Apes 'Extinct In a Generation'

[beetbox]

Apes 'extinct in a generation'

By Richard Black
BBC News website environment correspondent

Some of the great apes - chimps, gorillas, and orangutans - could be extinct within a human generation, an authoritative new assessment concludes.

Human settlement, logging, mining and disease mean that orangutans in parts of Indonesia may lose half of their habitat within five years.

There are now more than 20,000 humans on the planet for every chimpanzee.

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"All of the great apes are listed as either endangered or critically endangered," co-author Lera Miles from the World Conservation Monitoring Centre near Cambridge told the BBC News website.

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"The great apes are our kin," he writes. "Like us, they are self-aware and have cultures, tools, politics, and medicines; they can learn to use sign language, and have conversations with people and with each other."Sadly, however, we have not treated them with the respect they deserve."

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/4202734.stm

[DianeG5385]

1. Does that include homosapiens?

Just wonderin' what to tell the grandkids....

[krkaufman]

2. Go figure, it's one of their own doing them in. n/t

[Lilith Velkor]

5. "God damn you all to hell!"

[slay]

3. We need true education and leadership, not people like Bush

who think it's ok to fuck up the environment with no concern for other living creatures. :(

I can just see the way Bush thinks. It goes: Me me me, mine mine mine, more more more, then one of those smirky grins he does, followed by heh heh heh.

[Yupster]

4. Extinct in the wild?

They can't mean extinct can they? With all the captive breeding programs and zoo populations, I'm assuming they mean in the wild.

When I was in school 30 years ago, I remember the teachers talking about how there were whatever the number was almost 2 billion people in the world and wondering how we could support the projected populations in the future. Well, here we are, and the populations have indeed ballooned just as predicted, and that has meant disaster to the planet and its inhabitants.

But how do you tell someone not to have so many kids?

[thegreatwildebeest]

6. You can't...

...tell people not to have kids, or how many kids they should have. But they should have the ability and the option to decide how big their families should be. Everyone who talks about overpopulation etc, etc, ignores the fact that many people don't want to have 10 kids in developing countries, but lack the resources the knowledge to limit their child birth. Organizations like the UNFPA can't fill the damnd for reproductive health services fast enough (speaking of which you can donate to the UNFPA and help make up the difference that is left now because of America's refusal to donate money to the UNFPA).

If you care about population, you should care about womens rights, womens access to contraception and family planning counseling, and the right to choose. Without those three things women are left high and dry. I find it amusing that a majority of men on this forum in particular have made ill informed comments about how the human race breeds like vermin, rats, and other such things, ignoring the fact that in almost every developing country, its their brethren, not the woman, who chooses when to have kids. Such denigrating terms about birth and consequently, the women who give birth, is shortsighted, moronic, and misogynistic.