One Man’s Success is Another’s Demise

Correction: that title should have read, “One Man’s Success is ALL Others’ Demise,” for mankind’s triumph comes at the cost of endangerment, degradation and despoil for every other species. It’s not a simple case of Darwinian “survival of the fittest;” it’s the first and only instance of a single species’ persistence setting off a mass extinction.

Charles Darwin never actually said anything about “survival of the fittest,” (those words were dreamed up by some sensationalizing journalist) Darwin’s thing was natural selection. And anyway, humans can hardly be thought of as the “fittest,” compared to nearly every other species out there. Without technology we’re nothing but bald-bodied, clawless, finless, fleshy, flightless, miniature land sloths—most unimpressive next to every other animal we’ve sent down the road to oblivion.

Yet each cog in the great wheel of life we carelessly cast aside is another nail in our own coffin. Homo sapiens won’t come out of this man-made biodiversity crisis smelling like roses, but rather like road kill. All the kings gadgets and all the kings medical men won’t be able to put Humpty-humanity back together again once we’ve completely cracked the fragile shell of life on Earth and sold it off as the last McMuffin.

So, biodiversity or anthropocentricity—what’s it gonna be? You can’t have it both ways.

Come on Man, didn’t your mother ever teach you not to play with mass extinction? Having your own epoch is not something to be proud of. The current era, the Anthropocene, was so named not for any great human achievement, but because we’ve disrupted things enough to bring on our very own mass extinction—and this biodiversity crisis won’t go away until we back down or get out of the picture.

We are tilling under everyone and everything that gets in the way of our single-minded push to raise a bumper-crop of humanity. Of all the Earth’s invasive species, Homo sapiens is the one in dire need of controlling. Yet, we’ve been able to cleverly avoid or survive every effort Nature has come up with to regulate our numbers…so far.

But be warned, lowly human: Mother Nature still has a few tricks to throw at you if you aren’t willing to manage your own population. For as every good farmer should know: he who grows a mono-culture risks crop failure.

Text and Wildlife Photography ©Jim Robertson, 2013. All Rights Reserved

Goodbye, Gurney’s pitta

In keeping with the theme of yesterday’s post, “Where Will We Be in Y3K?” (the loss of biodiversity/mass extinction), here’s an article about another species faced with extinction which I received from fellow naturalist and wildlife advocate/animal activist, Barry Kent MacKay. Barry is also a great painter of birds, including this one of the critically endangered Gurney’s pitta…

Painting copyright Barry Kent MacKay

Published: 22 May 2013 Post Publishing:

Southern Thailand is home to one of the world’s rarest bird species, but authorities must act now to save it from extinction

From May to October every year, the Gurney’s pitta (Pitta gurneyi), one of
Thailand’s protected wild animals, have their breeding season. Their last
remaining habitat in the Kingdom is a small fragment.

The site is an Important Bird Area (IBA) and arguably the most important
one on the peninsula, supporting the richest lowland forest birdlife in
Thailand. …

The Royal Forest Department (RFD), the Department of National Parks (DNP)
and Krabi provincial administration have been able to halt the destruction and a
little of the lowland forest remains. It is estimated that there may be as few as 13 individuals (perhaps only four to five breeding pairs) now surviving…

Continued…Full story here:

http://www.bangkokpost.com/lifestyle/family/351259/goodbye-gurney-pitta.

Where Will We Be in Y3K?

With several important issues on deck to blog about, the spring winds blew a tree over our power lines and we spent the afternoon back in the relative Stone Age, huddled next to an outside window, straining to read printed pages by what natural light the stormy day had to offer. I decided to do some spring cleaning and throw out anything I hadn’t read or in some other way utilized in the last decade or so. Just as the power came back on I came upon the following letter I wrote after reading Richard Leakey’s book, The Sixth Extinction. This letter, which is as relevant today as when I wrote it (except that there are now 7 billion people instead of 6), was published on January 10, 2000 in the Seattle Post Intelligencer:

Ina fit of arrogant optimism bolstered by surviving the Y2K non-crisis, many are asking, “Where will we be in Y3K?” Perhaps a more pressing question is,” Which species would be able to survive another 1,000 years of mankind’s reign of terror?”

