Word: speciesism
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Most people bring back the usual mementos from their overseas vacations: photographs, T-shirts, diarrhea. The BBC Natural History Unit, however, came home with something better. A crew of scientists, academics and filmmakers from the British broadcaster visited the South Pacific island of Papua New Guinea this past spring to...
While the sheer number and size of the found animals were extraordinary - and made possible because the volcanic crater's ecology had been virtually undisturbed by humans - the scientific discovery of new species is actually quite routine. In fact, biologists are identifying new species at a torrid rate, about 50...
The truth is that scientists have only the foggiest idea of how many animals and plants exist on the planet. Estimates of the total number of species range wildly, from 5 million to 30 million to as many as 100 million. Although multitudes of uncharted animals and plants may be...
Yet even as we discover new species, the existing ones are coming under increasing threat. We're losing species 10,000 times faster than the natural rate, a loss of life so great that we've entered the sixth great mass extinction in Earth's history. Why? Global warming plays...
But the more imminent danger comes from the annihilation of forests - especially tropical rain forests, which house a richer variety of animals and plants than anywhere else on the planet. Papua New Guinea lost more than a quarter of its forests from 1972 to 2002, and the BBC team noted...