"We need a clean world as much as animals do"

nam78_two

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Wed Jan-03-07 01:34 PM
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"We need a clean world as much as animals do"

http://www.heraldtribune.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20070102/COLUMNIST17/701020373
Eric Ernst
We need a clean world as much as animals do

My mother-in-law used to say she would never trust anyone who does not like animals. That's good advice, especially from a mother-in-law. And although her reference pertained more to dogs, cats and her daughter's suitors, it holds equally true for wild animals and government policy makers.

Last week, we learned that polar bears have joined the growing number of species in danger of extinction within our lifetime. A global rise in temperatures is melting the sheets of ice the bears need for hunting, their reproductive rates are down, and they are drowning as they swim to find dwindling habitats of summer ice.

Scientists have known of this predicament for years. The latest development to make the news concerns a move by the Bush administration to include the polar bear on an Endangered Species Act list, which might trigger some belated protective action.

Working backward, the move signals a shift in the administration's stance on global warming, which to this point has consisted of denial.

First, a rationale for the listing would concede that global warming has caused polar ice to melt. Second, if emissions from power plants and automobiles have accelerated the warming -- and scientists believe they have -- then the Endangered Species Act might force the government to curtail carbon dioxide output.

That could mean cleaner air for all of us.

It's amazing that the resistance to this line of thinking has been so vociferous from Republican policy wonks, but money talks. Short-term, it costs less to spew pollutants into the air and water and to ignore the environmental consequences. So, we embrace the immediate gratification and leave the consequences for someone else to tackle.

Far from the northern reaches of polar bear country, we have taken a similarly arrogant approach in Southwest Florida with development. Clear-cutting land, stacking condos on the waterfront and filling in wetlands will eventually drive some of our wildlife -- manatees, panthers, loggerhead turtles, scrub jays and red cockaded woodpeckers are good examples -- to extinction.

Some policies border on barbaric, such as the one that allows gopher tortoises and other burrowing animals to be buried alive if a property owner wishing to develop a particular type of terrain preserves similar habitat elsewhere.

Yet, a stock answer to any protest generally falls along the lines of "You care more about woodpeckers than people."

It's not either-or. That's the point.

In a 1995 "Warning to Humanity," a group of renowned scientists predicted that one-third of all species living today could reach extinction by the year 2100. If so, the world would be a far different place from any we have known.

To conclude that such a holocaust would have little effect on humans is absurd. We may not realize the exact consequences, but we should know enough to acknowledge the importance of avoiding, no matter the monetary costs, such a scenario.

And in the words of a wise mother-in-law, anyone who argues otherwise should not be trusted.