For the last one: bluefin, polar bears, wolverines, people
Image by fiskfisk via Flickr
Delegates at a United Nations conference on endangered species in Doha, Qatar, soundly defeated American-supported proposals on Thursday to ban international trade in bluefin tuna and to protect polar bears. Atlantic and Mediterranean stocks of bluefin, a fish prized especially by Japanese sushi lovers for its fatty belly flesh, have been severely depleted by years of heavy commercial fishing, while polar bears are considered threatened by hunting and the loss of sea ice because of global warming. The United States tried unsuccessfully to persuade delegates to the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora, or CITES, to provide strong international protection for the two species.
So, who gets to kill the last bluefin tuna? The Japanese? Who will eat the last $5,000 slice — some Japanese billionaire, or some fat sashimi-sucking bastard in LA?
Who gets to shoot the last polar bear? A white Canadian, a member of a First Nation, or a Russian oil baron? What will be the opening price in a bidding war for the pelt — $10 million?
It’s times like this, when I read news like that above, that I react with a sense of the ludicrous — as ludicrous as those delegates at that UN conference on endangered species who acted to endanger those species further — and I start to speculate that there just aren’t enough predators eating people.
What if? What if local and regional populations of people in every country suddenly, for some reason, plummeted so drastically that they, like bald eagles or crocodiles, needed “endangered” status? What if some day on this planet some kind of as-yet-unknown predator caught and ate the last human being?
Unpleasant to think about? You never know when a much greater cosmic power — the planet, or something bigger — will force upon us a Modest Proposal that we cannot resist.
Consider the death this week of the only known wild wolverine in Michigan, the only wolverine to appear in that state in the last two-hundred years since trapping, hunting, poisoning, and habitat degredation formed a cumulative extermination. It’s an eerie echo of a James Dickey poem, For the Last Wolverine, that pleads, “Don’t let me die out.”
From MLive.com:
The female wolverine, estimated to be about seven years old, was found dead along a trail in Sanilac County on Saturday. . . .Tom Cooley, from the Michigan Department of Natural Resources and Environment, plans to conduct a necropsy on the wolverine this afternoon.
“This is an unusual one,” said Cooley, a state wildlife biologist. “Normally, we do a gross examination of what we can see with the naked eye.”
Since the wolverine was such a rarity, the state plans to take tissue, fecal, blood and muscle samples, and look at the animal’s liver, intestines and brain.
“There’s no visible indications of the cause of death,” Karr said, adding that he doesn’t believe anyone intentionally harmed the animal.
Jeff Ford, a science teacher at Deckerville High School, had been keeping track of the wolverine since 2005, using trail cameras, and sharing photos and video with schoolchildren and others
“I feel like I lost a member of my family,” Ford said.
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We can make use of our natural resources. We can be omnivores. But if we can’t control our run-away abilities to possess and consume anything, including those species of beast that can’t absorb the pressure anymore, then we will kill the last one. In doing so, we advance our own demise.
via Necropsy today in death of Michigan’s last wild wolverine, results in two weeks | – MLive.com.
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Scott, I share your thinking on this and appreciate your passion. Whatever progress we make toward equality and caring within our species, most of us have a vicious disregard for those just across the species line.
The story of the wolverine reminds me of the death of the only jaguar in the United States, who became ill, and then was euthanized, after being captured by government officials:
http://www.livescience.com/animals/090303-arizona-jaguars.html
Jeff: Thanks. So many things about this CITES meeting are a joke. A ton of accurate species data stares these guys in the face and the majority says, “Nope, let’s keep doing what we’ve been doing.” I wonder if, in fact, they think that extinction of a major resource is a workable economic model; that various industries can just switch from one food species to another when no one can find anymore of the former.
In response to another comment. See in context »Thanks for this. I share your feelings — and wonder if (?) the kids who refuse to leave their Xboxes and Wiis and go for a hike or marvel at hawks soaring overhead even know what is happening in the natural world. I fear there is a small Audobon- reading, AMC member group of us who feel these losses so keenly — while the rest of the world shrugs.
Thanks, Caitlin. The faster the world gets, the more distracting it is, for kids in school, young adults, and veteran workers, so spending time thinking about or finding good food resources isn’t always possible. We rely on regulators like these CITES guys, who failed us.
We also leave food collection to someone else because we have to, and then we get used to there always being full shelves at the supermarket. Having no job in an industrialized nation means you spend what you can on whatever food you can get, and can’t worry about how it ended up wrapped in plastic.
But what happens in less powerful countries? What might various fishing groups, who didn’t get a front-row seat at the UN CITES conference, end up doing when Mediterranean tuna stocks crash further?
In response to another comment. See in context »[...] comes after CITES last week voted down tighter regulations on bluefin tuna and polar bears, although they did uphold a ban in trade on elephant ivory. Jeez, who’s the big pachyderm fan [...]