Why is this colorful little wheel suddenly everywhere in Japan?
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
Not only Japanese companies but also Japanese universities have been quick to adopt it. Some examples of university programs with “SDGs” in their titles are at [1, 2, 3, 4, 5].
In my experience, the currently promoted buzzwords are often included in university program names in order to attract government funding. Five or ten years ago, the leading buzzword was “global.” My own university has probably a dozen or more programs with “global” in their titles; my colleagues often remark how hard it is to remember which is which.
Another current buzzword, in both business and academia, is “DX” (digital transformation).
Though the SDGs bandwagon is still going strong, some Japanese commentators have started to question it. A person interviewed in an article posted on Friday to a radio station’s website [6] calls SDGs “fraudulent.” He also notes that Japan leads the world in Google searches for “SDGs,” followed by Zimbabwe.
[1] https://www.nara-edu.ac.jp/ESDC/
[2] https://www.chubu.ac.jp/academics/college-education/sdgs/
[3] https://www.senshu-u.ac.jp/social/senshu_sdgs/challengeprogr...
[4] https://www.koeki-u.ac.jp/academics/personnel-training-progr...
[5] https://www.it-hiroshima.ac.jp/about/gp/center/sdgs.html
[6] https://web.archive.org/web/20220828044344/https://www.joqr....
Now that you’re aware of it, keep your eyes open and you’ll see it pop up in various spots
The yamanote line:
Quite often on politicians/government worker lapels:
https://www.kantei.go.jp/jp/content/20211224_sdgsaw02.jpg
Skytree event:
https://www.tokyo-skytree.jp/en/press/post/493
...
I expect it to be everywhere mid September for "sdgs week"
They're also heavily promoted in my work's orientation and training material, but the hq's over in Europe.
I've seen it in the wild maybe two times at most. Once in Ikebukuro as part of some volunteer clean up thing and another on some building somewhere.
So to me, it's not completely unheard of, but "suddenly everywhere" is still definitely a huge stretch.
All agreeable prospects, but all too vague and hard to define. They're more a wish-list than goals.
For example, what defines poverty? Wages vs the median, or quality of life factors? What makes work "decent"? What does inequality mean in this context, economic, judicial, racial?
Vague aspirational goals sound nice but are rarely met without considering the real decisions that have to be made to meet them. These things are things everyone wants, but what are we willing to sacrifice to meet them?
> For example, what defines poverty? Wages vs the median, or quality of life factors? What makes work "decent"? What does inequality mean in this context, economic, judicial, racial?
They're actually defined in far more detail: https://sustainabledevelopment.un.org/content/documents/2125...
(The details of the goals start around half way through)
https://edition.cnn.com/2022/07/11/europe/faroe-islands-whal...
It’s not as bad as cattle farming, which is straight up destroying the environment in several ways, from clear cutting rainforests to feed them to filling the air with methane.
And dolphin tastes pretty good, too.
> The ones being hunted aren’t at risk of extinction.
Cetaceans travel huge distances so... how much are "too much" dolphins? 1000 dolphins in a bay can seem a lot but, what if is 1000 for the entire Mediterranean?
If a machine comes with 30 screws, you just don't remove 20 screws randomly and expect the machine work as well as before. Is clearly a bad idea. Top predators provide environmental services for free, that are extremely expensive or impossible to replace. When we broke it, is broken for a long, long time, at least the rest of our lives.
Scientists say this since ages. Nobody listen.
If you go here: https://sdgs.un.org/goals#goals then click on each goal, its expanded in more detail, including implementation targets, of which there are over 150.
Many, especially governments, have definitions of poverty which are statistical, either percentile or a proportion of median income which makes it either actually impossible (there will always be a bottom n percent) or practically impossible (nobody earning less than half median wages).
https://foreignpolicy.com/2022/03/05/sri-lanka-organic-farmi...
I think we can all agree that homelessness is a problem we should address. If we could somehow tackle that one our country would be in a better place.
No need to kill the idea because we can't precisely describe what the definition is.
Look at the central bank inflation/unemployment dilemma.
Complete gender equality but otherwise only reduced inequality? I find that disagreeable.
PS: I'm not even sure whales eat fish that much. Either plankton or squid.
> Whales, the argument goes, consume a ruinous quantity of fish, and controlling their population is critical for preserving the oceans’ diversity. An online video from an industry association recommends eating the mammals “to protect the balance of the marine ecosystem and contribute to marine S.D.G.s!”
