Agony and Ivory. "Highly emotional and completely guileless,
elephants mourn their dead—and across Africa, they are grieving daily as demand from China’s 'suddenly wealthy' has driven the price of
ivory to $700 a pound or more. With tens of thousands of
elephants being slaughtered each year for their tusks, raising the specter of an 'extinction vortex,' Alex Shoumatoff travels from Kenya to Seattle to Guangzhou, China, to expose those who are guilty in the
massacre—and recognize those who are determined to stop it."
posted by homunculus
on Jul 16, 2011 -
26 comments
William Temple Hornaday was an early--and probably a founding--member of the American conservation movement, and was also director of the National Zoological Park. He wrote a tremendously bitter and accurate report for the U.S. National Museum in 1894 on the extermination of the American bison, an absolute head-shaker, detailing the history of the bison in North America and its destruction at the hands of sportsmen, hunters, mindless dolts and many others who massacred tens of millions of the animal ("murdered" is the word Hornaday uses constantly). To put the whole issue in perspective, Hornaday issued a famous map showing the shrinkage of the North American bison herd, setting out the enormity of the issue instantly on one piece of paper, a summary of hundreds of pages of bad stories and big numbers.
posted by Trurl
on Jun 15, 2011 -
18 comments
Tuna’s End Adapted from the book "Four Fish: The Future of the Last Wild Food" for the New York Times. A pretty bleak look at the state of world wide tuna fishing.
posted by chunking express
on Jul 13, 2010 -
55 comments
"Bryn the pygmy rabbit died in 2008, marking the end of her genetic line. This subpopulation lost its sagebrush habitat as the land was developed for agriculture ... In an off-exhibit room at the Oregon Zoo, the staff was quiet, even reverent, as they brought in Bryn. She was one of two Columbia Basin pygmy rabbits left, and since both were old females, this was a solemn occasion."
Rare: Portraits of America’s Endangered Species
posted by melissam
on May 30, 2010 -
16 comments
Attenborough's Pitcher, an "Udderly Weird Yam," a two-inch phallic mushroom already immortalized on
Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me, and the "Bombardier Worm" ("Chaff worm" would seem a more accurate name) are just four of the newly described species making the International Institute for Species Exploration's totally arbitrary
Top 10 New Species list.
[more inside]
posted by dust of the stars
on May 26, 2010 -
6 comments
In 2000, the Spanish
Pyrenean Ibex (a type of mountain goat) went extinct. In early 2009 it was
brought back to life, the first time an extinct species has been "successfully" cloned. The newborn bucardo died of respiratory failure minutes after birth, setting a second extinction record.
posted by stbalbach
on Feb 15, 2009 -
34 comments
Bats sleep upside down. They hang by their feet. They have little claws. They use echolocation to catch bugs. They are the only mammals that fly. They sleep during the day.
They are dying.
[more inside]
posted by Mister_A
on Jan 28, 2009 -
86 comments
80 percent of Americans say global warming is real and poses a threat to humanity. Which is good because if the global temperature raises by
4 degrees we're all dead. However only 44 percent would be willing to face any financial hardship in the name of a solution.
posted by Artw
on Aug 10, 2008 -
89 comments
There's a slight chance that
an asteroid could impact Mars at the end of this month. Usually, collisions between heavenly bodies have vanishingly small odds (a million to one, say), but the chances on this one have been steadily improving, from 350-to-1 to 75-to-1 to
25-to-1 (link to Washington Post). Scientists say that this could be comprable to the famous
Tunguska blast in Siberia a hundred years ago (not to be confused with
this other Tunguska blast).
[more inside]
posted by math
on Jan 7, 2008 -
37 comments
It was the early 90s and the World Wildlife Federation was trying to save the rhino. They offered up
Saiga horn as an
alternative to rhino horns for use in Chinese apothecary shops, thinking that the millions-strong population of Saiga on the steppes of Central Asia would
buffer the demand for rhinos. The result is one of the most devastating
population crashes for a large mammal species in modern times. There is now a
fear that the Saiga will become
extinct in the next few years.
posted by hindmost
on Nov 12, 2007 -
42 comments
Earth, 2100 AD. Atmospheric CO
2 has doubled to 1000 ppm.
From shore to the horizon, there is but an unending purple color -- a vast, flat, oily purple. No fish break its surface, no birds. We are under a pale green sky, and it has the smell of death and poison. Paleontologist Peter Ward's
new book links past mass extinctions to global warming
and shows, absent major changes,
"Our world is hurtling toward carbon dioxide levels not seen since 60 million years ago, right after a greenhouse extinction." Maybe it's time for a
heresy: nuclear energy's green, and renewables aren't.
posted by Bletch
on Oct 9, 2007 -
168 comments
Robert Krulwich tells the tale of Dr. Alan Rabinowitz and his friend...
"Dawi told Alan the terrible secret that explained why there were so few Taron (left in the world). And then Alan told Dawi a secret of his own..." (includes audio link)
posted by ZachsMind
on Feb 3, 2007 -
12 comments
Miracles You’ll See In The Next Fifty Years (Feb, 1950)
Some more up-to-date predictions:
science,
invention,
space travel,
colonisation,
immortality,
water
shortage,
flooding,
nanotech,
techno-apocalypse,
extinction,
mental health,
smart machines,
robots, mind uploading,
AI,
Asia,
economics,
demographics,
goverance,
cities.
What is your prediction?
posted by MetaMonkey
on Oct 5, 2006 -
54 comments
The 2004 International Union for Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources'
Red List of Threatened Species.
posted by Gyan
on Oct 20, 2005 -
6 comments
"Killer in Our Midst : Methane Catastrophes in Earth's Past and Near Future" (a free net book) - During the greatest extinction pulse known to have happened in the history of life on Earth - the Permian catastrophe - 90% of then existing species perished. This astonishingly well written, authoritative, free book may be the most important thing you will ever read on the net or off of it : it explains in great detail an inevitable Methane catastrophe, if humans do not stop adding CO2 to the Earth's atmosphere, during which "not only would a considerable percentage of existing plants and animals be killed off, but a large percentage of the human population as well" (or the whole species). In the worst scenarios the atmosphere itself could become poisonous to Oxygen breathing life. Mundane laws of physics, expressed in impending Methane Hydrate release, dictate to humanity : cut CO2 release or perish. Simple.
posted by troutfishing
on Oct 13, 2005 -
38 comments
Where did all the bananas go? Bananas are awesome. Popular Science has an article about how they are going extinct. Apparently in the early 1900's the main variety of banana died out and was replaced by what we know today. According to this article, it's happening again.
o/~ Work all night on a drink of rum
Daylight come and me wan' go home
Stack banana till de mornin' come
Daylight come and me wan' go home o/~
posted by crocos
on Sep 20, 2005 -
49 comments
