is bound to be many wildfires this summer started up just behind my house, about 45 minutes from where I work. It started ironically right about the time that I was on the phone with a reporter discussing one of Nevada’s greatest environmental threats: fire.

Despite my sideline preaching to the few who will listen, issues such as mercury, arsenic, air pollution from cars, mines and so on, while important, aren’t nearly as critical as the issue of why there are so many wildfires in the state, how the situation came to be as it is and, most critically, what is likely not going to be done about it. (more…)

Michael Shermer likes to tread dangerous waters. His latest dip into challenging the received turbulance of our times is an evolutionary explanation for the state of Modern Capitalism. Politicos, religionists and the lay masses, if they actually take a gander through Shermer’s The Mind of the Market: Compassionate Apes, Competitive Humans, and Other Tales from Evolutionary Economics, will likely recoil in disagreement. “You mean to say democratic life is not God-ordained?” they may gasp.

Shermer, chief evolutionist and resident skeptic at Skeptic Magazine, has long maintained the root of human behavior lies not only in our biology but in how our surroundings influence our actions. In this latest iteration, Shermer traces human evolution to explain why we are the way we are today. “If our species is about a hundred thousand years old, then 90 percent of our history has been spent in (a) state of relative economic simplicity,” he writes.

It’s true. The 1997 anthropological manifesto Limited Wants, Unlimited Means: A Reader On Hunter-Gatherer Economics And The Environmentdescribes in various essays how our hunter-gatherer ancestry got along in sustainable bands and tribes. Shermer, similar to these others before him, then extrapolates the “relative state of economic simplicity” into what we are today: consumer traders. (more…)