In his weekly column
author Jim Conrad talks about "the wave of human-caused
extinctions we're experiencing right now is the first to take
place since the one that 65 million years ago killed off the
dinosaurs and caused nearly half of the main groups of marine
animals to go extinct" The world around us that we take
for granted is rapidly disappearing.
What vivid memories I recall from the 1960s in Kentucky,
learning my birds from the old Peterson fieldguide. Surely no
time in my life has been happier than those days of recognizing
for the first time that I shared the landscape with such glorious
beings as Summer Tanagers, Yellow-breasted Chats, Cerulean
Warlbers....Mississippi actually is one of the least impacted
states. Only 54% of our species are in decline. In Tennessee, 74%
are failing, while in Vermont it's 85%. I am hardly surprised.
During the 1970s I served as naturalist on archeology tours in
the Petén Region of northern Guatemala, and I was always tickled
to see there so many of the migratory species that up here I know
as summer residents. The Audubon page says that at my time in the
Petén, in 1977, 77% of the original forest cover still existed.
By 1980, however, that number had fallen to 42% and by 1989 just
29% of the original forest cover remained. It's estimated that as
little as 10% will survive in 2025.
Conrad refers to the Audubon Population site
which has the stark statistics that "25% of the world's
mammals and 11% of its birds are at significant risk of
extinction".
Though the U.S. promised, at
the 1994 International Conference on Population and Development
in Cairo, to donate 0.7 percent of it Gross Domestic Product to
overall development assistance, U.S. aid currently adds up to
less than one third of our committment. While environmentalists
the world over strive to protect forests and fields, experience
has shown that political support for habitat protection falters
when human need reaches a critical threshold. In both Latin
America and the U.S., for example, critical wildlife areas are
threatened by oil, mining, and timber exploitation that is deemed
necessary to sustain rapidly growing human populations.
Rob is the
founder and editor of the news site robwire.com and is a
frequent contributor to rob.dailykos.com
and robnotes.blogspot.com