Rotten Tatter, I mean, Ratan Tata, head honcho of the capitalist Tata group, is the de facto ruler of this country today, as I have pointed out before. His latest brainchild is a port in Dhamra, Orissa, which is also home to one of the few remaining breeding sites of the highly endangered   Olive Ridley turtles.   

Being an unscrupulous capitalist, Tatter almost certainly doesn't give a damn about the turtles, but maybe he does give a damn about his balance sheet. So when the Tanzanians launched a mass protest against his group's proposed soda ash plant on Lake Natron, Tanzania, which would have wiped out the local flamingo population, he backed down.

Put enough pressure on him and he just might back down on this port as well.

You can - if you're interested - sign the form letter here on the Greenpeace site and send it to him,  or you can write your own letter.

Here's what I chose to write:

Dear Mr Tata
I neither like you personally nor the capitalist framework you represent, so you're free to disregard this letter as the outpouring of a frustrated individual. I, frankly, feel that you are a disaster to India with your Tatter No-no, oops, sorry, Tata Nano, with its fifth-rated technology and its ability to clog up and pollute India even further than it is already.
Mr Tata, I know that you are playing on your relations with politicians, like the Ambanis before you, to have your own way, and so far you have, because of the mercenary nature of the media and the apathy of the Great Indian Muddle Class, whom you have successfully hoodwinked, been able to get away with it.
But, Mr Tata, you cannot fool all of the people all of the time. In fact, in this modern world of instant connectivity, you cannot even fool all of the people some of the time.
Your Tatter No-no, sorry, Tata Nano, is already floundering on the skyrocketing price of fuel, your takeover of Corus, with funds supplied by the Indian government for reasons unknown, has yet to bring you any returns - all these things that were alleged points of national pride are  rapidly unravelling.
So, Mr Tata, the time has come to acknowledge that you cannot always have your own way. And the time has also come to accept the fact that it's high time you gave a thought to the real people of the country and their environment, and the denizens of that environment, rather than your own balance sheet.
If the people of the country are in days to come not to curse and revile the name of Tata (and they will, oh yes), it's time to take damage control measures.
Stop that port, Ratan. The turtles have a right to live. The people have a right to live. And you - you are already rich enough. Thinking of others for a change won't choke you.
But if you continue worshipping your balance sheet more than anything else, you may end up with nothing, and sooner than you think.

Believe it or not -

There are still tribes and peoples in the world who are not in touch with what we...for want of a better word...call "civilisation."

One of them, for those here who don't keep in touch with the more esoteric news of the world, was spotted from the air recently near the Brazil-Peru border. They were photographed in order, as a Brazilian official, Jos Carlos dos Reis Meirelles, put it, "to prove that they exist".

Here I have posted some of those photos; you can see large grass huts, and red-painted warriors firing arrows at the helicopter while a black-painted woman (note the breasts) watches...




...and in this photo a child can be seen as well:
 

Why should one want to prove that these people exist?

Well, one excellent reason is that these people live in a part of the world under great threat from environmental destruction, and if no one knows they are there, they might as well not exist, and it makes it easy for certain people to say "But that jungle is good for nothing and of use to no one. It should be cleared to grow biofuels to put in the fuel tanks of American SUVs and earn good dollars. A poor country can not afford environmental sensitivity." And once you accept the argument, the tribe will quietly vanish in a silent, undocumented, genocide; as so many already have.

Whereas, once you prove they exist, their forest can be declared a reserve that belongs to them and be protected from exploitation and destruction. And even though I know that the woolly mammoth and the giant moa were driven into extinction by pretechnological humans, by and large the so-called "savage" is a much better custodian of his natural surroundings than the "civilised" human. Where you have uncontacted tribespeople, you most likely have healthy unspoilt forests and undepleted fauna and flora. OK so far?

So far so good. But shouldn't the Brazilian government seek these people out, and give them access to the modern world and its benefits? Isn't it a violation of their human rights, as at least one person I know on this site would argue, to keep from them schools and hospitals and mosquito nets?