It is fascinating that whales have found a way to be both an endangered species, and an overpopulated ocean scourge (as an apex predator, no less) at the same time!
Spreading the idea that endangered animals eat "too much" is evil. Rotten to the core.
[1] https://us.whales.org/our-4-goals/stop-whaling/whaling-in-ja...
I see, so , humpback whale population has just crossed the line of no longer being an endangered species, *this year*. So did they overnight become an environmental pest that is decimating the fish population? I am going to guess you would say no. So I don't think your comment is relevant to the actual point being made. If OTOH you are just applying some factual editing so that my amazing comment can be printed in a newspaper, let's clean up that language sure!
Do I think that whales are decimating fish populations? Probably not, but I would need to see some data to say with any degree of certainty. And again, this is something you would need to look at in terms of local whale stocks and fisheries vs. just looking at all whales as a whole.
> So I don't think your comment is relevant to the actual point being made. If OTOH you are just applying some factual editing so that my amazing comment can be printed in a newspaper, let's clean up that language sure!
I think it is relevant to point out flawed logic or overly simplistic thinking in pretty much any discussion - regardless of whether or not it will be printed in a newspaper.
OK see this is where you are wasting everyone's time. Japanese whaling fleets are targeting those exact whale populations that *are* endangered. Most of the international community opposes their practices and there are many international protections on various whale species that the Japanese whalers simply ignore. pointing out "flaws" in what random people are saying about some random NYT article that mentions it is irrelevant to understanding what is actually going in the world, things that are true and actually happening that you can confirm (or whatever you feel like) on your own, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whaling_in_Japan.
> Do I think that whales are decimating fish populations? Probably not, but I would need to see some data to say with any degree of certainty. And again, this is something you would need to look at in terms of local whale stocks and fisheries vs. just looking at all whales as a whole.
your time then would be better spent *researching that* instead of wasting it nitpicking people. If I make a comment here, my audience are those people interested in making good faith interpretations. Sitting back and saying "hmmm, what if whales DO actually eat too much fish, and maybe the Japanese are only hunting whales that are not endangered? Here's one that's stopped being endangered for 8 months! ah HA! a flaw!" that's what we call a "bad faith" interpretation. it's non-constructive and reveals you aren't really very curious about the actual issue. I am not very interested in word games myself.
> I think it is relevant to point out flawed logic or overly simplistic thinking in pretty much any discussion - regardless of whether or not it will be printed in a newspaper.
The argument made by Japanese whalers in that quote is clearly idiotic, which you can confirm through a little bit of googling, where you would then know more about the subject. Correcting people who are failing to convince you of something due to small inaccuracies in their language OTOH fails to teach you anything new at all.
Put another way. an actual rebuttal to my comment would be, "I'm a marine biologist, and here are whale species X, Y and Z that are not endangered at all, to which the ecosystem is now being improved thanks to the Japanese whaling industry wiping out a third of them, and here's why the vast majority of the international oceanic community is wrong on this issue in their opposition to Japan's killing fleets". That would be some argument for sure, since it doesnt exist, but if one did, would at least be an informed comment that's valuable to the discussion.
> Japanese whaling fleets are targeting those exact whale populations that are endangered.
But the wikipedia article you linked basically says the exact opposite - that Antarctic Minke whales are not designated as threatened:
> Their objective is to hunt 3,000 Antarctic minke whales over 10 years, starting with 330 whales during the 2015–16 season.[citation needed] Antarctic minke whales have experienced an apparent decline in population, though the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) indicates that it lacks sufficient data to confer a threatened designation on the species of minke whale.
It also says:
> The 1985 IWC estimate put the Southern Hemisphere minke whale population at 761,000 (510,000–1,140,000 in the 95% confidence estimate).[179] A paper submitted to the IWC on population estimates in Antarctic waters using CNB gives a population of 665,074 based on Southern Ocean Whale and Ecosystem Research Programme (SOWER) data.[180]
So Japan is planning to kill about 300 Minke whales a year out of a population of 500,000 or so (using the lowest estimates from the wikipedia page). That’s about 0.06% of the population per year, which definitely does not seem like enough threaten the survival of the species.
With regards to:
> Correcting people who are failing to convince you of something due to small inaccuracies in their language OTOH fails to teach you anything new at all
In my opinion the inaccuracies in your comments thus far go far beyond mere "language" issues. I don't think any amount of careful rewording would fix them. These are factual and logical misunderstandings that are core to the very point you are trying to make.
