Coping with the siege on our planet

 A few weeks ago, 470 pilot whales beached themselves in Tasmania. Although this phenomenon has been observed for years, no valid explanation has been offered, but the depletion of fish stocks, noise made by ships, rise in water temperature - all caused by humans - are suspect.  

Humans have been killing whales for centuries. According to The New Yorker magazine, traditional whale hunting was for subsistence, using whale body parts for food, shelter, and amulets. But, in the sixteenth century, Basque whalers changed whale hunting into a trade with the use of harpoons. Using larger ships, they killed more than 40,000 whales near the Atlantic coast of Canada between 1530 and 1610.

By the late 18^th century, the Dutch, the Danes, the British, and the Americans had joined in. First taken for food, whales were later hunted for their oil. In the 19^th century, about 230,000 sperm whales were killed. Male sperm whales grow to 70 feet in length, and, in the 20th century, the slaughter of these magnificent mammals exceeded 700,000. The total number of whales killed from various species was nearly three million. Miraculously, they escaped extinction. 

Now, let’s turn to the humble pangolin. They are elusive creatures. When one was found in Pannala, NWP (in Sri Lanka), recently, it made the news. Pangolins are hunted for meat, for their scales (for use in traditional Chinese medicine), and for their skins. At one time, about 150,000 pangolins were killed in China each month for their meat and scales till they became nearly extinct in the mid-1990s. From 1975 to 2000, about 613,000 pangolins skins, mainly from Malaysia, Indonesia, and Thailand, were traded legally in the international market.

As for pangolin scales, between 1994 and 2000, about nineteen tons of scales (amounting to 47,000 pangolins) were exported from Malaysia alone. When Asian pangolin numbers declined, African pangolins became the target. Just one seizure of scales in the Cameroons weighed more than five tons. In April 2019, Singapore seized two shipments of pangolin scales, of 14.2 tons and 14-tons, both from Nigeria, from an estimated 72,000 pangolins. In fact, the scales have no medicinal value, consisting of keratin, the same substance as in hair and nails.

I have gone from whales to pangolins, but, for the sake of brevity, will not describe the devastation humans have caused to fellow creatures. Suffice to state that the UN estimates 1,000,000 species are threatened with extinction. Please see https://www.un.org/sustainabledevelopment/blog/2019/05/nature-decline-unprecedented-report/

Turning to vegetation, the Amazon forest, the world’s largest, is losing more than 150 acres every minute, and 78 million acres every year. Fires are also burning there as I write. Brazil is also home to the world’s largest wetlands, the Pantanal, which is on fire. So far, more than 25,000 sq. km. have been destroyed. Meanwhile on the West coast of the United States, unprecedented fires have devastated more than 4 million acres of forest, which included precious Redwood trees. Closer home, in Indonesia, an estimated 2.4 million acres of rainforest is cleared and lost every year.

Watching a forest burn or another majestic tree falling before a bulldozer on TV is becoming stressful for people like me. Rage, helplessness and utter despair come in waves, enough to make one physically ill. The mantra for many years has been “Think globally, act locally”, but thinking globally has its costs.  

Jane Goodall, the well-known primatologist and anthropologist, perhaps has the answer. She said "People say think globally, act locally. Well, if you think globally, it is overwhelming and you do not have enough energy left to act locally. Just act locally and see what a difference you can make!"