Well, now. Do you really think these tribespeople don't know the modern world exists? Anthropologists, for instance, have known of the particular group in these photos for twenty years. How do you think they knew just where to look?

These people aren't lost sheep wandering the wilderness in search of a shepherd. Like virtually all the "uncontacted" tribes, they know all about the modern world, and have come up against the business end of that modern world in the shape of prospectors, hunters, loggers, and so on. They decided that they could do perfectly well without the dubious benefits of stock exchanges and movie halls, and preferred to retreat into the interiors of the protecting forest. Given that the anthropologists say their numbers (or at least the number of huts) have doubled over the years, they aren't doing all that badly.

All right, so they don't have antibiotics to take when they get a bout of toothache. Sad. But the Native American population of South America collapsed from 5 million to 350,000 in the years after the alleged European "discovery" (ha ha ha ha hahahahahahahaha) of America, and is collapsing today. One tribe contacted in 1996 for the first time, for instance, lost half its members since then to the common cold. They'd probably prefer toothache.

While I'm on the subject: India has several indigenous tribes in the Andaman and Nicobar Islands. Most of them are "domesticaged" as I'd put it; one group, the Great Sentinelese, remains uncontacted though frequently surveyed from the air. They seem to be doing well enough, though the population of some tribes contacted in the relatively recent past, like the Jarawas, for instance, is already in free-fall.

But, you know, I wonder what went through the minds of those tribespeople when they saw a helicopter for the first time ever? Giant mechanical insect? A messenger of the gods?

I was walking along the street when up came this grinning little man to me. "The world will end tomorrow," he said.

He didn't look drunk or stoned or even particularly insane. No white dressing gown or notice round his neck. He was just a grinning little man, and I was afraid of him.

"You don't believe me," he said.

"I do," I said. "Oh, I do."

"The water's going now," he said. "Soon there won't be air, or grass, or animals, or plants. Nothing at all. You wait and see. The world's all set to end. It'll all be a dead desert."

"Sure it will, I murmured, backing away. "Sure it will."

And I went on to my work as a public relations officer for the world's biggest timber company.

You can't pay too much attention to these people, now can you?

Tiger, Tiger, burning bright

In the forests of the night

What immortal hand or eye

Dared frame thy fearful symmetry?

                                         - William Blake

There are hardly any tigers left.

According to the latest census figures, India has just about 1400 in the wild – and I think that’s an overestimate.

All these years we were being fed wildly optimistic accounts of how many tigers there were – and these figures, invented by who knows what method, were pitched towards impressing the powers-that-be. The penny dropped when a tiger sanctuary – Sariska – turned out to no longer have any tigers at all. The number of tigers has dropped by over 2000 in just five short years.

Let me just make a comment here – the tiger is India’s national animal. What the significance of this is, I shall talk about in just a moment.

Of course the days when tigers were openly hunted by “maharajas” and British sahibs on elephant back are long gone. They are still poached in secret for their claws, skins and fat (used as a massage oil, of all things), but far more are murdered by poison bait or starved to death by killing their prey animals and wiping out their forests.

According to apologists, India’s people are all now sensitised to the need to protect the tiger. Yeah, right. This is why a possibly pregnant tigress that strayed into a Bengal village recently was chased, beaten with iron rods and stoned for eighteen hours before being rescued by forest officials and subsequently, her wounds still untreated, released. This is why the numbers of tigers are falling by the day.

Of course the news channels are making media hay while the sun shines. NDTV24x7, queen of TV twit news channels, is running a “save the tiger” campaign, complete with people “signing up”. I’d be seriously amazed if a single tiger is ever saved by these methods. All this will do is, as usual, enrich the mobile service providers.

Of course the political parties are making some noises about this – the government has sanctioned a one time fund of Rs 500 million to save the tiger without, naturally, mentioning how it’s supposed to be used. The same government sanctioned Rs 1250 million manned space expedition, in the same budget.

I’ll tell you there’s one set of people who will be ecstatic if – or rather when – the tiger becomes extinct in the wild. It’s the Hindu Right.

