End Results
Is there a line to be drawn where on the one side compassion is largely reserved for the well-being of humans, and on the other, concern for all those other animals, subservient by nature to human beings? The human ape is the one animal that has developed the capacity to assert itself technologically, through the force of nature that represents the creativity of the human mind. In our wisdom and the technologies we are able to wield, great power and also great destruction of the natural world around us results.
In emerging economies - third-world countries struggling to lift their populations above their traditional toe-hold on life's amenities, basics like adequate shelter and food - their natural environment has suffered, as great tracts of forests have been mown down like fields of hay to feed cattle. In the case of some countries like Indonesia and its various provinces and islands, the rain forest has been partially destroyed, causing homelessness to its wild primates while providing fuel and arable land for its people.
On Borneo, a rehabilitation project was set up by a concerned Scandinavian, far from home, but touched to the core by the incidence of abandoned and orphaned baby orangutans. Where the natural resources habitually available to adult orangutans are fast fading, and so apparently, is the future for these primates. Lone Droscher-Nielson, founder/director of the Nyaru Menteng Orangutan Rehabilitation Project, funded by private donors, has so far managed to save 600 orangutan orphans.
Borneo, a hundred years ago, had over 300,000 wild orangutans, and that number now has been reduced to 50,000 most of which animals live in a province on the island of Borneo. The forests are being chopped down at the rate equivalent to six football fields a minute. The animals' natural habitat is fast disappearing. Needless to say, the environmental degradation exacted on such south-east islands through the destruction of their forests will have a dreadfully inimical impact on the islands themselves, denuded of their forests.
Unable to act as carbon sinks and adding to the general reduction of environmental stability and sustainability through climate change, and, risking desertification on the one hand, a loss of potable water accompanying that, and the potential for inundation with melting ice caps the world over. Still, the issue for the wildlife rehabilitation project is to preserve the lives of the infant orangutans. And now the plan appears to be the release of those pampered, well-fed and -tended orphans back into the wild.
But can this be done? Once a wild animal has been removed from its natural environment, its instinctive and natural patterning for self-sustainment irretrievably impaired, who can believe that they can be successfully re-introduced into an unfamiliar environment where they will be responsible for looking after themselves? Their instinct for acting positively to ensure their own survival has been tampered with, they have become wholly dependent.
The head of World Land Trust, a British conservation group, is not convinced that this enterprise can conclude successfully. The rescue of these infant orangutans, he observes represents a "welfare issue but it is not good for conservation" nor is it "cost effective", adding to a "world surfeit of captive orangutans." Clearly, the solution lies in convincing Indonesia that the ongoing destruction of that great natural resource represented by forests must stop.
With an immense population, and endemic poverty a fact of life, that would represent a difficult choice, even if the government of Indonesia recognizes the harm done by current logging operations impacting on their wildlife, on their greater environmental sustainability.
In emerging economies - third-world countries struggling to lift their populations above their traditional toe-hold on life's amenities, basics like adequate shelter and food - their natural environment has suffered, as great tracts of forests have been mown down like fields of hay to feed cattle. In the case of some countries like Indonesia and its various provinces and islands, the rain forest has been partially destroyed, causing homelessness to its wild primates while providing fuel and arable land for its people.
On Borneo, a rehabilitation project was set up by a concerned Scandinavian, far from home, but touched to the core by the incidence of abandoned and orphaned baby orangutans. Where the natural resources habitually available to adult orangutans are fast fading, and so apparently, is the future for these primates. Lone Droscher-Nielson, founder/director of the Nyaru Menteng Orangutan Rehabilitation Project, funded by private donors, has so far managed to save 600 orangutan orphans.
Borneo, a hundred years ago, had over 300,000 wild orangutans, and that number now has been reduced to 50,000 most of which animals live in a province on the island of Borneo. The forests are being chopped down at the rate equivalent to six football fields a minute. The animals' natural habitat is fast disappearing. Needless to say, the environmental degradation exacted on such south-east islands through the destruction of their forests will have a dreadfully inimical impact on the islands themselves, denuded of their forests.
Unable to act as carbon sinks and adding to the general reduction of environmental stability and sustainability through climate change, and, risking desertification on the one hand, a loss of potable water accompanying that, and the potential for inundation with melting ice caps the world over. Still, the issue for the wildlife rehabilitation project is to preserve the lives of the infant orangutans. And now the plan appears to be the release of those pampered, well-fed and -tended orphans back into the wild.
But can this be done? Once a wild animal has been removed from its natural environment, its instinctive and natural patterning for self-sustainment irretrievably impaired, who can believe that they can be successfully re-introduced into an unfamiliar environment where they will be responsible for looking after themselves? Their instinct for acting positively to ensure their own survival has been tampered with, they have become wholly dependent.
The head of World Land Trust, a British conservation group, is not convinced that this enterprise can conclude successfully. The rescue of these infant orangutans, he observes represents a "welfare issue but it is not good for conservation" nor is it "cost effective", adding to a "world surfeit of captive orangutans." Clearly, the solution lies in convincing Indonesia that the ongoing destruction of that great natural resource represented by forests must stop.
With an immense population, and endemic poverty a fact of life, that would represent a difficult choice, even if the government of Indonesia recognizes the harm done by current logging operations impacting on their wildlife, on their greater environmental sustainability.
Labels: Economy, Environment, Human Fallibility
posted by Pieface | 2:13 PM
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