I also believe that I am acting in good faith by engaging with the things you have written so far and browsing the article that you have linked. If you have more evidence that you would like to cite to support your views (ideally something a bit more specific than telling me to "research it" on my own - citing the fact and then providing a link to the source is the generally accepted standard), I would be happy to have a look.
> Japan kept official hunts of endangered species such as North Pacific right whales until 1994,[141] but intentional by-catches of endangered still continue to present in unknown scales.
Secondly, the actual point is that Japanese whalers claim existing whale populations are bad for the environment because such populations are too large, which is ridiculous, given the endangered, recently endangered, or nearly endangered status of most of the whale species they have targeted, not to mention apex predators are not prone to overpopulation since they rely on lower levels of the food chain to survive. It does not matter which species are currently endangered and which are not. It is not my burden to disprove a made up fact.
> So Japan is planning to kill about 300 Minke whales a year out of a population of 500,000 or so (using the lowest estimates from the wikipedia page). That’s about 0.06% of the population per year, which definitely does not seem like enough threaten the survival of the species.
nor would it therefore have any impact on reducing overconsumption of other fish species, which is their actual claim, if in fact their population reduction across all whale species is extremely low.
> In my opinion the inaccuracies in your comments thus far go far beyond mere "language" issues. I don't think any amount of careful rewording would fix them. These are factual and logical misunderstandings that are core to the very point you are trying to make.
you are clearly very skilled at language which makes it all the more clear that your continued intentional misunderstanding of a point I was making is not constructive.
> Japanese whaling fleets are targeting those exact whale populations that are endangered
And the evidence you have cited was this line from a wikipedia article:
> Japan kept official hunts of endangered species such as North Pacific right whales until 1994,[141] but intentional by-catches of endangered still continue to present in unknown scales.
There are a number of different issues here:
> Japan kept official hunts of endangered species such as North Pacific right whales until 1994 ,[141]
This ended nearly 30 years ago, so I will ignore as it is not relevant to the discussion of what Japan is currently doing. (That citation from the wikipedia article is also completely bogus - if you visit the link you will find an article written in 1818 (!) that has been translated to Chinese. So definitely not about modern Japanese whaling.)
> intentional by-catches of endangered still continue to present in unknown scales
Issues here are:
* No citation given in the wikipedia article
* Saying it happens in “unknown scales” provides no indication of the size of the problem. Is is 1 per year or 1000?
* “intentional” appears to be a typo here. “By-catch” by definition means the unintentional capture of non-targeted species.
So to recap - you made a claim earlier that Japanese are targeting endangered species. And then as justification you referenced an improperly cited claim about something that ended 30 years ago, and an un-cited claim about by-catches - which is very much not the same thing as targeting endangered species. There is absolutely nothing here to justify your claim.
By the way, I do think that by-catch is a real issue that is estimated to kill 300,000 cetaceans every year [1]. So many orders of magnitude more impactful than Japanese whaling. But it is a global issue inherent to commercial fishing rather than an issue with Japanese fishing in particular.
> It is not my burden to disprove a made up fact.
I’ll remind you that this whole thread started precisely because you did attempt to disprove this claim. If your position is simply that “This seems like an unlikely claim, but I have no evidence to disprove it” - then that’s perfectly reasonable. But based on the arguments and evidence you have put forth so far, any degree of confidence in your opinion beyond that is completely unjustified.
And finally, I would just like to point out one more inaccuracy in your most recent comment for good measure:
> not to mention apex predators are not prone to overpopulation since they rely on lower levels of the food chain to survive
Baleen whales (which are the types that are targeted by Japanese whalers) are not considered apex predators since they feed primarily on krill and smaller fish. So basically they are competing with fish for the same food source.
Good times.
I've never seen these wheels. Maybe in 2032? shrug
I think humans are doing that
Which is to say, that without a vote being cast, these plans are being implemented locally across the world.
If that's correct, is this not a UN takeover of government? Yes, worthy words around the goals etc, but aren't the people allowed a choice, with understanding, about what's coming their way?
In the other direction, the UN only exists because nation states voluntarily choose to be a part of it. It’s not some external force.
Are you not at all concerned that there is an organisation that is deciding what to promote, and that there is little you can do, once you 'elected representative' waves through whatever is proposed to them? And did you realise when you voted for your elected representative, that they were going to accept(/refuse) the UN sustainable development goals and implement them locally?
You may as well ask whether Dennis Ritchie took over Microsoft.