[Kabar-indonesia] Key facts about Asia's endangered animals [+NYT: Life After Earth]

[JoyoNews at aol.com]

also: Life After Earth: Imagining Survival Beyond This Terra Firma 

Factbox - Key facts about Asia's endangered animals

Aug. 2 (Reuters) - San Francisco-based WildAid launched a campaign on 
Wednesday using Chinese basketball star Yao Ming to convince people in 
China to be more aware of conservation issues and to stop eating shark fin. 

Here are some facts on four of Asia's endangered animals: 

* SHARKS: 

- Around 100 million sharks are killed every year for the largely 
China-driven global trade in shark fin and other parts. The meat is sold for food or use 
in health and beauty aids. 

- Shark finning -- cutting off fins and throwing the rest of the shark into 
the sea -- is legal in Asia, though several nations have laws that sharks must 
be landed with their fins attached. 

- Over-fishing threatens 20 percent of the world's 547 shark and ray species 
with extinction, the World Conservation Union said this year.        
 
- Half of all reported shark fin imports pass through Hong Kong, the world's 
trading hub, bound for huge markets in China, Japan, Hong Kong, Singapore, 
South Korea and elsewhere. 

* TIGERS: 

- India is home to more than half the world's tigers. The rest are scattered 
from Southeast Asia to the far east of Russia. 

- Between 5,000-7,000 tigers live in the wild, down from 100,000 at the 
beginning of the 20th century. Poaching for skins and to make medicinal products in 
India, Vietnam, Myanmar, Thailand, Cambodia and Laos is the most immediate 
threat, along with deforestation and the over-hunting of their natural prey. 

- The tiger parts trade is illegal in China. But China, South Korea, Japan, 
Singapore, Taiwan and Hong Kong have been named top consumers of traditional 
medicines containing tiger parts. 

- Three of the eight subspecies became extinct between the 1930s and 1980s; 
the Java, Caspian and Bali tigers. Of the remaining five -- the Siberian, 
Bengal, Sumatran, Indo-Chinese and South Chinese -- the 10-30 wild South China 
tigers are the most endangered, and could be extinct within five years. 

* ELEPHANTS: 

- There are between 25,600 and 32,750 Asian elephants living in small, 
fragmented groups in the wild, and more than 15,000 in captivity. This is less than 
a tenth the number of wild African elephants, the Worldwide Fund for Nature 
says. 

- Elephant numbers are falling because of the destruction of their habitat 
and poaching to supply the illegal ivory market. 

- Japan, the world's main ivory consumer, uses it for jewellery, carvings and 
Hankos (name stamps). The UN Convention on International Trade in Endangered 
Species of Wild Flora and Fauna (CITES) lifted a 10-year ban on ivory trading 
in 1999, allowing Japan to trade for stockpiles in Namibia, Botswana and 
Zimbabwe. 

* BEARS: 

- Asia is home to five of the world's eight types of bear, the Asiatic black, 
brown, sloth, sun, and panda. All eight species are listed as critically 
endangered by CITES. 

- Habitat loss and poaching are the main threats. The largest consumers of 
bear products are South Korea, Taiwan, Japan, China and Asian communities 
throughout the world. In Thailand, the sun and Asiatic black bears are hunted to 
make bear-paw soup. 

- China's legal bear bile trade has reduced the number of all bears except 
the giant panda, Animals Asia says. More than 7,000 bears are currently being 
farmed for their bile. 

Sources: WildAid, Traffic, Animals Asia, the World Conservation Union, 
Savechinastigers.net, Reuters 
     
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The New York Times
August 1, 2006

Life After Earth: Imagining Survival Beyond This Terra Firma 

By RICHARD MORGAN

graphic: Saving Species:  The Alliance to Rescue Civilization differs from 
other so-called doomsday projects. It envisions a lunar base where, in the event 
of global catastrophe, humans could carry on, protecting DNA samples of life 
on Earth and maintaining a bank of human knowledge. Alliance to Rescue 
Civilization

When the dust settles after World War III, or World War IX, humanity will 
still want to grow pineapples, rice, coffee and other crops. That is why in June 
on the island of Svalbard in the Norwegian Arctic, all five Scandinavian prime 
ministers met to break ground on a $4.8-million “doomsday vault” that will 
stockpile crop seeds in case of global catastrophe. 

While it boasts the extra safety of Arctic temperatures, the seed bank is 
just the latest life-preservation plan to reach reality, joining genetic banks 
like the Frozen Ark, a British program that is storing DNA samples from 
endangered species like the scimitar-horned oryx, the Seychelles Frégate beetle and 
the British field cricket.

