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"There are now more human babies born each day-- about 350,000-- than there are individuals left in all the great ape species combined, including gorillas, chimpanzees, bonobos and orangutans." (Richard Cincotta, ecologist and senior researcher, Population Action International) |
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Gorilla Composite Population Graph
Gorillas once numbered in the hundreds of thousands or more. Numbers of gorillas in the wild are currently estimated by ecologists to be in the hundreds, possibly single digit thousands. That works out to a fractional SANI value of less than one. The subpopulations are pathetically fragmented and hovering just above Minimum Viable Population levels. Their survival is in an extremely precarious state. For example, a fire combined with a virus or an outbreak of human warfare could finish them off momentarily. It is impossible to stop humans from killing and eating them as well. Gorilla meat is popular in the bush meat trade. The bush meat trade exists because the region of Africa in which these organisms find habitat is overpopulated by humans. Subcutaneous radio location devices will not stop the advance of the human juggernaut, which is the reason for the demise of gorillas. Such devices will however provide temporary employment opportunities for African wildlife managers and superfluous busywork for foreign ecologists. Film crews, production studios, zoos, journalists, book writers, and humans associated with the tourism industry may also derive benefit from these organisms whilst they survive.
Bush Meat Trade
Pushing Bonobos to Extinction (Christian Science Monitor) Humans are ambivalent in their consideration of gorillas, chimpanzees and other primates. Some humans consider these organisms important insofar as their presence supports the illusion that humans have not yet overpopulated the planet. Some humans wish to fight a noble cause to try to maintain gorillas and other primates in the wild. It's an exercise in futility as the rain forests are a house of cards. Rain forests are the habitat of gorillas and of many other primates. It is possible that rain forests may survive as identifiable green areas visible from spacecraft orbiting the earth. It is improbable that rain forests will escape fragmentation. Indeed the fragmentation which has already occurred is severe. It is sufficient merely to fragment a rain forest to initiate processes which ultimately destroy its functionality. From the point of fragmentation, Lovejoy's process of islandification and ecosystem decay sets in and the higher organisms, particularly mammals and primates are left unsupported. This is why the Union of Concerned Scientists has been jumping up and down and screaming their lungs out for the last two decades.
If there ever was an evil on earth, destroying life forms, destroying biodiversity is such evil. Has your priest, rabbi or pastor ever jumped up and down and screamed about destruction of biodiversity? No. In contradistinction, they support models which encourage ever expanding human population. Sometimes implicitly sometimes explicitly. Some religions, excluding of course Buddhism, would privately welcome the demise of primates and in particular gorillas and chimpanzees, if one could strip away their tate mae to reveal their hon ne. Certainly they are conspicuous in not audibly offering an opposing voice. Some of them find the sexual behavior of chimpanzees in the wild, particularly the female chimpanzees, to be extremely offensive. Chimpanzees are also not exclusively monogamous and therefore do not represent desirable role models for human behavior. It is important to demonstrate proper behavior in animal role models when attempting to show that behaviors such as heterosexuality or exclusive monogamy are the only or the natural behaviors for human organisms. Insofar as these primate organisms do not support such attempts to legitimize religious dogma, they find themselves unsupported and at risk. The disappearance of both chimpanzees and gorillas would also remove other obvious points of contention between fundamentalist religious creationists and their less ignorant human counterparts. If the considerations associated with religion seem either trivial or far fetched, the tendency of religionists to perform jerky cognitive functions has been grossly underestimated. Typically cognition is limited to use of neural tissue which is between the brain stem and an area just underneath the patella. The repercussions of jerky knee dogma have an astounding impact and reach much further than most would care to imagine.
In sum, current conditions for the primates, and for the gorillas especially, represent a nearly perfect recipe for extinction.
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This little graph shows the increase in human numbers in the last few thousand years. In this case, the distance from 1,000 million to 7,600 million is 7.6 times the distance from zero to 1,000 million. 7.6 billion is demographers' mid projection. Graph curve is from Learning Tools, KQED TV, San Francisco, a PBS educational tv station. Overpopulation denialists right and left have asked about the source, so now you know. The leader of the Task Force on Amphibian Decline living in Britain objected calling the graph extreme and, "off the scale." But it isn't. It is simply demographer's mid projection. Usually when such a graph is drawn, a short time scale is used. But an evolutionarily significant time scale can more easily show relevant amounts of increase per unit of time. The distance from 1,000 million to 7,600 million is 7.6 times the distance from zero to 1,000 million. The graph is an accurate representation. |
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Hemera Photo Object, Gorilla transparency
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