Forget computer malfunctions, power outages or other inconveniences. The new millennium finds us in the midst of a mass extinction unrivaled since a giant asteroid struck Earth 65 million years ago. Unfortunately, Bruce Willis can’t bail us out of the impending Armageddon by simply blasting a menacing death-rock to smithereens.

Our species, one in 1,413,000, is out to prove that it doesn’t take an asteroid strike to unravel life’s intricate diversity. In doing so, humans are on a collision course with destiny. We are eradicating 30,000 species per year—120,000 times the natural extinction rate of one every four years.

A recent annual survey by the Chinese government found so few of their nationally celebrated, freshwater white dolphins remaining in the Yangtze River that on Dec. 29 they were written off as living relics of an extinct species. China and India now boast more than 1 billion each of a human population that is 6 billion strong and growing. Comparing those figures with the billion inhabitants on the entire planet in 1600, any game manager would clearly see a species out of balance.

As Richard Leakey, the renowned paleoanthropologist warns, “Dominant as no other species has been in the history of life on Earth, Homo sapiens is in the throes of causing a major biological crisis, a mass extinction…And we may also be among the living dead.”

Where will we be in another millennium? Will a future Bruce Willis save us from ourselves? Or will we have gone the way of the dinosaur and the Yangtze white dolphin?

One Park Does Not a Recovered Species Make

Ignorance must be such sweet bliss for anyone who visits Yellowstone National Park and thinks the wildlife they see there represents fully recovered populations of some of North America’s most endangered species. Sorry to say, one park does not a recovered species make. For all its size, spectacularity and relative biodiversity, Yellowstone is little more than an island in an anthropogenic wasteland to much of its megafauna.

If ranchers and hunters had their way, wolves and grizzlies would be restricted to the confines of the park. Ranchers already have such a death-grip on Montana’s wildlife that bison are essentially marooned and forced to stay within park borders, battling snow drifts no matter how harsh the winter, despite an instinctual urge to migrate out of the high country during heavy snow winters.

Though Yellowstone is synonymous with the shaggy bovines, bison would prefer to spend their winters much further downriver, on lands now usurped and fenced-in by cowboys to fatten-up their cattle before shipping them off to slaughter.

Yellowstone’s high plateaus are on average well over 5,000 feet in elevation and can hardly be considered prime habitat for the wild grazers. Much of the park actually sits within the caldera of one the world’s largest active volcanoes. Any sizable eruption could release enough toxic gasses to kill off all of Yellowstone’s bison—the last genetically pure strain of the species now left on the continent.

People driving through cattle country on their way to Yellowstone often have no idea just how sterile the open plains they’re seeing really are. Gone are the vast bison herds that once blackened them for miles on end—killed off by hide-hunters, market meat-hunters or by “sportsmen” shooting them from trains just for a bit of fun. Gone are the wolves and plains grizzlies adapted to that arid habitat. And nearly gone are the prairie dogs as well as the ferrets, kit fox, plovers, burrowing owls and a host of others who depended on them for food or shelter.

Part of the reason I wrote Exposing the Big Game: Living Targets of a Dying Sport was to remind people about the wild species who once called so much of this continent home. No one’s going be able to claim ignorance on my watch; if I can’t go through life blissfully then neither can anyone else.

The following is an excerpt from one of the book’s two chapters on bison:

Selfless and protective, bison develop lasting bonds in and outside the family, not only between cows, calves and siblings but also between unrelated individuals who grew up, traveled and learned about life together. Juveniles help mothers look after the youngsters and will gladly lend a horn to keep potential predators away from the calves. I have witnessed cooperation among bison families often in the years I’ve spent observing and photographing them. I’ve also seen them put themselves in harm’s way to defend elk from hungry wolves, and even mourn over the bones of their dead.

