The illegal ivory trade is being carried out mostly by large crime syndicates, Wasser believes, and is being driven by growing markets in China and Japan, where ivory is in demand for carvings and signature stamps called hankos.
In addition, in the last few years demand has risen sharply in the United States, where much of the ivory is used to make knife handles and gun grips. In fact, a May report from the Care for the Wild International, a not-for-profit British natural protection organization, ranks the U.S. second behind China as a marketplace for illegal ivory.
There is something about an extinction of elephants that seems like a watershed event. Yes, I know we are in an age of anthropogenic extinction, and species are dying out every day. But elephants...that seems a little different somehow. They're not like some shy vole or uncommon butterfly. They're elephants. We love seeing them. They're beautiful and fascinating and obviously social and smart, and yet we can't even seem to find it among ourselves to halt and reverse their extinction. And if we can't do it for elephants, what would we possibly do it for?
5 comments:
And if we can't do it for elephants, what would we possibly do it for?
One would think we would do it for soil, so we can have grain.
But that's a complex issue and too complicated for a bumper sticker, so no one pays attention to it because Dancing with the Stars is Tivoed and ready to go.
And some ideologies are counting on technology and human ingenuity to save us!!!!! *heart*!!!
Best,
D
I suppose the world is so focused on the co2 menace that real environmental issues get pushed to the back burner.
If elephants lived in the arctic and were buds with polar bears they would have a better chance.
Or, find a study that says GW is destroying elephant habitat. That should do it.
The Charlesh spam bot routine has a new response program! Yay!. This one is much better than the nucular one that went around the blogs the last few days.
Kudos to the bot programmer for updating the routine regularly. Regular readers appreciate it, until Greasemonkey adds Quark Soup that is, then we'll simply [killfile] charlesh and move on.
Best,
D
Dano,
You have noticed my activity on LFTR? Great! I'm trying to get the good news out.
What do you think? Have you read up on LFTR? Too good to be true isn't it?
Gives the world virtually unlimited low cost clean energy to replace coal. Should make those concerned about co2 very happy. We don't have to condemn the poor to a low energy diet in the name of controlling co2.
Hansen on nukes. From the trip report
http://tinyurl.com/5e7xxw
“Bottom line: I can’t seem to agree fully with either the anti-nukes or Blees. Some of the anti-nukes are friends, concerned about climate change, and clearly good people. Yet I suspect that their ‘success’ (in blocking nuclear R&D) is actually making things more dangerous for all of us and for the planet. It seems that, instead of knee-jerk reaction against anything nuclear, we need hard-headed evaluation of how to get rid of long-lived nuclear waste and minimize dangers of proliferation and nuclear accidents. Fourth generation nuclear power seems to have the potential to solve the waste problem and minimize the others. In any case, we should not have bailed out of research on fast reactors. (BTW, Blees points out that coal-fired power plants are exposing the population to more than 100 times more radioactive material than nuclear power plants – some of it spewed out the smokestacks, but much of it in slag heaps of coal ash.”
From the French. How to transition to "green" nuclear.
http://tinyurl.com/55vgdk
"It rests on the combination of light water reactors and converter reactors needed to incinerate Plutonium and produce Uranium-233, leading to a reactor fleet widely based on the Thorium-Uranium-233 fuel cycle. The flexibility of this solution and its naturally reduced long lived waste production makes it appear optimal in view of sustainable, intensive nuclear power generation."
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