The Hindu Right, you see, wants the cow to be declared the national animal. Once the tiger is extinct, it can present this as a fait accompli and the government of the day, unless it comprises solely the Left parties (dream on) will promptly cave in.

In a few years, I can assure you, a bovine with a dung smeared tail and shrivelled udder will be the national symbol. And – given our national character – a good thing too.

A cow-brained nation deserves the emblem it gets.   

 

 

        

I've just read, in a newsletter from World Science, about a giant, six-storey high palm tree in Madagascar, that has leaves spanning half the width of a tennis court and that dies rapidly after flowering. Incredibly, this gigantic tree, of an entirely new type (not just species but genus) was hitherto entirely unknown. It's already threatened, of course - fewer than a hundred exist. And we only just came to know it's there at all.

Even as the nations of the world squabble over who is to pay, and how much, to stop global warming, deforestation, etc, I wonder how many species, large and small, are vanishing without ever having been seen by human eyes...

Incidentally, it seems kind of odd to me that creationists aren't up in arms to protect the environment. After all, even they can't pretend extinctions don't occur, and more to the point don't occur as a direct result of human activity (remember the passenger pigeon?). So they should be more insistent on saving "god's creations" than us miserable science-oriented scum.

Meanwhile, the palms hang on to survival. But how much longer, nobody knows.

     

Featuring an Oregon science teacher, this video on global warming and climate change is a mega hit online, even featuring on Yahoo News. Highly recommended.

Just imagine the life.

No more struggle, no more strife.

Your food comes right to you each day

No need for sunshine to make hay.

All right, for dog’s sake, I’ll knock off the doggerel. Sorry, I apologise. OK? Now…

Ever since student zoology days, parasites fascinated me. Considering that 80% of the human race is, at any given time, suffering from some kind of parasitic infestation, and that all of us will suffer from some kind of parasitic infestation at some time in our life, it becomes more than just of casual interest…

So, I was wondering what would go into creating the ideal parasite. What would the perfect parasite need?

Let’s think about it…and try and find a winner.

First, an ideal parasite needs to be able to find a safe and stable environment. In this respect I’d say the ideal place for the parasite would be inside the host’s body.

Advantage: It’s the host itself that protects it; the parasite can hide almost indefinitely so long as it doesn’t cause so much damage that the host notices and does something about it.

Disadvantage: If it’s inside the host, it can’t run off in a hurry when in trouble or detected, or change hosts easily if the old host sickens or dies.

Secondly, the ideal parasite needs a good way of finding its meal with the minimum of effort. In this case the tapeworms of the genus Taenia, like Taenia solium up above, take the cake and biscuit and the whole bloody bakery. They don’t even have mouths to eat…they absorb food through the entire body surface. They don’t have any way to breathe oxygen, so they respire anaerobically. All they do is lie in the intestine, with the tiny head in front attached to the wall by hooks and suckers, and absorb food, and lay eggs. Hell, they don’t even have to bother about having sex. They are self-fertilising. They literally fuck themselves.

Sweet deal, huh?

Roundworms aren’t far behind, though they do have to go to the trouble of copulating and swallowing food. They have a different system. When there is no food coming, they fall asleep and lie inert, doing nothing. When food and oxygen arrive, they wake up, gulp the food down along with whatever air there is, and then promptly go to sleep again. Another sweetheart deal…

Advantage: easy life.

Disadvantage: none, except that you’re unable to change hosts and you might, if too successful, damage the host, what with intestinal bloating and so on. If you damage the host too much, he might decide to do something about you. If you’re a hookworm, you may drink so much blood you’ll end up killing the host. Bad boy.

If you are an external parasite, like a leech or a tick for example, you need to be able to go long, long times without food in between hearty meals when the opportunity allows.

Thirdly, the parasite needs to reproduce easily. Now if you’re an internal parasite, it’s not that easy. Your eggs will pass out of the body or – if you’re a blood borne parasite - keep circulating inside, looking for an insect to suck them up. Some of the life cycles are really complicated, Taenia for example needing to be swallowed by a pig (Taenia solium) or cow (Taenia saginata) and then that animal needs to be eaten by a human for the worm to get to a new host.

