He might also give us periodic extinction reports.  Of course it is almost never possible to know exactly when animals have gone extinct, but workers observing those that are most endangered can alert the scientific community that there have been no sightings of any individual of a certain species within a certain period.  That is what recently happened in the case of the Baiji, and possibly it has happened in the cases of some Central American frogs, though they receive less public attention.

The extinction of populations is also an important subject.  Whiskerfish has already reported in Gristmill on the likely imminent demise of the northern white rhino, of which only a couple of individuals remain.  WWF reports that the population of the Amur leopard is down to 40, so they will probably survive 2007, but perhaps not much longer.  There are some interesting populations of rare carnivores in the US Southwest: wolves, jaguars, ocelots.

Chickens deserve our true friendship! So do fish! So do other sentient beings! Let us learn to be kind.

So, are we going to do without SUVs; are you kidding?  with a new efficient engine using new efficient diesel fuel?  Do you live on Earth?  

Brazil, which is the primary defoliant of the Amazon region, is clearing land to raise soybeans not corn, for the Asian markets.  Guess what?  that soy is GM.  Our own use of corn for the biofuels market, which is incidentally also GM, will continue as much of the rest of the world refuses GM crops for eating.  Remember diesels can burn almost anything, bless their little hearts.  Canada's and US's fields of canola (GM)and sunflower (GM), our corn and corn oil, cotton and cotton seed oil --Crisco(GM), soon rice and peanut products to be GM.

Guess what?  The new 2004 Crisco is a blend of saturated fats, the same saturated fats it replaced after WWII, palm and coconut oils, and blended with vegetable oils is now trans fat free!!  Should you cheer, No, not really.  The vegetable oils it is 'blended' with (one assumes that the vegetable oil is the major component) is GM!!  And that maligned saturated fat that was in common use before Crisco, well, its not so bad for you after all.  

All things old are new again.  

Statistically speaking we know that hundreds of species (insects, fungi, other invertebrates and vertebrates) are going extinct before we can discover and catalogue them. It has been estimated that a normal extinction rate would expect to see the loss of one bird or mammal every 500 to 1000 years. The microbe that would make cellulosic feasible may be laying in leaf litter or in some organism's gut, but if we let it go extinct, we will never find it. Also, it is unlikely that the extinction rate will exhibit linearity. It is much more likely to prove exponential.


In the end, it all comes down to biodiversity. Poison Darts--Protecting the biodiversity of our world