Word: extinctions
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When the last pig-tailed bandicoot disappeared from Australia 80 years ago, there were no mourners. Such a muted reaction is understandable, given that the bandicoot looked like a very large rat. It’s also one of many small mammals that have gone extinct in Australia over the last two centuries...
Even so, the question remains: is it really bad if species such as the pig-tailed bandicoot go extinct? Wilson attempts to explain the value of biodiversity, using a combination of utilitarian and purely moral arguments for saving species. Humanity, he argues, is driving straight for a cliff, and driving fast. Two hundred thousand humans are born each day, and conservative projections have the world population topping off around 10 billion late this century. With so many humans competing for rapidly-shrinking resources, both food and water are likely to become exceedingly scarce. And when animals have to compete with...
Even more dangerous, notes Don Melnick, head of the Center for Environmental Research and Conservation at Columbia University, is how doomsayers create a Chicken Little problem. "We need to bury the notion that the biological world is going to collapse and we're all going to be extinct," he says. "That's nonsense, and it can make people feel the situation is hopeless. We can't have people asking 'So why should we bother...
...shattering piece of news came over the press wire of the Rainforest Action Network in May: "One-quarter of mammals will soon be extinct." An Associated Press story made a similar claim: "A quarter of the world's mammal species--from tigers to rhinos--could face extinction within 30 years." Problem is, the story isn't true...
...Beatles and the Stones, Jimi Hendrix and Jeff Beck, ad infinitum ad gloriam, closed that case. And Jerry Lee would be the definitive piano rocker in part because he was, in the music's infancy, one of its last. (The saxophone, primal ax of early rock, also went nearly extinct.) He worked under another disadvantage: A pianist, unlike a guitarist, couldn't take his instrument to a gig; at least back then he didn't. Janes ascribes some of Lewis' extreme behavior on the road to his annoyance at being given "some pretty bad pianos to play...