Exercise 13.1 Eco-Labeling and Certification
Tuna are only one of countless products labeled for “green” or “sustainable” consumption.
But who are the organizations that oversee the certification of these products? What procedures do they use? Where competing labels exist, how do they differ? Find an eco-labeled product and try your best to answer the following questions: 1) What does the label assure?
2) Have the characteristics of the product assured by the label improved or changed environmental practices of the companies making the product? What do the words on the label mean (for example: “natural”). 3) Who oversees that certification process; are they “third parties” (people or groups apart from the company)? 4) What procedures does the product undergo to claim the label and how is that confirmed?
Now consider the following: how much time and labor did it take for you to confirm (or deny) that the label in question is reliable and does what it says? What would it take to do so for all such products you consume, assuming you wanted to? How much trust must be placed in labels? Do you feel it is well placed?
Exercise 13.2 Contemporary Commercial Fishing (and Overfishing)
Purse-seine fishing with once-unimaginably large nets is not the only modern commercial fishing technique that threatens has the potential to wipe out fisheries around the world’s oceans. Other techniques that can and do oft en lead to overfishing include longlining and drift -netting (sometimes called gill nets).
For this assignment, choose one modern, intensive commercial fishing method (purse seine, longlining, gill netting, bottom trawling, or another that you find on your own) to research. In a one-page essay, describe the technique and three ocean fisheries (species and location) in which this technique is commonly applied. Additionally, describe whether or not these fisheries are being fi shed sustainably and how, if at all, catch limits in these fisheries are regulated.
Exercise 13.3 Scientific Whaling
One of the most well-known slogans of the environmental movement is “Save the Whales!”.
Rubber dinghies manned with Greenpeace or Sea Shepherd Society activists ramming whaling ships is an iconic image of “direct action” environmental activism. The international whale conservation movement has become so popular, indeed, that very few countries worldwide harvest any whales from the world’s oceans, and most haven’t for decades. A few countries, however, engage in a practice known (by its proponents) as “scientific whaling.” What is scientific whaling? What countries engage in this practice?
How is it rationalized? What groups (and nations) are opposed to it, and why? Read up on this topic, and explain whether opponents of scientific whaling make arguments based primarily in animal rights ethics or ecological ethics (or, perhaps, some of both).