TIMES OF INDIA EDITORIAL ON SPECIES PROTECTION

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*http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/articleshow/1531720.cms*

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*The disconnect between piety and reality just got wider.

 

Last month the Australian government nixed a $200 million wind energy

project in order to protect the indigenous orange-bellied parrot, even

though one independent study showed the chance of such a creature hitting a

wind-farm mill blade was once in one thousand years.

 

Elsewhere, in the United States for instance, it currently costs taxpayers

$4.9 million per animal to protect the endangered Florida panther.

 

It's the most expensive wildlife protection scheme and more than what most

insurers pay for covering human life. Coming up number two at $1.6 million

per bird is the California condor. And remember Keiko the killer whale, star

of the Free Willy movies?

 

When he was supposed to be returned to the wild, animal lovers casually

coughed up a total of $29 million for his retraining programme. Keiko died

18 months later, anyway.

 

Poster animals like pandas, polar bears and parrots routinely claim the

conscience of concerned people, while at the same time thousands of other

less glamo-rous animals and plants are sliding into extinction.

 

According to a 1998 survey by the American Museum of Natural History, 70 per

cent of biologists view the present era as part of an extinction phenomenon.

An equal number predict that up to one-fifth of all living species could

disappear within 30 years.

 

Richard Leakey, the world's most famous palaeoanthro- pologist, goes

further. He calls it the sixth extinction level event since life first

evolved on Earth and one that's easily equal to the last which wiped out the

dinosaurs thanks to a random hit by an asteroid.

 

Between 17,000 and 1,00,000 species, he says, vanish from our planet every

year so that within the next 100 years 50 per cent of the Earth's known

species will have disappeared.

 

But whereas in the past this was due to extraterrestrial impacts, climate

change, volcanism and continental drift, this time around thanks are

entirely due to humankind overkilling in the seas, culling forest wealth and

caring zilch about life that's not cute, quaint or pet-worthy.

 

As a result, creatures such as salamanders, worms and a host of

micro-organisms remain at the bottom of the animal-spending list with almost

zero protection.

 

**It's a bit like pharmaceutical giants spending billions on developing

cures for erectile dysfunction or mood swings in menopause while tropical

infections such as malaria and dengue keep knocking down people with endless

ease.*