The Royal Albatross

It took about 3 hours for nature and bad luck to break him, but he finally said it. His steady level of energy seemed to momentarily sag. His posture up there in the driver seat crumpled just a little. I thought i detected a slight sigh, and before jumping out again into the driving rain to open yet another livestock gate, he said,

"Well guys, it looks like we're really having a shit day. This is more like what you would expect here in a winter storm..."

I was glad to hear him admit it, but i was still having a good time. I was just beginning to worry that he might be psychotically positive all the time. He'd done a great job though, of making the best out of the situation.

For a Royal Albatross though, it was a damn fine day. Gale force winds that made it physically difficult for a human to walk around in provide a stable surfing platform for a bird with wingspan up to twelve feet wide.



One of the things i liked about Dunedin was that in many parts of the city you could look up from just about anywhere downtown to gaze upon pretty sheep pastures on the steep hillsides that squeezed the town. Today we were traveling across some of those very pastures out to the very end of the Otago Peninsula. I never thought i'd do it, but we were on a bird watching tour. We were packed into a white van with 10 other people peering through foggy windows at a bunch of sometimes weird birds that i'd never heard of. I'm so uneducated about birds that i've been yelled at by three different people for passing up the opportunity to take a picture of one of the birds we saw that is apparently extremely rare to see, even for serious bird watchers. Looked like a typical skinny legged shallows bird to me.


A cool spit of land with a house on it.

Our main purpose for the tour was to go to the Royal Albatross, the biggest species of Albatross in the world. At the end of the Otago Peninsula lies the only mainland nesting site of the birds on the planet. It took us a long time to get out there, and when we finally did was when i started getting pissed off. The viewing is restricted to small groups, and our tour guide said we only had 1 hour to be there.


A wind gauge.

First we had to wait 10 minutes for things to get organized. During that time you can wander through various educational displays. Then, they take you into a room and give you an overview of what you are about to do next, which takes about 6 minutes. I was so ready to go into a photographic frenzy but... Then you have to watch an EXCRUCIATING 10 to 15 minute movie about the birds covering all the information you already learned looking at the displays while waiting to get into the theater. THEN MORONS GET TO ASK QUESTIONS THAT PROVE THEY WEREN'T LISTENING TO THE LONG ASS MOVIE!!!



Finally we were led outside where you must walk up a switchbacking concrete path, past several bunker entrances. For reasons i am in the dark about, you must pass through a couple of locked gates even though you are already in a secure area. More mysteries plagued my mind as i wondered why our ranger guide (not our day guide) was taking minute after minute to catch up with the group between each gate.





It had taken forever to get there, and the situation did not improve. The viewing room had windows on one side that were tinted, making for difficult exposures on a dark day. Even worse, there were tons of birght lights on in the room, causing reflections all over the glass. The worst though, was that the tinted glass was completely covered in dirt on the outside. I mean it was seriously dirty. Autofocus wouldn't work at all. I couldn't believe they would let them get that dirty. I could forget all about any great shots. If your trying to take pictures of objects that are quickly and randomly changing directions and distance from the camera, autofocus is pretty important, unless it's bright enough to have a longer depth of field. There was some European guy with a lot of camera equipment like me, and i could tell he was also infuriated about all the same things. He couldn't speak english though. I at least got the ranger lady to turn off all the lights in the room.









The birds were magnificent. It was hard to judge their size with nothing else on the hillside to compare to. Their size and the incredible design of their wings was occasionally given away when a smaller bird like a raven or a seagull would fly up out of the eddy created by the viewing building and enter the main wind current. Without warning those birds would be comically swept away out of control and out of site while only a few yards away the Albatross would be nearly motionless, hovering over the same position until suddenly veering unpredictably left or right like jet fighters breaking formation. I thought the wind was behaving unpredictably, but the ranger told us we were seeing mostly juvenile birds and, being back to solid ground for the first time since leaving the nest 4 or 5 years ago, the young birds were having a kind of social celebration, taking turns showing off their skills to their competitors. We were alotted about 15 minutes to watch the amazing, endangered creatures It went very fast.



