HARVESTING LIFE ON EARTH

Rex Burress

Every time I read about overruns in harvesting natural resources on earth, I wince, as it brings out the conservationist in me. People around me may wince, too, as my criticism of overkill might seem annoying and too sternly expressed.

It's partly the Paul Covel and William Mott in me-- my renowned conservation mentors of the 1960's who denounced any form of environmental atrocities, or my Missouri Conservationist background, but in any event, I wince when I read of natural resource overuse that imperils the wildlife of the planet we live on.

As unlikely as it might seem, I'm pro-gun and pro-hunting in accordance to code laws, because I grew up in rural Missouri and witnessed the efficiency of the conservation department. Biologists kept track of wildlife populations and established limits on the harvesting of the surplus, intended to prevent major game losses and to keep over-population from developing. “Too many deer equals too little food!” Hunting was part of the farm life and I took zeal in bringing in squirrels and catfish for the table.

But I was also an official “Nature Knight for Boys” and kept records and made observations for the Missouri Department of Conservation, a unit that successfully restocked deer, turkeys, beaver, and otter in the 1960's, reestablishing what once was plentiful. The Lewis and Clark Expedition of 1804 reported herds of a 100 deer along the Missouri River near Kansas City, but 100 years later the whitetails had been hunted almost to depletion, especially in North MO where I lived. Lack of laws and conscience created a dearth of wildlife that took a long time to recover.

The tragic story of the passenger pigeon should have given America plenty of warning that we'd better get it right with our environment and regulations, or wildlife would slip away into oblivion. Those wild pigeons were so numerous that their flights would blacken the skies for hours as they passed overhead, said John James Audubon. Farmers dynamited the roosts and raked them up by the barrels full to feed their hogs. And before we knew it, the last passenger pigeon died in a zoo in 1914.

What I intended to dwell on was some recent wildlife overruns in the food markets around the world, and a California declining abalone population. Those are issues far away from my home base in Oroville, yet 'far away' is part of the planet and deserves international concern. If habitat is the more important detail of wildlife rather than individual animals, controlled habitat is also the basis of ecology world-wide. For Earth Watch people, think globally; act locally. It is the conservation attitude that will save our species...in spite of short-sighted political mongols eager to 'make money now' at any cost.

As with the abalone, possessor of a gloriously beautiful iridescent inner shell so magnificent that it far outshines the meaty body, there is sea life everywhere broadly harvested to fill the markets. On food shows, like Andrew Zimmern's Exotic Foods, I again wince to see tons of improbable animals for sale at the Asian markets, mostly I imagine, taken from poorly protected habitats. I ask myself, “how can nature survive in the raging quest to feed mankind?”

To fuel my conservationist zeal, there are two articles in the March, 2017 issue of National Geographic that present a couple dire cases of overkill. “A Sea's Fading Bounty,” tells of fish populations plummeting in the South China Sea by overfishing and a maritime boundary dispute. It states: “3.7 million people conduct the fisheries in the China Sea, generating billions of dollars, but after decades of free-for-all fishing, stocks are dwindling, threatening the food security of vast regions and the extinction of many aquatic species.”

From troubled waters in China to an Indonesian Island, where the endangered Crested Black Macaque monkeys are in “A Fight to Survive” against meat hunters, animals are attacked and squeezed out of habitats due to absent or lax regulations and the increasing world hunger.

Locally, the Sierra Club, especially, is alert to environmental crisis around the world and a force for frack-free water and conservation in Butte County. It is as John Muir said: “The battle for conservation will go on endlessly. It is part of the universal warfare between right and wrong.”

“Earth provides enough to satisfy every man's needs, but not every man's greed.”--Gandhi

“A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise.” --Aldo Leopold