> Enzo Michelangeli
> >I can personally live in a world without tigers, and I suspect that the
> >villagers in Bangladesh, sometimes eaten by them, can too. Oh yeah, but
they
> >are goddamn polluters whose reproduction should be curbed anyway...
> This is the stupidest thing I have ever heard in my life. When species
high
> up on the food chain disappear--like the tiger, sperm whale, eagle,
> etc.--the impact is not only on the rest of the ecosystem but on homo
> sapiens as well.
We haven't yet recovered from the disappearance of trilobytes and t-rexes...
> When rainforest habitats disappear in East Asia, it not
> only causes extinction of tigers and orangutans, but increases global
> warming, flooding and the disappearance of types of vegetation that can
> serve medical science.
Can. Or cannot. If you get sick, do you rely on herbs from the forest, or pills produced by bad pharmaceutical multinationals?
> In Cockburn/Hecht's "Fate of the Forest," there is
> an account of how the Amazon rainforest supplied a variety of important
> medicinal herbs that were Brazil's main source of foreign revenue for much
> of the 19th century.
I imagine how much forex they were making out of that, and how useful were those long-forgotten herbs if nobody tried to grow them elsewhere (as it was done with a really useful plant, the rubber tree). Anyway, FYI the Amazon rainforest is largely still there. Not to mention the ones in South East Asia. Bonafide settlers are welcome.
> When the Borneo or Amazon rainforest are cut down to
> make lawn-furniture for sale at Pier One, it will be the fault of savages
> like Michelangeli who control political power.
Do I? Wow, I'm more powerful than I ever imagined! >:-}
> He reminds me of the
> character Dan Ackroyd played on SNL, the shady huckster who ran ads on
late
> night TV. One episode he demonstrated how to prepare and roast endangered
> species like California condor.
Lou, you watch WAY too much TV. Get out to the real world and breathe some fresh air. Don't worry, there are no vampires.
Enzo