Our next stop was another colony penguins. I felt a little misled and cheated on the Albatross portion of the tour. The brochures available on the Otago Peninsula and the information agents at the i-centers seemed to purposely conceal the fact that you can easily drive there yourself, free from any tour schedule. If the weather had been nice i would definitely have preferred to do so and enjoy the surroundings. As things were though, we did have a very friendly, likable, and very knowledgeable guide who pointed out an awful lot of things that i would have missed by myself. Plus, the penguins we were going to see were on private land, so at least you had to be on the tour to see them. Access was by driving across numerous grazing fields full of sheep and through half a dozen gates. I could see how this part would get pretty old for a guide. Stopping, opening the gate, driving through the gate, stopping, closing the gate, driving to the next gate, and repeating the whole process in reverse on the way back. Along the way the sheep continuously proved themselves worthy to be eaten.



The penguins were at a secluded beach. Penguins in this area seemed to all climb up the high hillsides upon emerging from the sea. I asked how far they walked after swimming all day long (they seem exhausted when they get out) and was told that they have been known to walk as far a a kilometer up the hills every day to get to their nest. They walk slow too.



We had to walk down the hill in the rain through high wet grass and thistles. The wind was raging and i actually fell down once because i had made the poor choice of wearing loafer type shoes for the day. We were unable to get very close to these penguins, the free viewing we saw a few days before was a much better value. I decided that the next time i go see Albatross and Penguins it's going to be on South Georgia Island.




Some of the baby penguins were getting large. This one (on the left), after meeting it's parent for the first time since early morning, was showing how big and tough it was by spinning around and spreading out it's wings.



We didn't get back to town until about 8:30 at night. Unfortunately for us, we had to leave. It turned out that all the hotels in town were booked for days because of college orientation week and some sporting events. We had to drive through the dark and pouring rain for two hours over unlit twisty roads in the hills to get to the nearest hotel with vacancy. It was in a small redneck town and a rock band was playing at our hotel. It was rowdy enough that the police showed up. I was happy because i wanted to sleep. The next morning i found a huge pile of unopened beer bottles grass near my car. I should have taken some.


Fighting the waves to get on shore.




Sometimes sealions, who also hang out on the beach, will decide to eat some of the penguins.

Buddhism and Stem Cells.

I was watching a great lecture given by the great Sam Harris and wanted to relay some of the information he mentioned about stem cell research. He talked about the embryonic stem cells which seem to show the most potential and that the stem cells used from this form come from the blastocyst, which is a collection of 50-150 cells and is only 4-5 days old. It's not organized with a nervous system and it doesn't have a brain. And the blastocysts that the scientists and doctors want to use are excess embryos created for in vitro fertilization donated with consent and used for the research.

Now think about this, the brain of a common house fly has 100,000 cells that make up its brain and that is just a fly!! A fly has a brain and a fly has neurons. Yet most of us don't think twice about killing one of them, however, do worry about destroying a 5 day old ball of cells that will be destroyed anyway? It seems short sighted to not make the most of these blastocysts before they are discarded. As Harris describes it, "We know that more suffering is visited upon this Earth every time we swat a fly than when we kill a three day old human embryo."

Sam Harris again:

"On one had with have this collection of 50-150 cells and on the other we have little girls suffering from diabetes and full body burns, we have men and women with Parkinson's disease, we have literally tens of millions of people suffering terrible torments which could one day be remediated by this research." I submit to you, if you think that the interests of a virtually microscopic collection of cells; I mean if you had ten of these (blastocysts) in the palm or your hand right now you would never notice. If you think that the interests of these organisms may yet trump the interests of a girl with full body burns, you have had your ethical intuitions blinded by religious metaphysics. No ethical argument would get you there. No argument that talked about human suffering and its alleviation would get you there. It's not enough to say that the collection of human cells are potential human beings. Given genetic engineering every cell in our body with a nucleus is a potential human being, every time the president scratches his nose he's engaged in a holocaust of potential human beings.

