Among the many things that outrage and depress me about humanity, our treatment of and disregard for the oceans is near the top, and I'm not talking about oil spills (though there's that, too). Yet another species faces extinction, and the disappearance of blue tuna could catastrophically change the nature of the oceanic ecosystem. All so the Japanese (and Americans, and Europeans) can get their quality sushi. Disgusting.
A new report says half of the primates in the world are in danger of extinction. Not surprisingly, human-spurred deforestation is a major factor. Of course, the report will probably be ignored by the primates who are responsible, but it's just another devastating and depressing reminder of the destructive power of unchecked human growth and "development" is having on the rest of the world.
Biological extinctions are always incredibly depressing to me. No less depressing? Cultural extinctions:
This is devastating for a number of fields, ranging from history and anthropology to linguistics and others. Culturally, the world has lost more than a language; it has lost all of the cultural insights, stories, worldviews, and knowledge that that language had passed on from generation to generation for over 65,000 years. As with the extinction of animals, it's hard to say what you can do about it when the numbers whittle down so far, but that doesn't render the loss any less depressing or devastating. Hopefully, Sr is resting with her ancestors and speaking her language with them once again.The last speaker of an ancient tribal language has died in the Andaman Islands, breaking a 65,000-year link to one of the world's oldest cultures.
Boa Sr, who lived through the 2004 tsunami, the Japanese occupation and diseases brought by British settlers, was the last native of the island chain who was fluent in Bo.
Taking its name from a now-extinct tribe, Bo is one of the 10 Great Andamanese languages, which are thought to date back to pre-Neolithic human settlement of south-east Asia.
John James Audubon's drawings of the great auk, a bird of the northwest Atlantic hunted to extinction by 1844.
Certainly, it's hard when anybody says, "just let the species die." Yet that's exactly what one British naturalist is saying about Pandas, declaring that it costs too much to keep them alive, and that they've worked themselves into an evolutionary "cul-de-sac." Even setting aside my primary disagreement based on the fact that for whatever reason, I really like pandas, I have to disagree with him for one very simple reason that this article highlights:
Giant pandas are confined to forest areas high in the mountains of southwestern China and have to consume large quantities of bamboo to survive.It seems to me that they aren't so much "doomed" due to the evolutionary path that they've taken. If left alone to their environment, they would have more than enough bamboo and land to continue surviving just fine. Unfortunately, deforestation, logging, and farming are destroying the panda's otherwise-supportive habitat. That's not an evolutionary cul-de-sac; it's one more example of humanity doing all it can to destroy other species, ecosystems, and the environment in the search of short-term profit.They number around 1,600 and are threatened by agriculture, logging and China's increasing human population.
India may be bringing up the issue of Chinese poaching of their dwindling tiger populations in bilateral talks this week, but does anyone think the Chinese are going to do anything about it? With traditional Chinese medicine using rare cat products such as tiger penis soup for fertility, with rising prosperity in China leading to a huge surge in demand for such dubious products, and with high-ranking members of the Chinese government major consumers of them, I think we are seeing the last wild tigers roam the Earth. I don't know much about captive breeding programs for tigers, but I hope they work because otherwise we are going to lose the great cats.
-It's been a really busy week. For starters, Manuel Zelaya has apparently returned to Honduras, but what's going to happen next is anybody's guess.
...UPDATE: Apparently he entered briefly, but has returned to Nicaragua to avoid arrest. We'll see what follows...
-Brazil has agreed to allow Paraguay to sell its surplus energy from the Itaipu dam to Brazilian companies other than the state-run Eletrobras. The Itaipu issue has been a stickler for years - Brazil needs more energy as it grows, and Paraguay has had a surplus thanks to the agreement to share power from the dam between the two countries when it was built back in the 1970s. Although Lula had originally said he would not review the contract from the 1970s when Lugo won election, he has since taken a more diplomatic stance (as is characteristic of his administration), and it now seems I was correct in suggesting that this would not be nearly the diplomatic crisis between the two countries that some scholars thought it would be.
