Monday 16 July 2012

The Sixth Extinction

I try to be as upbeat and positive as I can about the environmental situation, even though I'm more than aware of things being terribly wrong.

Sometimes though, the news just becomes so full of awful stories it becomes really difficult to be at all positive. Most professional biologists now believe that Earth is currently losing animal and plant species at a rate that threatens to rival the five great mass extinctions of the geological past. We are thus said to be in the midst of the Sixth Extinction.

Here are some links about this, and a few ideas of how we might be able to help in some small way.

A World Without Coral Reefs - are we pushing tropical corals to extinction?

India's Vanishing Vultures - how have three of the commonest birds in India been made endangered?

(I've blogged previously about vultures - most recently here and shared a poem here.
International Vulture Awareness Day is 5 September).

Elephants and rhinos are facing their worst poaching crisis in years, but so are smaller animals - to such an extent that many protected forest reserves are empty of animals.

We can all read widely to educate ourselves about the issues, join campaigns to protest about some of the issues, or donate to wildlife charities.

The wildlife welfare charity Care for the Wild recently launched a good campaign called Right Tourism, which aims to help people to avoid damaging wildlife while they're on holiday. The topics they look at include: attractions that use captive animals; wildlife on the menu and environmentally sustainable wildlife watching holidays.

As ever, text in red contains hyperlinks that take you to other webpages where you can find out more. 

6 comments:

EG CameraGirl said...

Thank you for all these links. Lots of good reading here. It's very depressing that we're into the Sixth Extinction, though.

Anonymous said...

Scary stuff, but I feel the same as you about what is happening. Thanks for the links.

Ms Sparrow said...

I just received my copy of Sacred Elephant in the mail today. It is a marvelous book! Thank you so much for recommending it. What a tragedy it would be if these magnificent animals would go extinct!

RG said...

Kind of makes a lot of science fiction about the future seem kind of wimpy ...

Crafty Green Poet said...

Ms Sparrow - glad you like Sacred Elephant - enjoy reading it! I always like recommending books, specially when people then also like them!

Rabbits Guy - yes it does..

Owl Who Laughs said...

Thank you for the exigent information, and for having the courage to not only face these issues but present them to others.

We humans think we are rational calculators (our economic system tells us we are...)but we are really animals, and we need to face the many levels of our minds we currently dominate or ignore.

We live in smug psychological seclusion from the truth: our habits of consumption are destroying the beauty and balance of Earth.

Even those of us who agree with the above statement often act addictively and destructively.

All of us know how to talk the talk, and seem so pleasant and kind -- on the surface.