But in a ruthless act of rabid backstabbing, 1600 bison—who had never known confinement or any reason to fear people—were slain to appease Montana ranchers during the winter of 2008. More than half of Yellowstone’s bison were killed in what was the highest body count since the nineteenth century. 1438 were needlessly and heartlessly shipped in cattle trucks to slaughterhouses (those nightmarish death camps where so many forcibly domesticated cattle meet their ends), while 166 were blasted, as they stood grazing, by sport and tribal hunters. Two winters prior, 947 bison were sent to slaughter and 50 were shot by hunters.

Instead of making amends for the historic mistreatment of these sociable, benevolent souls, twenty-first-century Montanans are still laying waste to them. Spurred on by industry-driven greed for grazing land (veiled under the guise of concern about brucellosis, a disease with a negligible risk of transmission that has never actually been passed from wild bison to cattle), the state of Montana sued to seize control of bison ranging outside Yellowstone. Now their department of livestock has implemented a lethal policy and the US National Park Service is facilitating it. Since the dawn of the new millennium, nearly 4000 Yellowstone bison have been put to death.

Text and Wildlife Photography ©Jim Robertson, 2012. All Rights Reserved

 

Silly Humans, Carrion is For Carnivores

Never before in the history of mammals have seven billion large, terrestrial, meat-eating members of one species ever single-handedly laid waste to so much of the Earth’s biodiversity. Human carnivorousness is killing the planet one species at a time, one ecosystem after another; one bison at a time, one wolf after another.

Every time you order a steak or grill a hamburger, you legitimize bison and wolf culling for the sake of livestock growers. If you really want to save the wolves and the bison, go vegan! And urge your friends and family and neighbors and co-workers to do the same.

Tell it to the world—it’s time to leave the predating to the predators!

Human beings can live much healthier on a plant-based diet, as their primate cousins always have. True carnivores, such as wolves, coyotes, cougars, marine mammals or members of the weasel family have to eat meat to survive. If you’re not willing to go vegan for your own health perhaps you could do it for the health of the planet; if not for the sake of the animals you eat, maybe for all the other species affected by your bill of fare.

Text and Wildlife Photography© Jim Robertson

Finding the Christmas Miracle

This is the time of year when people like to find the silver lining in things. The phenomenon is especially obvious during mainstream media newscasts, as the networks are keenly aware that their viewers might abandon them and move on to a different channel if they stick too close to the reality of a given situation on this, the holiest of nights.

So, in the spirit of silver linings, I’m going to try to be positive and find the “Christmas miracle” in everything (at least until December 26^th anyway). Okay, here we go…

-Although the Earth’s climate is changing faster than scientists originally predicted—due to the ongoing, rampant, anthropogenic burning of fossil fuels like coal, oil and natural gas, resulting in worsening droughts, more intense hurricane and fire seasons and a record melt-down of the Arctic ice cap—at least we survived the Mayan Apocalypse.

-Even if Ted Nugent personally poached and otherwise killed an inestimable, undisclosed number of bear, deer, elk and other undeserving victims this year, at least his silly T.V. show was cancelled.

-Though there was an increase in the number of noble, majestic elk who were senselessly yet legally “harvested” (read: murdered) by sportsmen in Montana this year, the numbers are in from hunter check stations for the final weekend of the general big game season across the state and overall it looks like 2012 saw fewer hunters taking fewer animals….(That one was easy; I just put a positive spin on the original end of the year report by the Montana game department that read, “The numbers are in from hunter check stations for the final weekend of the general big game season across Montana and overall it looks like 2011 saw fewer hunters taking fewer animals. One bright spot seemed to be a small increase in the elk harvest in several areas.”)