-There's also great news on how Brazil has stemmed the spread of AIDS:
Two decades ago, it would have been hard to imagine finding an upside to an HIV crisis of the scope that Brazil had on its hands. The World Bank estimated that 1.2 million Brazilians would be infected by the turn of the century — by far the highest number of any country in the region. But today, there is plenty of good news to go around. Thanks to aggressive intervention, Brazil has only about half as many HIV cases as predicted. And the country's popular President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, or Lula for short, has taken the show on the road: HIV/AIDS assistance is becoming a powerful tool in the president's growing diplomatic chest.The article traces how Brazil's government offered free antiretroviral medicine to victims beginning in 1996 and aggressively launching both treatment and prevention programs (in what is simultaneously a reminder that government health programs can and do work, and that even Fernando Henrique Cardoso got some things right in his administration). It also links those efforts to Brazil's broader diplomatic accomplishments since Lula took office in 2002, and is well worth reading in its (relatively brief) entirety.
Major emerging powers such as China, India and Brazil are among nations that may recover fastest once the global economy picks up, Roubini told reporters at the conference. He also mentioned Chile, Uruguay, Colombia and Peru as countries better- positioned to grow. Countries facing the biggest challenges include emerging markets in Eastern Europe, such as Hungary, Bulgaria and Ukraine, he said.-In a stomach-churning story of despicable actions, a jury is considering a lawsuit against a Florida hospital that deported a brain-injured illegal immigrant back to Guatemala in 2003.
The lawsuit seeks nearly $1 million to cover the estimated lifetime costs of his care in Guatemala, as well as damages for the hospital's alleged "false imprisonment" and punitive damages to discourage other medical centers from taking similar action.
Jimenez was a Mayan Indian who was sending money home to his wife and young sons when in 2000, a drunken driver plowed into a van he was riding in, leaving him a paraplegic with the mental capability of a fourth grader. Because of his brain injury, his cousin Montejo Gaspar was made his legal guardian.
Jimenez spent nearly three years at Martin Memorial before the hospital, backed by a letter from the Guatemalan government, got a Florida judge to OK the transfer to a facility in that country. Gaspar appealed.
But without telling Jimenez's family - and the day after Gaspar filed an emergency request to stop the hospital's plan - Martin Memorial put Jimenez on a $30,000 charter flight home early on July 10, 2003.
The outcome of the case could play a major role in how hospitals deal with illegal immigrants in the future, making the case of major importance not just to health-care, but to immigration issues, as well as the basic decency of treating any person, regardless of nation, race, or creed, respectfully and tenderly.
Things like this simply scare the living bejeezus out of me. For reasons that remain totally unclear, bats are dying off in upstate New York in astronomical numbers. Scientists don't even know why - whether it's climate, pesticide, bacteria, fungus, virus, or something else. Species that were already endangered are facing extinction, as are species that were healthy previous to this.
I probably read too much Philip K. Dick (explanation will follow), but it's this kind of thing that really makes me fear for humans. People worry about icecaps melting and things like hurricanes, tornados, colder winters, less water, etc. causing severe harm to humans, and I admit that may be a bit frightening. What terrifies me, though, is the reduction or loss of a species (or multiple species) that throw the living ecosystems so far out of whack that humans have no way or time to recover before catastrophe. I find the fact that the scientists still haven't figured out what the problem is to be very disconcerting, both because species are at risk here, and because the loss of said species could have profound effects we haven't really considered. In some ways, whether the bats are dying because of disease or because of the consequences of human activity (global warming or pesticides) is irrelevant. If this problem doesn't get solved (and it may not - we tend to think we're more capable of things than we sometimes really are), this could be really bad.
(The Philip K. Dick thinking comes in in that a lot of his works deal with time travel and how just one small factor can change everything. While this isn't time travel, thanks to Dick's work, stories like this immediately make me fearful that the seemingly innocuous sickness of bats leads to greater insect numbers, and these insects happen to get some new disease that they transmit to humans, and presto changeo, we're done for. Paranoid? Probably. Dramatic? Certainly. But it's shit like that that terrifiese me about global warming. What delicate balance will be thrown totally out of sync, and what will the results be?).