Just take for a moment the claim that there are souls in this petri dish, that every human blastocyst, a three day old embryo is ensouled. Well unfortunately, embryos at that stage can split into twins so what happens, we have one soul becoming two souls? Embryos at an even later stage can fuse back into what is called a kymero, a single individual born of two embryos, so do we have two souls becoming one soul? This arithmetic of souls doesn't make much sense.

James: As a Buddhist I agree with everything Mr. Harris has said above. I don't believe that we complex humans have souls let alone blastocysts. As one Buddhist scientist described it, "It is the recycling of life." In other words it is using life that would be discarded anyway to better the life and reduce the suffering of a living breathing being. I don't see it any different than donating blood or donating an organ upon your death. In a manner of speaking It's all a type of rebirth and coming from a place that any Buddhist would recognize, compassion.

Want to what the Dalai Lama thinks, so did I as he's the closest thing we have to a central authority on Buddhism. I know not all of us follow his tradition, like myself, but I think we can all agree that he's an expert on the Buddhadharma:

From the Buddhist perspective, the general line of demarcation in ethics is based mainly on the long-term consequences-the results of the scientific research. It's very difficult to distinguish the ethical status of an action simply by judging the nature of the action itself. Much depends on the actor's motivation. A 'spiritual' act with negative motivation is essentially wrong. A more aggressive act may seem destructive, but if that specific action is carried out with altruistic motivation, and the proper sort of goal, then it could be positive. Of course, the motivation is not opaque to the individual who is engaged in the act. So, it very much depends on the scientists' motivation. If you as scientists have a sincerely compassionate motivation, and a sense of responsibility for the long-term implications, then carry out your work and make your decisions. If you have to weigh the benefit for a smaller community against a larger community, the larger community is more important, generally speaking.

But the basic point is that whatever is most beneficial is what needs to be pursued-or at least what an individual feels is probably going to be of most benefit and least negative is what that individual should carry out. On the question of gene replacement and manipulation, this is similar to things we are already doing at the gross physical level. For example kidney, heart, and liver transplants are now very common practice and patients benefit from these transplants. By extension of that principle, one could conceivably replace or change certain genetic components that are instrumental in causing diseases. But we should at least have a very high degree of knowledge of the implications, both the benefits and the side effects. And then, perhaps, in principle, this would be acceptable.

"But how do we understand at what point consciousness enters the embryo? This is problematic. A fetus, which is becoming a human is already a sentient being. But a fertilized egg may actually bifurcate into 8, 16, 32, 64 cells and become an embryo, and yet be naturally aborted and never become a human being. This is why I feel that for the formation of life, for something to actually become a human, something more is needed than simply a fertilized egg. It may be that what you do to a conglomeration of cells that have the possibility of becoming human entails no negative or karmically unwholesome act. However, when you're dealing with a configuration of cells that are definitely on the track to becoming a human being, it's a different situation. (James: My interpretation of this last sentence is that it becomes more problematic at a more advanced stage. For example I don't think many scientists are willing to exploit full blown fetuses for stem cells.)

"In some areas, Buddhism may have a different perspective from secular ethics. I think for example about human rights. From the Buddhist viewpoint, it is very difficult to claim that we human beings have special rights that are categorically different from animal rights. All sentient beings, all beings who have the experience of pain and pleasure, have the natural right to protect their existence and fulfill their aspiration to overcome suffering and enjoy happiness. The claim to rights is based on the capacity to experience pain and pleasure; it has nothing to do with intelligence, which is the main distinction between animals and human beings. They have the same experiences of pain and pleasure that we do.

James: As the DL reminds us, sentient beings are basically those who can feel pleasure and pain. So as blastocysts do not have central nervous systems to even register pain let alone a brain to experience I think it is safe to say that it is not yet human life. In conclusion my interpretation of the DL's teachings above definitely allow for stem cell research as long as it's done at the early blastocyst stage). Of course we know that we can not end all suffering in this world but it would be irresponsible of us not to help when and where we can to ease suffering.

~Peace to all beings~