soberLast night, after I posted the clip, I began to think about the strong possibility that polar bears may be extinct in only another century, having lost the ice sheets on which they rely to global warming. And of course it won't only be the polar bears. Worldwide, predators are at the top of the list of threatened species. The Bengal and Siberian tigers, cheetahs, snow leopards, the Eastern Timber Wolf, Komodo dragons, the Tasmanian Devil, most sharks, and on and on and on. There are few extant large to medium-sized predators that are not threatened — except, of course, man, the super-predator. And watching the clip of the last thylacine, I could not but wonder about future clips of the last tiger, the last polar bear...
The platypus, sheheit says these are not fit thoughts for late at night, but sometimes the platypus lies.
We who revel in nature's diversity and feel instructed by every animal tend to brand Homo sapiens as the greatest catastrophe since the Cretaceous extinction. — Stephen Jay Gould
