Archer writes:
Losing what you've got before you even know what you have... human experience has shown that, time and again, to be a bad way to do things.
Reminds me of what happened to the Dead Sea Scrolls before it got to mainstream archaeologists. A goat herder threw a stone into one of the many caves he saw. He heard something broke. Went inside and found dozens and dozens of ancient jars. Inside he found scrolls with texts he didnt recognize. What did he decide to do with all this stuff he found? He decided to use them as firewood. Started burning them.
It was only by the grace of the God Tazmanian Devil (Buzsaw has asked me to honor the second commandment) that an achaeology student passed by the market and saw one of these scrolls the goat herder had been showing people.
Was it really the goat herder's fault that the scrolls came this close to being burned for someone's immediate need? Was it really his fault that the scrolls, after surviving centuries of natural elements as well as human's nature to destroy, came this close to being lost forever?
I can't really blame him for it because he was ignorant. This is the same kind of ignorance that have pretty much been causing mass extinction in our age and time. I think the root cause of extinction in our day and age is unrelenting poverty.
Unrelenting poverty leads to unrelenting ignorance. Unrelenting ignorance leads to carelessness. Why worry about a few gorrilas or dolphins or birds when I got a family to feed? Carelessness leads to destruction of habitats. Why worry about a few trees when I gotta make some money to buy that western color tv? Destruction of habitats leads to depletion of fertile grounds. Why spend valuable time to clear a section of forest to farm when you can just slash and burn and then move on to next section of the forest? Depletion of fertile grounds leads to depletion of more fertile grounds. And it goes on and on.
What gets to me is that rather than trying to protect what they claim to be god's gift to humanity, christians seem to be all too supportive of the destruction of habitats and extinction of many species, the same habitats and species that they claim to be god's gift to them. If I got a gift for my birthday from my wife, I don't just throw it into the trash can. I actually would show interest in it. Try to make it a part of my daily life. Etc.
Which comes to this question. Between a tree hugger and a christian conservative that only cares about coorporate expansion, even if it means destroying whole sections of forests and killing entire species, which one appears to care more for god's creation?
Anyway, enough with my rant on extinction.
In the last generation, really, our own species has begun in earnest to understand cladistics. We are beginning to put together life's family tree. We are coming to appreciate the odds any species has to beat, through eons of evolution, just to be here. You want to know more about that. How did it get here? How does it relate to the other living things on this planet? What can it teach us?
Forget all of that. Most people in areas where the extinction rates are highest believe in special creation, not evolution. Ask them why their fellow christians in the developed countries are allowing them to destroy god's gift to man like that.
Disclaimer:
Occasionally, owing to the deficiency of the English language, I have used he/him/his meaning he or she/him or her/his or her in order to avoid awkwardness of style.
He, him, and his are not intended as exclusively masculine pronouns. They may refer to either sex or to both sexes!
™ Version 4.2