25% of Wild Mammal Species Face Extinction
By Juliet Eilperin
Washington Post Staff Writer
October 7, 2008
BARCELONA, Oct. 6 -- At least a quarter of the world's wild mammal species are at risk of extinction, according to a comprehensive global survey released here Monday.
The new assessment--which took 1,700 experts in 130 countries five years to complete--paints "a bleak picture," leaders of the project wrote in a paper being published in the journal Science. The overview, made public at the quadrennial World Conservation Congress of the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), covers all 5,487 wild species identified since 1500. It is the most thorough tally of land and marine mammals since 1996... .
___________________________________
The human species (Homo sapiens) is the primary culprit in the destruction of the Earth, her envelope of life-giving air, her waters, and a myriad of innocent creatures over whom no deity has given man hegemony or dominion.
The longer I am here, the more I despise my own kind.
Of the damned human race, Mark Twain wrote the following in his "Letters From the Earth":
"And so I find that we have descended and degenerated, from some far ancestor (some microscopic atom wandering at its pleasure between the mighty horizons of a drop of water perchance) insect by insect, animal by animal, reptile by reptile, down the long highway of smirch less innocence, till we have reached the bottom stage of development (namable as the Human Being). Below us, nothing."
I am inclined to agree with Twain.
D. Grant Haynes
You are not logged in, so your subscription status for this entry is unknown. You can login or register here.
No comments found.
Commenting has been disabled for this entry.