Your Letters and Comments
April-June 2005 (Vol. 6, No. 2)
Water and the Fight Against Poverty
The article,“Pipe Dreams” by Fred Pearce (Conservation In Practice, January-March, 2005) brought home to me the wonder of water, but I have a small grouse about an omission.
A few years ago I wrote for an overseas magazine a two-part feature entitled “Ever Since Noah” on the power of water to both enrich and impoverish our Earth. It concluded that a chief culprit in the misuse of water was the “press of population” leading to the shrinking of land and the overdevelopment of coastal and plains areas.
Of course, any hint of overpopulation is politically incorrect in right-wing America today. Having lived nearly 50 years in Africa, I have seen women spending most of their waking hours walking many miles with 10-kg containers on their heads to fetch enough water for their family’s basic needs. Or alternatively, they resort to near-by stagnant pools that carry filth and disease and put their health at constant risk.
We should never take water for granted. Every time I turn on a tap or take a bath, I realize how blessed we are and yet how careless we are with the world’s water.
In my book, the number-one priority in the fight against poverty is to see that everyone on Earth has access to clean, drinkable water.
ZELDA MACK
Nature Conservancy Legacy Member
Sparking the Imagination
This is to inform you how much I have enjoyed and learned from reading Conservation In Practice. It brings me hope that the problems of conservation are being identified and that solutions will be found. All issues have been exciting but the piece on William McDonough (January-March 2005) and the concept of “industrial ecosystems” sparked the imagination. I shared my copy with the coordinator of the Missouri Department of Natural Resources’ South Central Solid Waste Management District.
HERMINA JOLLEY
Sky View Farm, Missouri
Potent Medicines
I read with interest the article “Healing Powers” (Conservation In Practice, January-March 2005). Author Douglas Fox looks at traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) in American cities, but the problem is worldwide.
Throughout Asia, from India to Japan, many rare animals are killed for the pharmacological requirements of TCM. The valuable gall bladder and bile of endangered bears are used to treat a variety of inflammations, infections, and pain. There are “bear farms” that supply bile to Chinese practitioners, where steel catheters are surgically implanted into caged bears’ gall bladders, enabling handlers to regularly “milk” the bears for their bile. North and South American bears are also being killed for their gall bladders, which are then smuggled into China. Other endangered animals, such as the five rhino species, are killed for their horns — which, when ground into a powder, are said to cure diverse ailments, but not impotence.
Tigers, endangered throughout their range, are killed for their bones, which are made into “tiger bone wine” said to give the drinker the sexual prowess of the tiger. Throughout the world’s oceans, sharks of all species are being slaughtered and their fins cut off to make ridiculously expensive (US$100 a bowl) shark’s fin soup, which is believed to confer the savagery of the shark on the drinker.
Ever since people developed the notion that the horn of the unicorn could detect poison or cure various ailments, people have killed rhinos to obtain “medicine” from their various parts. It is a terrible anachronism that so many people today rely on largely ineffectual animal-related remedies, but the real tragedy is that large numbers of animals have to die to provide these nostrums.
The great majority of medicinals prescribed in TCM are of vegetable or herbal origin; only a few originate in animal parts. Of these, many are from domestic animals such as pigs, cows, horses, camels, goats, and sheep. But a few come from wild animals, such as tigers, leopards, rhinos, deer, bears, musk deer, pangolins, sea horses, and sea lions.
I do not want to criticize the principles or practices of traditional Chinese medicine, but I do want to point out that some irresponsible people — often perverting the fundamentals of this venerable tradition — bear a large responsibility for the destruction of some increasingly endangered species. A wider understanding of the traditions, the medications, and the status of the endangered species might possibly save even more lives — human and animal.
RICHARD ELLIS
Author of the upcoming Tiger Bone and Rhino Horn: The Destruction of Wildlife for Traditional Chinese Medicine
Global Conservation Spending
Recent letters and columns in Conservation in Practice by Peter Kareiva and Jon Christensen, respectively, have described the need for a more practical, data-driven approach to the study of conservation prioritization systems and their influence on global conservation investment. Kareiva notes that the “best approach would be to simply produce a map of where money is being spent on conservation and then make an effort to fill the gaps.” We agree and we would like to draw your attention to our forthcoming paper in Conservation Biology. We report the first study of global conservation spending with an emphasis on the relationship between so-called silver bullet conservation prioritization systems and actual spending by major nongovernmental organizations. We show that published prioritization schemes correlate with 3 to 33 percent of global spending.
CHRIS PYKE AND BEN HALPERN
NCEAS, University of California, Santa Barbara
