Elizabeth Barrette (ysabetwordsmith) wrote,
Elizabeth Barrette
ysabetwordsmith
  • Mood: busy

Protect European Species

Wildlife in Europe is struggling to survive.  This article explains the need to protect biodiversity.

Remember the cool griffin I wrote about?  She is partly inspired by two European species.  The short-toed eagle has viable populations but suffers from dwindling habitat; in some places, it only visits where it used to breed.  The Eurasian lynx remains common in some areas, but has lost much of its native range; in Italy it is all but extinct.  Take away these two locally relevant species and we'd have a far more generic griffin, which is less interesting.  They are important colors in my palette of words.

The world we live in enriches our lives.  When the world is healthy, we thrive.  When the world is ragged, we struggle, and the connections between human difficulties and the environment aren't always obvious.  So it's best to keep our environment in good shape to begin with, rather than try to figure out what's wrong after it's already wrecked.
Tags: activism, environment, nature, reading, wildlife, writing
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  • 4 comments
marina_bonomi

marina_bonomi

May 17 2011, 18:23:47 UTC 10 years ago

The Eurasian Lynx is a protected species in all of the Western Europe countries, it *was* extinct in Italy (and had been for about a century) until it was reintroduced on the Alps in 1981, the species is fragile and needs protection but actually it is coming back (just like wolves, bears and quite a few others).
A number of zoo-parks here are very active in repopulation projects and are classified as 'centers for the protection of endangered species',the youngs of protected, endangered species born in the parks are reintroduced in protected wildlife areas as soon as they are grown enough to be independent (this applies, for instance to European Bisons and Bearded Vultures) see here: http://www.parconaturaviva.it/Progetti-di-conservazione-e-sensibilizzazione
ysabetwordsmith

Yay!

ysabetwordsmith

May 17 2011, 18:34:03 UTC 10 years ago

This is encouraging. I like it when people act to rebuild animal populations. We've had some excellent improvements in Yellowstone National Park after reintroducing wolves there.
paka

paka

May 17 2011, 19:39:09 UTC 10 years ago

"What is man without the beasts? If there were no beasts, man would soon die from a great loneliness of the spirit. For whatever happens to the beasts also happens to man."

... and, it's possible Sealth never actually said this, but I still believe it. Humanity's more than an expression of genotype, and in a species defined largely by social evolution, it's sheer insanity for us to do this much phenotypic damage. If that makes sense.
ysabetwordsmith

Yes...

ysabetwordsmith

May 17 2011, 19:44:30 UTC 10 years ago

That makes perfect sense to me.