The best solution for an internal parasite is probably the one used by the pinworm Entrobius. It lays eggs on the anus, and these cause such intense itching the sufferer (usually a child) scratches the anus, picks up eggs on its fingernails, and then if it puts its fingers to its mouth without washing them the eggs go right on in and begin the cycle again.

Another solution is that of the external parasite, the flea. It lays eggs on dirt around the host, not on the host itself. The disadvantage is that it needs the host to be surrounded by dirt. If it isn’t, the flea can’t breed, poor thing.

Fourthly, the parasite needs to be able to abandon a dying host quickly and move on. This is not a frivolous matter and is impossible for internal parasites, which otherwise have everything going for them. Fleas are the best in this regard. Kill a rat and watch it for a few minutes. As the body cools, the fleas are already looking for fresh abodes.

Fifthly, if a parasite can do a few services for the host, the host may overlook its depredations. Plenty of examples in other animals, not many in humans. I mean of course parasites, which cause harm, not commensals, to which the host is indifferent, and not symbiotes, which help the host. I’m not talking of them.

Sixthly, it needs to be physically resistant to anti-parasitical medication. Worms aren’t. Lice aren’t. Fleas, so long as they can get off the body into the dirt, are.

So, do we have a winner?

You’d never find a perfect parasite with all those features, will you now? Some of them are mutually contradictory. For example, an internal parasite has good food and no effort but can’t jump ship; an external parasite needs to work for its food.

So I guess there isn’t an ideal parasite…oh, wait, there is. We have a winner.

My nominee for the Perfect Parasite: the Indian politician.

Consider:

This species inhabits the body of the Indian political system and the Indian state. It works from inside. It absorbs any food (read money) that comes along; it can sleep inertly, doing absolutely nothing (certainly none of its official duties) until food and air (money and power) come along, when it suddenly wakes and gulps it all down. It is remarkably adept at causing itches and inflammations in the sense of mini-wars and crime waves to get itself re-elected, in the manner of the pinworm; it can thrive in the dirt that accrues round the system. And, like the flea, when the party to which it is attached begins faltering, it’s incredibly quick to seek a new host. It can oblige people sometimes, for a fee naturally, in illegal endeavours like setting up sham factories and human trafficking and the like. And it is incredibly tough, virtually ineradicable. If one is destroyed, two will take its place.

I believe the zoology textbooks need some modification…I wonder if they’ll credit the new classification to me.

We normally think of viruses as downscale bacteria, tiny living creatures. No, they are not. A virus is a lipoprotein coat surrounding a helix of deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) or ribonucleic acid (RNA). Just, basically, one chemical inside another. It can't even replicate itself outside a living organism. Hell: viruses can even be crystallised. Like sugar.

Now what was I hearing about God creating heaven and earth and living things...

Even when I was a teenager, we did not have a mosquito problem. Mosquitoes were someone else's problem.Mosquitoes bit people down on the plains. Here, a kilometre and a half above mean sea level, we were free of them at least.

That was then.

Oh, we had mosquitoes. We had flocks - dense flocks of thousands of mosquitoes that would fly into our rooms every evening. They would then proceed to sit sedately on the walls, in serried ranks, and do absolutely nothing till - sometime during the dark hours - they would quietly fly away again. They did not force anyone to invest in those horrible mosquito nets or mosquito coils or burners and pungent mats. They did not bite anyone. They did not spread malaria. Like most mosquito species, they were plant juice feeders.

I haven't seen those flocks for years.

Now we don't have those clouds of harmless mosquitoes. What we have are small numbers - relatively speaking - of black mosquitoes with handsome white stippling. They look like some hack artist's idea of SS concentration camp guard uniform colour schemes. The come in singly, and they bite. How they bite. And after they bite, it doesn't itch. It bloody well burns.

Did I mention that malaria is now increasingly common in the summer months, even in this city? Including the more dangerous falciparum form, which can cause cerebral malaria and very often kills?

