Making Elephants Extinct this Decade — Just because Humans Are Greedy and Dumb — Zac Goldsmith’s Article in Britain’s The Independent

© 2013 Peter Free

 

20 December 2013

 

 

Citation

 

Zac Goldsmith, At this rate, elephants will be wiped out within 10 years — The illegal ivory trade is funding terrorist groups, The Independent (18 December 2013)

 

 

“Mindless people”

 

Zac Goldsmith warns:

 

 

Up to 40,000 elephants, on average, are killed every year. That equates to one every 15 minutes.

 

If that rate were to apply continuously, it would render the species extinct in the wild within 10 years.

 

Africa has already lost some 90% of its elephants in the past half-century.

 

What makes it an even greater tragedy is that the world so nearly put an end to that madness a few decades ago. In 1989, a worldwide ban on the international trade in ivory was approved by . . . the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species. Levels of poaching fell dramatically . . . and the black market prices of ivory slumped.

 

However, only 10 years later, malignant interests were able to have their way. . . and so-called 'one-off' sales were allowed.

 

With so much legal ivory on the market, illegal ivory was easy to pass off, and demand simply rocketed.

 

By and large, [elephants] are being butchered so that mindless people, many of them Chinese, can buy chopsticks, toothpicks, combs and other trinkets.

 

[I]nvestors buy these commodities in the hope that their source . . . will dry up.

 

[T]his dark industry fuels terrorism and the worst forms of violence around the world.

 

© 2013 Zac Goldsmith, At this rate, elephants will be wiped out within 10 years — The illegal ivory trade is funding terrorist groups, The Independent (18 December 2013)

 

 

The moral? — We know what’s happening, we just don’t care

 

Par for the human course.  Arguably Earth’s malignant cancer.