Dave Foreman of www.rewilding.org wrote Man Swarm and the Killing of Wildlife to give us an idea of the death toll of animal life in America and worldwide. According to the High Country News road kill study, February 7, 2005, Americans kill 1 million vertebrates trying to cross our roads daily, which equates to 365 million annually. (http://www.hcn.org/issues/291/15268)
How many species suffer extinction daily around the planet? Dr. Norman Myers, Oxford University, United Kingdom, substantiates 80 to 100 species end their time on this planet every day via human habitat encroachment. Humans kill species at such a prolific rate that it is deemed the "Sixth Extinction Session." The first five sessions arrived as ice ages, meteors and other deadly events.
Foreman's book cannot be dismissed. It cannot be ignored. It cannot be put down once started. Foreman shows the unraveling the wild world at the hands of humanity. For anyone that thinks unlimited population growth can continue, this book knocks out all the myths perpetrated by economists, religious leaders and pro-immigration advocates.
In my own media battles on the population/immigration/environmental front, I have had to contend with big time radio talk show hosts who support unlimited growth, i.e., Ernest Hancock of www.freedomphoenix.com . Top television news personalities such as Diane Sawyer, Brian Williams and Charlie Rose will not touch the subject, but they report about the consequences--failing to make connection--on purpose.
But the slaughtering continues:
"Upwards of two hundred species, mostly of the large, slow-breeding variety, are becoming extinct here every day because more and more of the earth's carrying capacity is systematically being converted into human carrying capacity. These species are being burnt out, starved out, and squeezed out of existence--thanks to technologies that most people, I'm afraid, think of as technologies of peace. I hope it will not be too long before the technologies that support our population explosion begin to be perceived as no less hazardous to the future of life on this planet than the endless production of radioactive wastes." Daniel Quinn
While you may hear a lot about "carrying capacity", you never hear about carrying capacity for all the other creatures on our planet. It's like they don't exist or are unimportant. Foreman loves wild things and I love them, too.
Foreman writes, "We have come on like a swarm of locusts: a wide, thick, darkling cloud settling down like living snowflakes, smothering every stalk, every leaf, eating away every scrap of green down to raw, bare wasting earth. It's painfully straightforward. There are too many men for Earth to harbor"we are crippling Earth's life support system by such a flood of upright apes is bad news for us."
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