I always feel that there is nothing more dangerous than the man himself in this world because of what he is capable of doing and because of the destruction he can bring. In one of my blog previous entry (http://alienworld.wordpress.com/2007/01/24/humans-are-aliens-on-this-animal-planet/) I had proposed a hypothesis that man came on earth from Mars, after consuming all the resources on that planet.
I spent my childhood in towns which were nearer to nature, so had an opportunity to look and appreciate wildlife from close. We used to spend hours in jungle just roaming around and getting amazed by the work of nature. As a child I also remember that there so many sparrows visiting our home daily. As the time passed, there number kept on decreasing. And now, I do not even see one. Last week I read in a news paper that 4 Gir Lions were found dead. This has happened second time in 6 months. We keep on hearing such news quite often.
There are many reasons for the extinction, including some non-human caused. Human activities that have caused massive extinction of species are killing, degradation of natural habitat. There are other factors as well which are directly or indirectly relations to human actions.
I was watching Discovery channel last Sunday on ‘Greatest Discoveries’. The program was about mammoths and why they extinct. Till now my impression was that their extinction was attributed to change in weather (post ice age). The program raises a new theory that they might have extricated because of excessive killing. No guess for who were killing them! They were killed for their meat and fur.
We were every bit of savage then and we are every bit of savage now. For every great and magnificent animal you see going extinct, you will find that the reason is only one – Humans.
I was reading a survey (NATIONAL SURVEY REVEALS BIODIVERSITY CRISIS – SCIENTIFIC EXPERTS BELIEVE WE ARE IN MIDST OF FASTEST MASS EXTINCTION IN EARTH’S HISTORY: http://www.well.com/~davidu/amnh.html) and believe me that you will be shocked and terrified on finding the effects of losses of species on us. According to this survey nearly 70 percent of biologists believe that we are currently in the early stages of a human-caused mass extinction, known as the Holocene extinction event. Have a look on the problems we are and will face:
• Seriously impairing the ability of the environment to recover from natural and human-induced disasters.
• Destroying the natural systems that purify the world’s air and water.
• Reducing the potential for the discovery of new medicines.
• Increasing flooding, drought, and other environmental disasters.
• Contributing substantially to the degradation of the world’s economies, thereby weakening the social and political stability of nations across the globe.
• Damaging agriculture, fisheries, and food production.
• Decreasing the ability to control infectious diseases.
It is time for us to wake up before it is too late.
From Wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holocene_extinction_event
The Holocene extinction event is a name customarily given to the widespread, ongoing mass extinction of species during the modern Holocene epoch. The large number of extinctions span numerous families of plants and animals including mammals, birds, amphibians, reptiles and arthropods; a sizeable fraction of these extinctions are occurring in the rainforests. Because the rate of this extinction event appears to be much more rapid than the “Big Five” mass extinctions, it is also known as the Sixth Extinction. Since 1500 AD, 784 extinctions have been documented by the International Union for Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources. However, since most extinction are likely to go undocumented, scientists estimate that during the last century, between 20,000 and two million species have become extinct, but the precise total cannot be determined more accurately within the limits of present knowledge. Up to 140,000 species per year (based on Species-area theory) may be the present rate of extinction based upon upper bound estimating.
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