In 1981, mountain gorillas were at rock-bottom. Confined to a small mountain range in central Africa, together with people encroaching on their habitat attracting poaching and civil warfare, their population had been estimated at only 254. They’d have fitted into one Boeing 747. Now things seem somewhat better. A poll in 2012 noted that the populace was around 880. That’s a major improvement, but it is still just two Boeing 747s of mountain gorillas. They stay seriously compromised.
We hear similar stories of woe all of the time, from all over the world. When it’s tigers, pandas, California condors, or coral reefs, a lot of the planet’s wildlife is under threat. It is originally upsetting, and just numbing.
Is it worth worrying about it all? Sure, it is going to be miserable if there are not some more adorable pandas around Earth, but it is not like we rely on these. Anyway, surely it is more important to look after individuals — that, let us face it, have their troubles to worry about – compared to invest countless dollars maintaining creatures. What, in a nutshell, is the purpose of conservation?
On the surface of it, there are loads of reasons why people should not bother to rescue endangered species. The most apparent is that the staggering cost entailed. It may be especially difficult to comprehend why anybody would want to maintain critters like wolves, which pose a danger both to livestock and people. Certainly, there are a few species we’d be better off without. Perhaps you might want to know more about that, you can watch videos with awesome content on YouTube or simply convert the videos on mp4 by clicking download mp4 Youtube.
Species go extinct all the time anyhow. Also as the human species dying out, five mass extinctions obliterated swathes of species. The latest one, 65 million decades back, took out the dinosaurs.
The extinction rate has increased a hundredfold over the past century. If extinction is a natural process which goes on in the absence of people, why should we stop it?
A lot of people love the organic world. We believe animals are adorable, royal, or just plain intriguing. We love walking in the dappled sunshine of old woods, or scuba-diving above a coral reef. Who does not believe mountain gorillas are great?
How some people find character amazing, by itself, will not perform.
Nature is amazing, and that aesthetic value is a reason to maintain that, just because we maintain artistic masterpieces such as the Mona Lisa or Angkor Wat. The primary problem with this debate is that it spells doom for those plants and animals which individuals are less fond of the nasty, the smelly, and the just plain vague. If we do not find them attractive, they are out.
More basically, it comes in a place of freedom and luxury. It is all very well to get a moneyed individual in the western world to wish to conserve tigers since they are nice to check at, but it does not cut much ice with a villager in rural India whose family is at risk from one.
Rather it is about seeing the human culture and crazy ecosystems as an inseparable whole. This does not mean claiming every last species, which we could not do if we tried. It is also not about keeping things just the same, since that is impossible too.However, it will mean ensuring that ecosystems are as rich and varied as you can. That will be good for them, and great for all of us.