Saturday, March 20, 2010
Wednesday, March 17, 2010
Divided and Diminished: A Requiem for the Grizzly Bear
Canada is the second largest country in the world, one that most people perceive as a vast and well-managed wilderness. However, increasing levels of industrial development, such as the tar sands and the Mackenzie Natural Gas Pipeline, is fragementing Canada's forests and wetlands into a "divided and diminished" shadow of its former self.
David Quammen, in Song of the Dodo, uses the metaphor of a Persian carpet being hacked to piece. "Let's start indoors. Let's start by imagining a fine Persian carpet and a hunting knife. The carpet is twelve feet by eighteen, say. That gives us 216 square feet of continuous woven material. Is the knife razor sharp? If not, we hone it. We set about cutting the carpet into thirty-six equal pieces, total them up--and find that, lo, there's still nearly 216 square feet of recognizably carpet like stuff. But what does it amount to? Have we got thirty-six nice Persian throw rugs? No. All we're left with is three dozen ragged fragments, each one worthless and commencing to come apart."
Today, New York Times columnist Olivia Judson published an insightful piece about the impacts of our propensity to fragment terrestrial ecosystems into worthless little pieces: "Small islands are simpler, less ecologically interesting places than big islands. When we break up rainforests or steppes, or build roads through pristine landscapes, we start to fray the fabric of nature. We may not see the full impact today, tomorrow, or next year. But we know what the long-term effects will be. By fraying nature we make the planet a simpler, duller, diminished place."
Nowhere is this happening faster and more ruthlessly than in Alberta, where the grizzly bear teeters on the edge of the proverbial abyss.
David Quammen, in Song of the Dodo, uses the metaphor of a Persian carpet being hacked to piece. "Let's start indoors. Let's start by imagining a fine Persian carpet and a hunting knife. The carpet is twelve feet by eighteen, say. That gives us 216 square feet of continuous woven material. Is the knife razor sharp? If not, we hone it. We set about cutting the carpet into thirty-six equal pieces, total them up--and find that, lo, there's still nearly 216 square feet of recognizably carpet like stuff. But what does it amount to? Have we got thirty-six nice Persian throw rugs? No. All we're left with is three dozen ragged fragments, each one worthless and commencing to come apart."
Today, New York Times columnist Olivia Judson published an insightful piece about the impacts of our propensity to fragment terrestrial ecosystems into worthless little pieces: "Small islands are simpler, less ecologically interesting places than big islands. When we break up rainforests or steppes, or build roads through pristine landscapes, we start to fray the fabric of nature. We may not see the full impact today, tomorrow, or next year. But we know what the long-term effects will be. By fraying nature we make the planet a simpler, duller, diminished place."
Nowhere is this happening faster and more ruthlessly than in Alberta, where the grizzly bear teeters on the edge of the proverbial abyss.
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