To a certain group preoccupied with doomsday, these projects are laudable but 
share a deep flaw: they are Earth-bound. A global catastrophe — like a 
collision with an asteroid or a nuclear winter — would have to be rather tame in 
order not to rattle the test tubes in the various ark-style labs around the 
world. What kind of feeble doomsday would leave London safe and sound?

Cue the Alliance to Rescue Civilization, a group that advocates a backup for 
humanity by way of a station on the Moon replete with DNA samples of all life 
on Earth, as well as a compendium of all human knowledge — the ultimate 
detached garage for a race of packrats. It would be run by people who, through 
fertility treatments and frozen human eggs and sperm, could serve as a new Adam and 
Eve in addition to their role as a new Noah. 

Far from the lunatic fringe, the leaders of the alliance have serious 
careers: Robert Shapiro, the group’s founder, is a professor emeritus and senior 
research scientist in biochemistry at New York University; Ray Erikson runs an 
aerospace development firm in Boston and has been a NASA committee chair; Steven 
M. Wolfe, as a Congressional aide, drafted and helped pass the Space 
Settlement Act of 1988, which mandated that NASA plan a shift from space exploration to 
space colonization, and was executive director of the Congressional Space 
Caucus; William E. Burrows, an author of several books on space, is the director 
of the Science, Health and Environmental Reporting Program at N.Y.U.

President Bush has already proposed a Moon base. “He just needs to be told 
what it’s good for,” Dr. Shapiro said. Dr. Shapiro has written a number of 
books on the origins of life on Earth, as well as “Planetary Dreams: The Quest to 
Discover Life Beyond Earth,” where he unveiled the civilization rescue 
project. 

In 1999, the same year the book came out, Dr. Shapiro wrote an essay with Mr. 
Burrows for Ad Astra, an astronomy journal. There, they formally laid out 
their plan for the rescue alliance, beginning by warning that “the most enduring 
pictures to come back from the Apollo missions were not of astronauts 
cavorting on the Sea of Tranquillity, nor even of the lunar landscape itself.” 

“They were the haunting views of Earth, seen for the first time not as a 
boundless and resilient colossus of land and water,” they continued, “but as a 
startlingly vulnerable lifeboat precariously plying a vast and dangerous sea: a 
‘blue marble’ in a black void.” A conversation shortly after the essay was 
published, Dr. Shapiro recalled, resounded with the earnest imagination of 
science fiction drama:

Dr. Shapiro: “We’ve got to use space to protect humanity!”

Mr. Burrows: “By God! Yes!” 

The concept is not new, but there is some fresh momentum. Mr. Burrows’s new 
book, “The Survival Imperative: Using Space to Protect Earth,” is due out this 
month. And the physicist Stephen W. Hawking, who is not part of the group, 
began arguing this summer that human survival depends on leaving Earth. 

The mission of the Alliance to Rescue Civilization has also attracted the 
support of Col. Buzz Aldrin, the second man to walk on the Moon, who now devotes 
much of his time to the idea of Martian colonization. 

“It takes a big reason to go to the Moon, because, frankly, it’s a lousy 
place to be,” Colonel Aldrin said in a telephone interview. “But this is exactly 
the kind of planning as a human race we need to secure our future.

“But the A.R.C. idea isn’t ahead of its time because it’s needed right now. 
It’s a reasonable thing to do with our space technology, sending valuable 
stuff to a reliable off-site location. NASA is certainly not bending backwards to 
do it. It’s the private people like A.R.C.”

Born and raised within walking distance of the Bronx Zoo — and he walked that 
distance often — Dr. Shapiro developed an early interest in biodiversity. He 
frets over the frailty of civilization and the planet, but he is not a 
pessimist. He compares the Moon-base idea to a safe-deposit box. 

“It makes sense to protect the things you value,” he said. “But we, as a 
civilization, we don’t have anything like that.” The trouble with doomsday, Dr. 
Shapiro argues, is that it is almost always rendered in popular culture as 
grandiose, though in reality, many minor incidents present substantial everyday 
threats. 

In 1918, an influenza strain killed some 30 million people; a possible new 
bird flu strain spurs contemporary panic. In January 2003, a computer virus shut 
down airlines, banks and governments. That same year, a tree fell on power 
lines outside Cleveland, resulting in a blackout for much of the Northeast. 
Doomsday can be understated.

“But I’m not here to predict doomsday; I’m here for sanity,” Dr. Shapiro 
said. “When we’ve gained what we’ve gained, we should fight to keep it.

“And, worst-case scenario, if it’s all for nothing, we’ll have a nice 
museum.”

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Joyo Indonesia News Service
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