Martha, thought to be the world’s last passenger pigeon died on September 1, 1914 in Cincinnati, Ohio.
The species once numbered in the billions but after intense hunting, the passenger pigeon suffered a catastrophic decline and disappeared from the planet.
Martha, the last passenger pigeon
Hmm, destroy 85 to 90% of the population of a species and dither over whether to ban more hunting of the animals?
But this is encouraging news: Europe leaning toward banning bluefin tuna catch.
Alaska is pushing ahead for the state to spend $1.5 million to fight the listing of the polar bear as an endangered species.
Another letdown from the Obama administration:
The Fish and Wildlife Service has denied protection to the American Pika which could become extinct due to global warming.
As Greenwire’s Patrick Weiss writes in the New York Times: “Said Greg Loarie, an attorney with Earthjustice: ‘To conclude the species is not even threatened by climate change is truly irresponsible.’”
Groups such as the Center for Biological Diversity have pushed for the effects of greenhouse gas emissions to be considered under the Endangered Species Act. But, in this decision, they see the Obama administration reaffirming the stance of the Bush administration. What a shame.
Diane von Furstenberg has more Facebook friends than there are tigers left in the wild.
It’s time for corporations to stop profiting from the use of imagery of endangered animals without giving money for their protection.
I’m not a lawyer but I would like endangered animals to have control over use of their images and to be paid a licensing fee that would go toward saving their habitat and ensuring their survival.
On the Coca-Cola website last year, Coke historian Phil Mooney wrote that:
“Our beloved bear was introduced in 1993, and turns 15 this year.”
“Please join me in wishing a Happy Birthday to our bear, who I think doesn’t look a day over 10!”
As polar bears die and drown and decline due to global warming, should Coca-Cola have the right to use these images without giving back to the species?
Two or three rhinos are reportedly killed every week in Africa and Asia to make traditional medicines and to make dagger handles. Even so, a number of rhino populations in Africa are increasing in number.
A New Zealand ecologist has devised a new way to count birds and animals in the wild, which would make it easier to determine extant populations of certain endangered species. The technique listens for bird calls and animal sounds and using a mathematical formula can calculate the number of individuals in an area.
Seedhead is entering a new phase with a focus on endangered plants and animals and the endangerment of the natural world as a whole.
One of my biggest areas of interest is the terminology surrounding extinction and endangered species. Endangered, threatened, extinct, even the more recent coinage, ecocide – these words seem to be lacking in or have lost the power to highlight the awesome and terrible loss of diverse and beautiful inhabitants of this planet.
Extinction, perhaps first and foremost, falls down on the job. The idea that the term originally connoted, as far as I know, is “to go extinct.” There’s a passive, “oh, that kinda just happened” quality to the word. It not only fails to convey the idea that there are causes behind extinction, but ridiculously fails at pointing to the many different causes that actually exist (and which sadly appear to be growing.)
Extinction as a word is being asked to encompass dead endings brought on by many different things. There are species that go extinct for quote unquote natural reasons: because they lose reproductive viability, or because they have been outcompeted by other species or because they have been driven to extinction by such occurrences as ice ages and meteor crashes.
But the word is also meant to include species that are pushed to a fatal edge by humankind, whether by man-made climate change; activities such as hunting, harvesting, poaching and overfishing to obtain food and other animal resources; development which reduces habitat; activities such as agriculture and extraction that reduce habitat; and activities that reduce the populations of animal predator threats.
And, while there are gray areas between them, extinction fails to differentiate between these natural and man-made losses. And, on top of that, it does not take into account intention when it comes to losses caused by humanity. In rare cases has a species been intentionally eradicated. Many are lost due to unsustainable hunting and fishing. But the explosion of extinction these days is mainly for reasons that are, to a varying degree, unintentional. We don’t mean to kill off species when we reduce and destroy habitat by developing land for real estate and agricultural uses, logging forests, and shaving off mountaintops to mine minerals. And, sixty years ago or so, no one could have foreseen that industrialism would change the atmosphere of the entire earth. (Exhibit A: The Yangtze river dolphin, believed to have gone extinct two years ago due to “incidental mortality” as the BBC reported.)
Where are the words that will report to duty now?
An interview with William Alexander, author of the new book, “The $64 Tomato: How One Man Nearly Lost His Sanity, Spent a Fortune and Endured an Existential Crisis in the Quest for the Perfect Garden.” Alexander spent over $16,000 creating the perfect vegetable garden and made himself a bit mad in the process. Publishers Weekly called it “a hilarious horticultural memoir.”
