Tuesday, January 22, 2008

Why is this not on the front page every day??

You will not see any political candidates talking about this elephant in the room. As of the first decade of the 21st century 50,000 species go extinct every year due to human activity. Basically our industrial economy is killing the planet. This rate of species extinction has been rising dramatically through the 20th and now the 21st centuries and has approached the level that was last seen 65 Million years ago when a meteor hit the earth and wiped out a good portion of life on this planet. Here are some links:

http://news.minnesota.publicradio.org/features/2005/01/31_olsond_biodiversity/

As of 2003, only 10% of large fish in the ocean remain:
http://www.cnn.com/2003/TECH/science/05/14/coolsc.disappearingfish/
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2003/05/0515_030515_fishdecline.html

90% of all edible species in the oceans will be gone by around 2048: http://www.usatoday.com/tech/science/discoveries/2006-11-02-overfishing-threat_x.htm

A very good summary page of the current species extinction: http://www.well.com/~davidu/extinction.html

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Thanks for this. Reminds me of an attempt I made to write about the same thing (and lack of proper coverage) last month. Interesting blog, thank you.