A response to a ‘friend’ who doesn’t believe that nature is under threat at all.

I have a ‘friend’ on an American site who does not believe in global warming or species extinction. He believes that nature is incredibly resilient and humans are not having a profound effect on it. He does not really care about cruelty and the way creatures are being massacred or their habitats destroyed. He thinks that the only thing that is important are humans.

Personally I think cruelty and mindless destruction are unpardonable. I’d lock people up for life.

I wrote him a diatribe including a section from the article on Turtle Oblivion in Brazil

Turtle oblivion: the rise and fall of an Amazon trade

Here’s a little extract talking about the immense damage done to one little part of nature – the turtles. Bear in mind that this was done to most other groups of animals across the globe – manatees, penguins, sea-lions, whales, dolphins, porpoises, bears, tigers, seals……..:

One witness calculated that based on a turtle laying a minimum of eighty eggs, to make one twelve-litre jar of manteiga required the eggs of forty turtles, a total of some 3,200 eggs. Another horrified observer referred to a stretch of beach that annually yielded two thousand jars of oil, each jar requiring about twenty-five hundred eggs, in that one locality alone causing the destruction of five million eggs. It was estimated that by the late nineteenth century a total of around 250 million turtle eggs were being destroyed each year simply for the production of manteiga.

This is just one example of the massive impact we have had on animal communities across the globe.

Something you seem to deny.

Across the world I have seen overfishing, overhunting and destruction of habitat. Quite apart from the immense cruelty (slowly roasting live turtles on open fires for instance) this is simply unsustainable. Watching lorry loads of bush meat – chimps, gorillas and monkeys – going past in Zambia. Walking through silent jungles in Vietnam and Zimbabwe. Seeing the refuse trucks from Lima depositing tipping their waste on the beaches alongside barrels of industrial waste to fill the ocean with crap, slicks of raw sewage from the Townships in South Africa. I could go on and on. But it doesn’t concern you does it? You didn’t shit in those toilets, dump your rubbish in a bin in Lima or shoot the chimps and you really don’t care. You think that all those chimps and gorillas will magically repopulate themselves and the remaining forests will reclaim their populations of animals. Nature is so resilient. There’s always another dodo or passenger pigeon. We’ve all seen a rhino. Who needs orangutans anyway? Besides – you aren’t actively killing them. Why worry. It’s only people that matter. We can live in concrete jungles. We don’t need nature at all.