-Despite widespread trapping of mink, marten, otter, raccoon, beaver, muskrat, bobcat, fox and about every other “furbearer” in the state of Montana, the wolverine are off the hit-list there…for now.

-While gun sales set a record on Black Friday and spiked even higher since the Sandy Hook school massacre, at least some of this year’s crazed gunmen did the world a favor and eventually turned their weapons on themselves.

-Although 115 wolves have been sadistically slaughtered in Wisconsin (in addition to hundreds of others shot and trapped in the Lower 48 so far this year), that state has reached its “quota,” so no more wolves there can be legally killed by hunters…at least until the next hunting season (hunters there are calling for an unlimited quota next time).

-Despite the fact that we’re in the midst of the sixth mass extinction event in the planet’s history with so many species going extinct per year that no one can possibly keep track, remote cameras recently photographed both an ocelot and a jaguar in southern Arizona.

-And on a personal note: although, due to his failing health, my 87 year old father was spaced out and barely able to whisper a word or acknowledge anything the entire day yesterday, he suddenly started smiling and became animated and engaged when he found himself winning nearly every hand at poker last night (by the end of the game, he had amassed an enormous pile of chips and the rest of us were bankrupt).

Seasons Greetings and always keep an eye out for that elusive silver lining!

Text and Wildlife Photography ©Jim Robertson

Hello Mass Extinction

In yesterday’s post, “Bye Bye Biodiversity,” I mentioned the hundreds of miles of Iowa cornfields where nothing else grows or lives. Humans have seen to it that nothing else lives in that region, at first by physically killing off the birds and mammals through hunting and trapping, and next with poisons to eradicate those species they deemed “pests:” the insects and burrowing mammals, along with any competing plants, collectively known as “weeds.”

To see to it that only the resultant monoculture thrives, their chosen plants are genetically modified to repel any other life that might find its way into the wasteland (also so they won’t reproduce on their own without the parent corporation’s seed stock). Much of the corn is grown to serve as feed for those other monoculture “crops:” cows, pigs and chickens stuck on factory farms.

It requires huge tracts of open, flat land to allow for this kind of whole-Earth manipulation to go on, and the Midwest, once known as The Great Plains—the former home to vast herds of migratory bison and elk, pronghorn and prairie dogs, wolves, grizzly bears and more—was just the ticket.

As long as there are still miles of farm roads to speed their pickup trucks along and an occasional deer, coyote or “planted” pheasant to hunt, folks growing up there consider it to be the “country,” blissful in their ignorance of the biological diversity that thrived across the once wild land they call home.

It’s a similar story out west, where so much of the ancient forests have been removed and replanted with single-species tree plantations. Though the slopes are still mostly green, much of the wondrous diversity of life has been lost, along with the memory of whom and what once lived there.

By the same token, anyone arriving by transatlantic schooner would have no way of knowing that mass extinction in North America had already begun with the arrival of the first human hunters to cross the Bering land bridge a dozen centuries before. The megafauna which evolved on the Western Hemisphere—in glorious isolation from predacious human primates, whose greatest achievement may well be the complete undoing of all that evolution has created during this, the tail end of the age of mammals—would have brought to mind the African savanna; an American Serengeti.

Futuristic films, such as Soylent Green and Silent Running, suggest that when humans inevitably destroy the planet, there will be absolutely nothing left. But mass extinction does not necessarily equate to a totally denuded planet. The otherwise lifeless Midwest monoculture cropland, where one or two dominant species have displaced all others, is closer to what a mass extinction looks like.

In other words, we aren’t on the “verge of causing” a mass extinction, as the mainstream media (loath to report on anything that might affect the stock market) would tell you; we are among the living-dead in the midst of a human-caused mass extinction. It may not be the “Zombie Apocalypse,” but as far as life on Earth is concerned, it’s pretty damned scary.

Text and Wildlife Photography© Jim Robertson