I remember a time when - I was fifteen - a mosquito sat on my hand and I allowed her to uncurl her proboscis, stab it through my skin, and suck my blood till she resembled a fat red bubble, while I watched absorbed through a hand lens. I actually timed it with a stopwatch to find how long she took, and after how long the little swelling came up. (That also disproved the myth that an undisturbed mosquito will suck up all its saliva from the wound and there will be no weal.) But that was then; I did not have any fear of disease. I would not try that experiment these days.

Give me blood and I promise you...evidence of global warming and climate change.

A certain person (I am deliberately being vague so as to disguise this person's identity, but he/she is on Multiply) writes a paean to SUV's which goes roughly as follows (I am again deliberately misquoting enough so as to blur identity, but all the essentials are there):

I drive an SUV. I love how whenever I have visitors, I can pick them all up at the airport in my SUV, fit all their luggage in and drive home without being crammed in the car. I love the fact that I have enough seat belts for my kids, and their friends whenever we have an outing. I love that this SUV I drive has a towing package, so I can hitch a trailer and move big furniture items or whatever, without having to pay for someone else to do it for me. I love how I can drive my SUV in the snow and not slide off the road. I love my SUV, and I love the fact that by the time I need to get a new SUV I'll be getting the GMC Acadia, which has improved gas mileage use and by then will come in Hybrid as well. There'll also be other optional fuels to choose from. Not a problem, there's plenty of industrious (sic) heritage here too.

Right...

I don't know whether I even have to begin pointing out all the things wrong with this person's attitude, but here goes anyway.

I love how whenever I have visitors, I can pick them all up at the airport in my SUV, fit all their luggage in and drive home without being crammed in the car.

I suppose no one else has visitors to be picked up at airports and driven home, and that there are alternatives other than SUVs to do it? I don't think this person actually goes daily to the airport, so it becomes a major issue whether one is "crammed" or not.

I love the fact that I have enough seat belts for my kids, and their friends whenever we have an outing.

Now I know for a fact that this person has two children, not a football team as the quote would suggest. And if one has to go for outings, surely one can plan how many people would go?

I love that this SUV I drive has a towing package, so I can hitch a trailer and move big furniture items or whatever, without having to pay for someone else to do it for me.

I don't suppose he or she moves house daily, do you?

I love how I can drive my SUV in the snow and not slide off the road.

People were driving in snow without sliding off roads before SUVs were ever thought of, or didn't you know?

I love my SUV,

Big surprise.

and I love the fact that by the time I need to get a new SUV I'll be getting the GMC Acadia, which has improved gas mileage use and by then will come in Hybrid as well.

By the time you need to get a new SUV? Do you change SUVs with the year and model? The era of living disposably is past, or didn't you know? As to "improved gas milage", what does that translate into? Does it use only as much fuel as three ordinary cars, instead of five? And as for "hybrid", I'll tackle it with the next bit.

There'll also be other optional fuels to choose from.

Which? Ethanol? Biodiesel? Let's see. Already, maize ("corn") prices in the US are shooting up because of food crops being diverted to produce ethanol for vehicles...so that a minority of pampered Americans - and their wannabe imitators - can continue to drive around in their dangerous, in fact lethal, fuel guzzling, environment destroying vehicles which take up inordinate amounts of road space, contribute to global warming, and kill people far more easily than normal cars.

And of course as global prices shoot up I can already see speculators in poor countries, where people are starving, buy up food grains and export them to be turned into ethanol so these people can continue to indulge themselves.

Then, as global warming induced droughts and floods sweep the world, and food production plunges, there is still going to be the requirement to plunder grain for these vehicles. So much so that invasions may be conducted for the grain and for food to eat. Not to be turned into fuel. Who can drink petrol?

But, I forgot. Have faith, global warming is a myth, and Al Gore is a hypocrite.

Not a problem, there's plenty of industrious (sic) heritage here too.

Not nearly enough to heal the damage already done, let alone fixing what you're going to do.

