Reconstruction Act Definition Us History

SAN FRANCISCO (MarketWatch) -- Apocalyptic predictions aside, global warming is no threat to humanity's existence. At 6 billion strong, homo sapiens will adapt before we perish -- with the well-to-do likeliest to weather a sun-baked thinning of our herd.

Yet now that we recognize the impact of our excesses on ourselves, it's fitting we acknowledge and address the callous disregard we've shown our fellow beings. Species are vanishing at an alarming rate, but we've closed our eyes due to the vanity of humanity and the rationale it's just survival of the fittest.

While the dodo bird is the best-known snuff victim of two-legged predators, we've annihilated hundreds of exotic species: the Madagascan dwarf hippo, Steller's sea cow, Falkland Island wolf, Hispaniola edible rat, pig-footed bandicoot, Kangaroo Island Emu and the Palau flying fox.

The little-noted demise of each in some way came at the hand of humans. So has the vanquished state of the following eight species on the verge of extinction. The economic and social forces driving their extermination speak to the many ways we're wiping out in a relative heartbeat what it took evolution eons to create:

1. Javan rhinoceros

Generations of hunters in backward cultures slaughtered the Javan rhino for an eight-inch horn with imagined medicinal value -- then left their up-to-5,000-pound carcasses to rot.

Once ranging throughout southern Asia, less than 60 exist today in two national parks in Indonesia and Vietnam -- and none in captivity. The Vietnamese group, totaling as little as three to eight, may die off because it's uncertain if any are males. The Javan is one of five Rhino species; fewer than 2,700 Rhinos now exist on the entire Asian continent.

The International Rhino Foundation is working to keep these behemoth plant-eaters from disappearing from the planet they've roamed for 50 million years.

2. Bonobo chimpanzee

We all know the tragedy of the mountain gorilla -- just 700 left in the wild due partly to civil-war combatants executing them for media attention. The disgrace in the plight of the bonobo, a.k.a. the "hippie chimp," is it's the only known creature that greets aggressive rivals with a sensual body rub and settles spats with a French kiss and quick whoopee session.

With fewer than 5,000 left in Congo rain forests due to poaching for its meat -- down from 100,000 just 20 years ago -- humankind should take a lesson from the gorilla and this chimp that shares 95% of our DNA, that it is better for our mutual survival to make love, not war.

The Bonobo Conservation Initiative is working to safeguard the chimps and establish new protection areas.

3. Black-footed ferret

Thought to be extinct in the late 1970s, this member of the weasel family met its near demise due to a distemper plague and cattle ranchers' eradication of the prairie dogs on which it feeds. Following discovery of a Wyoming colony in 1981, it's been reintroduced at seven sites in the Western U.S. and Mexico. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service hopes to have 1,500 reestablished in the wild by 2010.

Still the nation's most endangered mammal, its recovery is far from assured. It remains caught in a competition for resources -- continued prairie-dog poisoning to preserve cattle-grazing lands and the granting of oil and gas leases in its designated recovery areas.

The Center for Native Ecosystems is assisting in the restoration effort.

4. Yangtze River dolphin

Americans thoughtlessly decimated once-abundant animal populations en route to becoming a Great Industrialized Nation -- and the Chinese are now doing the same.

Pollution of their 3,900-mile river artery has rendered this 8-foot dolphin, nicknamed the "Goddess of the Yangtze," functionally extinct. With perhaps 20 still hanging on in defiled waters, this marine mammal's population may no longer be viable enough to grow even if Asia's largest river was suddenly purified.

Known as the Baiji in its native land, it's one of only four freshwater dolphins in the world, three of which are in Asia, and all of which are critically endangered.

The Baiji.org Foundation is working to keep the species from perishing.

5. Iberian lynx

Like the Florida Panther, which numbers fewer than 100 in the wild due to development, this cousin to the American bobcat is a victim of habitat destruction.

Its range has been reduced primarily to a small area of the Sierra Morena in southern Spain, and is now further threatened by construction of the new Madrid-Cordoba highway. With but an estimated 28 breeding females left in the wild, this lynx is on its way to becoming the first "big cat" to go extinct in the history of modern man.

Portugal-based SOSLynx is a fighting to prevent that.

6. North Atlantic right whale

Fewer than 400 of these large baleen whales are believed to still exist in western North Atlantic waters. Because they're among the slowest-moving of their species, whalers thought them the "right" catch to pursue.

Starting with Basques in the 11th Century and later American colonists, whalers hunted them to commercial depletion by 1750 and a worldwide ban instituted in 1937 failed to rebuild their number. Remaining stocks often die due to ship strikes because they're attracted to approaching vessels but don't move quickly enough out of their way.

The New England Aquarium and the Provincetown Center for Coastal Studies are leading groups involved in preserving the right whale population.

7. Puerto Rican parrot

An intense captive-breeding program is fighting to preserve this one-time coveted catch of the pet-bird trade and the lone remaining U.S. native-parrot species. The roughly 35 wild birds that still exist could be wiped out in a flash by a hurricane.

To minimize that possibility, the bird keepers spearheading the program raised funds to move their facility from eastern mountain slopes to a northern locus more cloistered from tropical storms. Replenishing their number -- a mere 200 including captive birds -- will be a long, arduous task since the Puerto Rican parrot, which mates for life, bears but two to four eggs once a year, and the deforestation that hastened their collapse isn't letting up.

Parrots International is assisting in federal and commonwealth efforts to save the species.

8. Kemp's Ridley sea turtle

The smallest of all sea turtles at about 100 pounds, the Kemps Ridley inhabits the Gulf of Mexico and nests primarily at a single beach in Rancho Nuevo, Mexico. Widespread harvesting of its eggs there in the 1960s, deadly bi-catches by shrimp trawlers and fatal ingestion of floating trash mistaken for food reduced its estimated population to barely 700 nesting females.

While it's showing signs of recovery with the seeding of a second nesting ground on Padre Island National Seashore in Texas, the Kemp's Ridley remains the most endangered member of a species that's inhabited the world's oceans for 150 million years.

The Sea Turtle Restoration Project is working to protect sea turtles, including the Pacific Leatherback, which is down to 2,300 nesting females.

A call to action

As much as the progressive march of humans is to blame, politics in the here and now isn't helping matters. It's a shame, for instance, that conservative U.S. lawmakers champion the rights of undeveloped embryos -- whose species is in massive overabundance -- but oppose environmental protections and spending on conservation programs that could stem further obliteration of the world's wildlife.

If you do believe in a coming Judgment Day, best hope the hairy dwarf porcupine, scimitar-horned oryx and other departed creatures aren't seated on the jury. That prospect argues for contributing to the above organizations -- and broader umbrella ones such as Conservation International, World Wildlife Fund, National Wildlife Federation and Defenders of Wildlife -- if you're making year-end charitable donations.

They could be the tithes that bind our critically endangered species to the planet we dominate till kingdom come.

Reconstruction Act Definition Us History

Source: https://www.marketwatch.com/story/animal-extinctions-the-result-of-faulty-human-economics

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