News Roundup
- What’s causing brown pelicans to act so fishy (HA)? Possibly a huge winter snowstorm in the Pacific northwest, an area that was previously outside of their range, but has been opened up during recent, warmer times. Is this yet another example of how diminishing populations can be threatened by exogenous events? Or is it a result of the brown pelicans’ recovery, pushing populations out of their traditional range? Oh nature, your pendulum is fickle and confounding.
- Some politicians were doing something they weren’t supposed to. In this case, hunting endangered mountain sheep (argali) from a helicopter. The helicopter crashed, and photographs of the scene suggested their illicit activities. Doesn’t this conjure to mind the myriad animals Cheney could have been hunting all these years with nary a care?
- There are more Asian elephants in Malaysia than previously thought. In an area of about 4,000km2, nobody until now had accurately estimated the elephant’s population size. Hopefully this illustrates how little we really know, about anything. On the other hand, Google Earth is now offering centimeter resolution. Oh, and you can now watch a video of a single electron on YouTube. I suppose the mis-matched attention to detail is more illustrative of our priorities. Still, 600 elephants!
Posted by Tim on January 15th, 2009 • • 2 comments
A jeremiad concerning wasting time and keeping silent.
My not-so-great generation of elders will likely be remembered as the perpetrators of the most perverse, self-serving silence in human history. No other generation has taken so much from this good Earth, threatened the very future of its own children and given so little of themselves to preserve life for coming generations. Photographs of us will disclose both our corpulence and hollowness.
Although the disclosure of truth is unsettling, hiding the truth from the human community could be a monstrous example of human-driven foolery, one that could soon lead to a colossal ecological wreckage.
To suppress the truth by conscientiously substituting whatsoever could somehow be true with willful silence is tantamount to the commission of a pernicious lie.
A widely shared and consensually validated determination among people with knowledge to maintain their silence, when remaining silent betrays intellectual honesty, conceals the truth and thwarts courageous action, is the most dangerous of all global threats to the family of humanity, life as we know it and the preservation of Earth as a fit place for human habitation.
From this perspective, perhaps we can begin to apprehend the actual, most formidable enemy of future human wellbeing and environmental health.
Steven Earl Salmony
AWAREness Campaign on the Human Population,
established 2001
http://sustainabilityscience.org/content.html?contentid=1176
http://sustainabilitysoutheast.org/index.php
http://www.panearth.org
[...] are now suggesting that all those pelican deaths in California were due to climate change. Posted by Tim on February 26th, 2009 Tags: [...]