Yesterday, in the afternoon, they decamped. I did not see them leave, but when I went to the garden only a few last swarm members were hanging around their temporary nesting place. Absurdly, I felt kind of...abandoned. By wild bees.

Maybe I'm too lonely?

Many years back when I was a puppy, rock bees (bigger brown bees about three times the size of honeybees) had built a really large hive (more than a metre tall) above our front door. No one disturbed that hive until the bees abandoned it and moved on after over a year - and not one person ever got stung, though those bees were flying around everywhere all the time. Then we took it down and opened it up. It had lovely architecture - an outer wall of wood shaped into plates just like fish scales, and inside it, floors of wax honeycombs with actual pillars separating and bracing them. I was not even a teenager then (at most 12) and no one had the intelligence to take photos. I don't even remember whether we had a camera then. The hive lasted about two years in a room we used as a catch-all until it disintegrated.

I have seen many bee swarms. Wasps frequently nest in the corners of the garden and I am quite used to them. Bees are more rare, though. I like wasps. Once - in 2000 or 2001 - one had built a nest outside the clinic's window. She had taken paint from the window frame to help in her nest, so it was not gray but blue as well. I watched that nest from its inception till full size. Since there was a sheet of glass between us that wasp did not get unduly disturbed if I put my eye right up to her and carried on with her work. Lovely animal. One day she just disappeared and never came back. I don't know if she abandoned that nest or if someone killed her.

Once only have I been stung - in the most bizarre way (of course I usually get hurt in bizarre ways, as everyone who knows me knows by now). This must have been about five years ago. One evening I saw a wasp flying around indoors. She was large and yellow. Naturally I did nothing to disturb her. Some time during the evening I lost sight of her and thought she'd left. I slept without incident. As usual I woke in the dark and I went to pull back the curtains from the window. As I reached up to the curtain I put my hand on the edge of a table to brace myself. Immediately my hand felt like it was a blaze of fire. That wasp had taken up position under the edge of the table and my hand had come down on her...I opened the window and let her go. Killing her would have been idiotic. I had been stung on the web between the index finger and thumb of my right hand. It was agonising for an hour or two but subsided afterwards.

Of course wasps, unlike bees, sting readily. Bees are reluctant to sting because unlike wasps bees have complex stings which are attached to their intestines. A bee that stings leaves its intestine behind with the sting and dies swiftly afterwards. A wasp, on the other hand, can go on stinging.

Of all the tribe, I adore bumblebees the most. They're common and they're perfect. I have never tried to molest one and I have never found a bumblebee's nest. I just like to watch them buzz around.

Oh, meanwhile, honey. I'm sorry, but a sugar laden mix of bee saliva and semidigested plant nectar has never particularly commended itself to me.

Video of a giant shark, reputedly ten metres long. It has parasitic fish dangling one from each eye, which would seem to make it a Greenland Shark - huge but harmless.
Never heard of a Greenland shark quite so big, though. That's up in Basking Shark territory.

This weird, and unfortunately doomed, specimen of the extremely rare frill gilled shark is a real living fossil, and I just wonder how many unknown creatures we're forcing to extinction even without knowing they exist?

However much proof you'd append about the reality of global warming, there is a growing number of self-professed "sceptics" whose locus standi seems to be:

"I don't believe it. I won't believe it! Them durn scientists always lie, don't they? God won't let the earth warm up too much, no sirree!"

Their own viewpoint seems to vary from "The earth is growing warmer naturally" to "It's neither getting warmer nor cooler", to, incredibly, "The earth is cooling down" (there is an example of a specimen who advanced this argument on Multiply) - there isn't a single viewpoint and there is never an attempt to back their view up with real facts.


The odd thing is, that although they seem to be the equivalent of charter members of the Flat Earth Society, they'd call us the equivalent of Holocaust deniers. And sometimes they are the same people.

I wonder if these characters are going to change their views when they look out on howling deserts where there were, just a year or four before, lush forests? Or are they going to deny the evidence of their eyes, then?

Idiocy never ends.

It was just a small item in a corner of the front page of The Times Of India. The other two papers I take did not mention it at all.

