No more black rhinos
:-(
We must stop treating nature as an infinite resource made to please our selfish dreams...
I'm not an expert, but as far as I know, the cause for the wide changes in animal populations worldwide is us, humans. The rise of industry and modern capitalism has severely accelerated those negative processes. Bad things we do:
- Destroy the environment through air pollution, water pollution, land/soil pollution, cutting down forests...
- Kill and abuse animals for money, food, clothing, art, fun, hunting, research, zoo...
- Destroying natural habitat when building cities and other kinds of empires. Forests belong in this category too.
These things are all linked to each other. Pollution causes temperature rises and those cause certain sea plants to die, and then fish have harder time finding food, and with less fish, sharks can't find food... and so on...
Every thing thing about modern lifestyle is part of this. The people who created and still run these industries managed to hide it from us.
- Manufacturing of clothing causes huge amounts of water pollution (20% of total water pollution, iirc)
- Plastic causes a lot of pollution, and there's a huge amount of toxic waste left after the industrial process
- All the trash that isn't recycled isn't really destroyed and doesn't disappear into thin air. The just move it somewhere where we can't see. When I realized it, suddenly I lost my motivation to pick up trash on the street, or at least motivation to throw it into the trash cans (collecting it is still as good, if properly sorted by material). They just dump it back somewhere else... and a lot of materials, such as metal, cause pollution to the ground and get into the underground bodies of water, which become toxic
- Electricity is produced using horrible methods which harm the enironment. So many countries with tons of sun don't bother to even try solar energy, and home solar panels are extremely expensive, even in developed countries (at least mine, to be honest I didn't compare to other places)
- Tons of stuff is thrown away every day. There's tons of excess manufacturing, and products are intentionally made in bad quality, so that they stop working in few years and must be replaced. "Made for the waste" products. Meant to be thrown to the trash pile from the first moment. Companies and organizations throw away old equipment so easily...
- manufacturing of animal based foods causes tons of pollution and uses a lot more water and food than plants do. Animal waste causes pollution. Agriculture in today's insane intensity destroys nature too, and the huge amounts of food cows and other farm animals eat cause us to manufacture enough food to make every single human being super fat. At the same time, close to a billion people still live in bad nutrition conditions and hunger...
- Metal mining causes pollution, and developed countries go to Africa for ores because the pollution standards there allow to trash the planet legally, or they just afford to pay the fines
Again, I'm not an expert, just a reader of websites and watcher of documentaries. But I think evern thing far-from-complete info gives some ideas what can be done. But I'll do that in another comment, this one is very long already.
@mlinksva, I never heard about the "The Voluntary Human Extinction Movement" (VHEM) before. #interesting
Unfortunately there are currently 2599 critically endangered species of animal. This doesn't include any: fungi, plants or protists. It's difficult to do anything with such a huge problem, i have given money to organizations to help protect the Sumatran tiger but I can't give to 2598 other organisations nor do i think there is that money, i suspect less cute and fluffy animals have less of an effort trying to save them.
Anyway here is the list (note using the binomial name): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IUCN_Red_List_Critically_Endangered_species_(Animalia)
Tsyesika@io.theperplexingpariah.co.uk at 2015-04-15T07:32:03Z
testbeta, Christopher Allan Webber likes this.
A side note: If anyone does know of a charity which tries to protect all (or as many as possible) endangered species of animal indiscriminate of how cute they are or how many people they bring to zoos I'd be interested in knowing and likely donating to them.
Tsyesika@io.theperplexingpariah.co.uk at 2015-04-15T07:34:05Z
Claes Wallin (韋嘉誠), j1mc, Christopher Allan Webber likes this.