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| Source: Mother Nature Network |
Source: Vital Issues
"We are members of probably the last generation who will share this planet with living forests, living rivers, living oceans." -- Derrick Jensen, writing in The Ecologist, October 2003
One million species of animals and plants face extinction from drastic Climate Change (global warming) alone within decades.
"A quarter of known land animals and plants, more than a million species, will eventually die out because of the global warming that will take place over the next fifty years, the most important study of its kind has concluded. International scientists from eight countries have warned that, based even on the most conservative estimates, rising temperatures will trigger a global mass extinction of unprecedented proportions." (The Independent, 8 January 2004, "Revealed: how global warming will cause extinction of a million species", by Steve Connor, Science Editor)
Has anyone tallied how many extinctions have already taken place? Extinctions were said 20 years ago to have occurred at a rate of one a month. How many a month is it now? Nearly one-half the world’s forests have been lost in the past 30 years. How many animals & plants have disappeared
along with them?
Human beings are destroying their own biosphere, their life support system -- killing off mammals and birds and fish and other aquatic creatures and soil & aquatic micro-organisms; decimating forests and killing off plant species; polluting the seas into depleted-oxygen Dead Zones and befouling rivers & lakes & streams & any available pool of water with disease-producing & cancer-causing chemicals and radioactivity.
Human beings -- primarily the controllers (major shareholders) and operators of giant corporations -- are destroying living creatures and their habitats as if we could live completely without them.
You doubtless have not heard of the tiny Californian tecopa pupfish that was made extinct by a commercial development that could have avoided doing it.
They are gone. But we can still rescue endangered and threatened animal species such as (to name only a few of the best-known creatures): African gorilla and chimpanzee, Sumatran orangutan, tiger and lion of India, rhinoceros and elephant of Asia, several species of whales, the South American condor (the largest bird on the planet), leopards in the Caucasus and Far East. Not to mention severely diminished populations, such as the wonderful cheetah (just about the fastest creature on earth)
How many among us have any sense of Wonder and Beauty concerning the natural world, Creation?
How many of us are sensitive to what the wholesale destruction of Life means, in moral terms?
For all of us, and especially for that silent majority that only seems to care about money and material things, know that we are destroying ecosystem 'property' worth an estimated 33 trillion dollars a year to us.