Here, verbatim and complete, is what it said:

"US WON'T CAP CARBON EMISSIONS

The US has declined to place caps on carbon emissions, saying it might damage its economy even as it agreed with a UN report that human activities were leading to climate change."

Sounds like someone wearing a suicide vest reaching for the trigger and saying, yes, he knows he will be blown to bits, but not pulling the trigger will hurt his chances of martyrdom.

Now what is happening to the world isn't just  "climate change" with its associations with a holiday ruined by unseasonal rain; what's coming is a catastrophe that might dwarf all the wars that have ever come.

Why?

Well, for one thing, most of the world's populace lives within shouting distance of coasts, and as the Arctic and Antarctic ice caps melt at ever increasing speed, rising sea levels will do to such communities what the tsunami did to millions just two years and a bit ago. The violence might not be there, but the story of displacement and ruin will be the same - on a global scale.

Then, there will be large scale melting of glaciers and mountain ice caps, and a consequent drying up of rivers. Imagine what the loss of river water will do.

Also, there will be massive disruption of ocean currents, and it's estimated that Britain for example would soon be another Siberia.

Not to speak of the desertification and drought which will, along with the drying of rivers, reduce foodgrain production by an estimated 25 to 50%. The rice yield in India, alone, is estimated - by Indian scientists who will try for political reasons to understate the true scale of danger - to be set to fall by 40%.

No water. No food. No forests. Coastal populations pushing inland for shelter and refuge. Imagine what is to come.

All so some wimpish American stockbroker (and his Indian imitator) can forget his penis envy by driving around in a big, bad SUV.

"Damage its economy", hell.

There won't be any economy left to damage.

We've all been hearing how animal species are becoming extinct. So far we could ignore it because only non-cute, non-Disneyfied animals were dying off. No longer.

The Yangtze River dolphin is now officially extinct in the wild. This is the first extinction of a large animal since the Caribbean monk seal was exterminated half a century ago.

Today, we can no longer with the equanimity that marked earlier times go about hunting to death other animal species, like we did the Thylacine ("Marsupial Wolf"), the Steller's Sea Cow, the dodo, the passenger pigeon (hunted for, among other things, pig food and fertiliser), and like we almost did to the Sumatran and Javan rhinos, the American bison (whose extinction was actually a planned operation - if it became extinct, the theory went, so would the Native Americans who depended on it), and the Asiatic lion. But we can allow species to die, like the Solenodon for example, by ignoring their habitat degradation, their plummeting populations, their destroyed and blocked migratory routes. We can bask in the illusory glow of conservation success stories (like the  Giant panda) and allow the conservation success stories to slide back into the disaster zone (the Royal Bengal Tiger).

We can also claim that "development" and "progress" must mean that other species must make way, that "tree huggers" and so on must never be allowed to come in the way of corporate profit, that killing animals is actually improving the environment (elephant "culls" in South Africa, and the Japanese claim that whales destroy fish stocks). We can allow nations to resume the wholesale massacre of the great whales, for example, because they are NATO allies and/or economic partners. We can make hunting grizzly bears and bred-in-captivity big cats some kind of "rite of passage". We can make laws protecting animals that are in practice meant to be ignored (such as India's now lifted restriction on whale shark fishing, which had never resulted in prosecutions because the government always argued that there are, contrary to all evidence, no whale sharks in Indian waters). We can simply ignore the animals because protecting them is too much political trouble (fishermens' right to fish, industrialists' right to pollute, and so on and on and on). We can let them die of apathy and neglect.

The Indian river dolphin, Platanista gangetica, is also swiftly sliding towards extinction. Closely allied to the Yangtze dolphin, it is also a primitive blind species with a habitat restricted to rivers. It is even to this day deliberately hunted for its fat, for catfish bait (!), and falls prey to gill nets and to the sort of vermin who dynamite rivers for fish. There is an enormous amount of political lethargy towards this animal...it might just be that someone will save it by convincing the governments of the states that protecting it will bring in tourism dividends.

It's a slim chance, but it's all we've got.