An alarming bit of recent news was lost and swept under the carpet in a world obsessed with consumerism and abandon, and mankind needs to wake up to some facts.
As per a report which came out in Oct. 2016 and is published by the WWF every two years, The Living Planet Report, around 58% of the vertebrate population on earth has been decimated in the last 40 years!
According to the same report, the freshwater population has been the hardest hit and has declined by almost 81% during the same period, which brings forth the troubling question;
Has mankind got it right when it comes to other species on earth, or do we just don't care?
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The report has been largely ignored by the media in the largest democracies like the US and India, though it was encouraging to see some traction in Europe. But the biggest surprise came from the state controlled media in countries like China, who were the one's to give it the exposure it deserves.
It goes without saying that the world population of humans has exploded, and so has the consumerist culture prompted by an economic system which seems to have no regards to anything else, including other species on this planet.
Our success as a species is increasingly turning out to be lethal for all other species who inhabit earth and the The Living Planet report, among other statistics, should be a wake up call for human-kind to reflect and change its ways if we have any compassion left.
Raw statistics
According to a report in the Yale Scientific, the estimated population of humans on earth was pegged at 200 million in the year 1 AD and crossed the 1 billion mark in the bustle of the Industrial Revolution around the year 1804.
Just 200 years later, in the year 2011, the population of man crossed 7 billion but the effect it had on the other living species, both on land and on water, has been lethal. We have exterminated quite a few species right out of existence and now we notice a dramatic fall in the population of the one's still around.
The blatant consumerism in which we indulge has sponsored the rise of activities which have been proven to be toxic for everything else, including mother earth, in the form of global warming and destruction of forests, rivers and the habitats of other species.
Our insatiable greed for things like diamond and ivory has encouraged poaching and the rise of "blood diamonds", all at the expense of nature, including wildlife. And after the extinction of the dinosaur some 65 million years ago, I believe this can be counted as the single biggest catastrophe mankind will ever face if remedial measures are not adopted at the earliest.
So wake up, humans, this planet is not for us only.
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