The Price of Extinction
by Froma Harrop
What price would you place on the beautiful, musical and probably extinct ivory-billed woodpecker? Of course, all the world's gold couldn't bring the bird back. But suppose you could time travel back 60 years to the shrinking Southern swamps, where the last pairs were definitively seen. And suppose you made an economic argument for saving the birds' habitat. How much would you say the ivorybill was worth? Come on, let's hear a bid for the bird.
Environmental economists do these calcula ...
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Posted by: liz
Comment: #1
Mon Oct 13, 2008 10:01 PM
When I feel something biting me, I slap at the area and then scratch. I care not if I'm being bitten by something on the extinct list or something that will be around tomorrow. If the last mountain lion on the planet comes into my living room and threatens my family because urban development has taken away it's home and hunting ground, I will still shoot it dead. Whatever secrets it may have held, whatever problems it may have solved would be snuffed out and I would feel no blame or regret. The world is an amazing place and life forms evolve all the time. If we haven't found a use for something by the time it is extinct, maybe it's time had come. Unlike many, I don't profess to understand what is going on, nor do I cry the last of a species. Science could never catch up to what was or what could have been. The best we can hope for is to utilize what is available to us now.
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Posted by: James A, Sweeney
Comment: #2
Tue Oct 14, 2008 3:22 PM
Ma'am; it is nice to worry about other species than our own. I must confess I lean that way myself. I have to worry about the existence of the American Citizen. If you think you are better, perhaps you are, but does that fact give you permission to be a parasite on the body politic? For my part I want to drive into extinction the free range parasite, and the undifferenciated financial parasite, the common political parasite, and the party parasite. We cannot feed the human tape worms of this world without eating our rights, eating all our resources, eating our futures, and eating up all the fagile species and environments of the world. We have to live within our means, and save the capital of many generation as handed to us, and we have to hang onto our rights, resources, and country. Do not worry about parasites. There will always be parasites so long as there are poor people, even if it means living as gouls or cannibals. Worry about the common man, and the average citizen...Thanks...Sweeney
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