Meet SEJ member Christopher James Preston! Christopher is a transplanted Brit writing from Missoula, Montana. His work orbits around climate change and biodiversity. His new book on animal recoveries, "Tenacious Beasts: Wildlife Recoveries That Change How We Think About Animals," finds glimmers of hope in a dozen species back from the brink.
In his book “The Synthetic Age,” University of Montana environmental philosophy professor Christopher Preston argues the future world won’t be natural, it’ll be synthetic. With global climate trends projected to
It is one of the stranger quirks of crime history that a marine snail became one of the key drivers in the development of the South African synthetic drugs market from the 1990s onwards, as well as forming a lucrative illicit market in its own right. Over two decades, the illegal market for South African abalone (
Haliotis midae, also known as
perlemoen) has grown to the point where more than 2,000 tonnes are being poached from South African waters annually, according to 2018 estimates from wildlife monitoring group TRAFFIC.
The growth of this poached abalone market helped fuel the rise in the trafficking of synthetic drugs and their precursors to South Africa. Although much has changed since the 1990s, according to interviews with abalone poachers and middlemen, many of the same dynamics that established the abalone-synthetics connection still remain in place today.