Back in 1900, when Theodore Roosevelt was out hunting bears, things were different.
Back in 1902 the human world population was 1.7 billion. Nature was secure. The Jungles and rainforests were intact. The effects of hunting (apart from if you were a Dodo, Passenger pigeon or Bison) were not going to drastically affect animal populations.
Guns were quite rudimentary. You had to get close.
Now we have high-power, accurate guns. You can kill from distance.
We have a population of 7.3 billion. The forests are being decimated. All around the world – the Amazon, Vietnam, Madagascar. Some of the major rainforests are now 10% of what they were in 1900. The hunters, with their high-power weapons, go in to the remaining jungles via the logging roads, and shoot anything that moves. Trucks are heaped with dead chimps, monkeys and anything else you can think of.
I have a head full of questions.
By 2100 the world population could be 16 billion. Will there be a single wild animal left? Will there be a single square mile of rainforest?
What world are we creating?
What should we do with the politicians that are selling the forests for a quick buck?
What should happen to the logging companies who are clearing pristine rainforest to make a killing?
What should happen to the authorities who sell licences to the sad hunters, like Walter Palmer, who murder animals for trophies?
What should happen to the hunters who are decimating wild-life to feed their families?
What can be done to protect our dwindling wild-life and conserve our wildernesses?
Interesting questions and observations. My two cents is that to save ourselves we have to redefine what ‘wild’ means. We are so used to thinking of it as out there, beyond us. Something divorced from ourselves. We have forgotten what we really are.
I quite agree. We have. We feel divorced from what is going on in the natural world because we have created a plastic world into which only the bits of the ‘natural world’ that we like intrudes. We have to reconnect. Thanks for your comment – best wishes Opher
Reblogged this on Opher's World and commented:
These mad men need locking up.
We cannot save ourselves ( forgive me for sounding almost like a fundamentalist Christian ) already our civilisation is ripe for picking , it is a fragile and loose global network. The profit motive prevents any escape antibiotics are running out, and climate is becoming precarious, intelligence may well have had its day .
Kertsen – I don’t choose to believe that. There are many dire problems and human nature has a dark side but I have worked with kids for decades and they inspire me with their enthusiasm, idealism and ability to solve problems. There are answers to all the problems. All we lack is the will.
Opher We can believe what we choose that’s the freedom in the west but we must also like dedicated investigators look for evidence for our beliefs. The evidence is too vast for me but we have many experts to help. There is a tide of scientific concern about the world even from some famous men of science .
The concern is often not about scientic possibilities but about our will and our nature to be sensible. For my part I see science as a double – edged sword building up here and cutting down there. I see it as intelligence without moral compass. Religion in the past was moral compass without the intelligent pursuit of knowledge.
Kertsen – that is true. But we can express our concerns and wishes – which is what I do.
There are huge concerns that I share with the majority of scientists:
There are too many of us
We are polluting the planet
We are changing the weather
We are warming the planet
We are destroying wildlife and causing a huge number of extinctions
We are greedy and causing destruction through strip mining, deforestation, overfishing, oil extraction and fracking.
We are tribal and resort to war
We have gross inequality that creates mass poverty
etc. etc.
All of these problems are soluble if it wasn’t for our insular, selfish way of thinking.