July 14 last week was Shark Awareness Day with TV channels showing documentaries and movies about sharks. Created by Tom Golden, Discovery Channel will present Shark Week, a week long programming block that originally premiered in 1988. National Geographic, similarly, launched SharkFest which is five weeks of all things shark. Former heavyweight champion, Mike Tyson, is set to fight a Great White Shark for Discovery Channel’s Shark Week.
Shark Awareness Day exists to remind and educate the world on the importance of sharks to the marine ecosystems in which shark populations are steeply declining. Sharks are important to our ecosystems because of their role as apex predators. Apex predators are required to maintain the balance of the populations of the species below them in the food chain. Without sharks to regulate our rivers and oceans, the species below them in the food chain would drive their prey to extinction and then die off due to lack of food to sustain their unregulated populations.
Removing sharks will also result in the collapse of fisheries, ecosystems, and reefs across the world. Even declining populations of sharks affect the fisheries and ecosystems negatively because the remaining numbers are so widely spread that mating is a challenge. We should not support unsustainable fishing practices nor should we support restaurants that serve products such as shark fin soup.
White tigers are a fan favorite. Beautiful coat, blue eyes, what’s not to like? But there’s a dark truth behind that beautiful tiger. First and foremost, white tigers aren’t their own species. They are a genetic variation of the Bengal tiger which inhabits the Indian subcontinent. White tigers have their white coats due to a condition called leucism which causes a loss of pigmentation and their white coats and blue eyes.
White tigers are seldom seen in the wild because the chance of a white tiger occurring in the wild is so low that it is near impossible. In order to achieve a white tiger, breeders and zoos inbreed the animals. This is basically selective breeding but with parents who are close genetically. For example: brother and sister. White tigers also suffer from health issues such as lung development, spinal issues, deformed bones, reduced life-spans and immune deficiencies. It is common for white tigers to have deformed faces and crossed eyes. To obtain that picture-perfect white tiger, up to one hundred tigers may be given birth to and destroyed due to a deformed face, and other physical deformities. Due to their lack of skin pigmentation, they are more at risk from diseases such as cancer. Besides this, a white tiger would never be able to survive in the wild. Upon birth, its parents and siblings may attempt to destroy it because it is unrecognizable from its parents. If the white tiger did manage to survive infancy then it would be greeted with another set of challenges. Due to its skin color, any prey that it would attempt to hunt would spot it from far away proving it next to impossible to complete a hunt.
The white tiger suffers from a variety of problems yet breeders and zoos continue to breed them. Why? Because these tigers are adorable and people pay heavy prices to see them and pet them. They are a very profitable animal and it is financially profitable to destroy those one hundred cubs in order to obtain the picture-perfect cub which will make thousands of dollars. The breeding of white tigers should not be supported.
A chimpanzee at the Ol Peteja Conservancy Photo by Faraz, Battle for Planet
The great apes are the closest living relatives of the human species. Orangutans share 97% of the same DNA as humans with gorillas sharing 98% and chimpanzees and bonobos sharing 99%. The remaining great apes were endangered before the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic but with the absence of the rangers who protect them, the extinction of the great apes may be nearer than previously estimated.
Since the 20th century, the mountain gorilla population was in steep decline and numbered only 480 individuals as of 2010. Thanks to conservation efforts funded by ecotourism, they number over 1,000 today. All that success may soon be undone. Great ape tourism has been suspended causing the national parks that are home to these species to be short of resources. As the great apes are so closely related to the human species, they are also prone to the diseases and infections that we carry. For example, gorilla-trekking, where visitors take a guided walk to see the gorillas in their natural habitat required the trekkers to wear a face mask even before the Covid-19 pandemic due to the fact that a common cold can be deadly to the gorillas, the Covid-19 virus to which they are potentially vulnerable may prove deadly to their dwindling numbers.
The Democratic Republic of Congo, home to gorillas and chimpanzees and the sole habitat of the bonobo, was already struggling with the less deadly and less contagious Ebola pandemic and it has been set back further by a new pandemic. In the absence of great ape tourism, we need to find different ways to support our closest living relatives.
Well, tree-free paper is paper that is made of fibers extracted from sources other than trees. It’s not some product created to be environmentally friendly. In fact, before the early 1850s, the fiber used in paper was predominantly extracted from cotton and non-wood plants. A revolution began in the early 1850s, to more tree-based paper, as wood-pulping technologies were vastly improved upon to take advantage of the large forests across the world.
Whether or not we should make the shift to tree-free paper remains a controversial topic even after the argument of environmental damage has been put forth. The controversy lies in the fact that many people think that tree-based paper is a sustainable industry. Facts support this theory but while they are true, such facts fail to tell the whole story. For example, in the US, more trees are regenerated than harvested annually which apparently means the practice of logging to extract fibers from trees is sustainable. That argument cannot be justified for a range of reasons. The trees that are planted every year are predominantly one single species spread out over hundreds of hectares. This is called monoculture farming. The original forests that were cleared to harvest were diverse ecosystems teeming with life. Those diverse forests and all the animals that lived in them were driven out of their land and may have died. Monoculture farming has not allowed those animals to return to the land they once roamed. In monoculture farming, every time the trees are harvested, all the carbon the trees stored is released back into the atmosphere. This as such cannot operate as a carbon sink. According to studies, these monoculture plantations will only store 2.5% of the carbon as natural forests in the long term. Instead of storing carbon in the long term, the harvested trees are made into short-term products such as paper, which is used, thrown away, and left to decompose, creating even more carbon in our atmosphere.
Tree-free paper is a more environmentally friendly alternative to paper. Banana leaves are discarded in most places but since banana leaves contain fiber, paper can be made from it. This is a sustainable practice but only because the paper is a by-product of banana farming. If we began monoculture farming for banana leaves, that would defeat the whole purpose of shifting to tree-free paper altogether. The demand for paper is still high, despite how far technological innovation has come and the most sustainable and environmentally friendly plan for making paper is to use fibers from a range of sources so that monoculture farming practices decline and gradually become absent. Nature can be resilient, and perhaps the only way to get the natural forests we once had is to leave the land alone, undisturbed. In a couple of decades, much of the biodiversity that the original forests held can make a comeback.
