Source: http://www.cnn.com/2005/LAW/09/09/wo....ap/index.html
No, this isn't a greenie post. Far from it.
Not too many years ago (less than a decade) I had the distinct pleasure of spending an hour with the individual responsible for tracking the damage done to the Red-Headed Woodpecker by the U.S. Army.
The location was just west of Ft. Bragg, N.C., and he had all his maps at the ready.
The problem was that it wasn't the Army that was pushing the woodpecker out of it's habitat, but rather, it was the woodpecker pushing the Army out of it's live-fire training ranges. No kidding - the Army had been steadily loosing ground to the encroachment of the environmentally-protected Red Headed woodpecker for years, despite the shelling and small arms fire.
Over the decades, since the banning of DDT in the 50's, the woodpecker has made a slow comeback, and was steadily encroaching upon the live fire exercise areas within the restricted area to the west of Ft. Bragg.
How ironic!
This whole program was established because it was believed that the live-fire activities were pushing the bird out of it's natural terrority. As it turns out, the dwindling numbers were most likely due to DDT and more recent wide-ranging insecticides and herbicides such as those used to control ticks and poison ivy.
Yet the mantra remains that it's the U.S. Army live-fire activity which threatens the woodpecker.
The bottom line, here, is that wildlife is far more resilient than we give it credit. Our activities may very well push it out of a particular microcosm, but the inherent pressure of survival causes it to either surge back or to migrate. Even human history is full of migration, for many reasons, including famine, war, etc. Migration, adaptation, variation within a species - all are tools of our survival, and the woodpeckers are no latecomers to this party, regardless of the blithering idiocy of the Arkansas Wildlife Federation.
As Jeff Goldblum's character said best in the movie Jurassic Park, written and directed by Michael Crighton, "life has a way of finding another way."
It always has, and it always will. It's unbelievably ill-advised to side with an isolated decline in the numbers of any given species for a very good reason - it happens ALL THE TIME, with or without our involvement.
On a further note, there may very well be an identified species (or sub-species) in a single location that may be in danger of extinction. What's important to remember is that species adapt constantly to changing environmental conditions, that variations within and across species lines are the norm throughout nature, not an abberation, and we absolutely can NOT afford to cow-tow to every naturalist who comes along and decries a dying species for one simple reason: Perhaps 15 thousand species perish each year.
Again, due to no fault of our own. It's simply the way of life.
More importantly, however, is that more than 15,000 new species appear every year. Such is the way of life, constantly varying, adapting, and evolving to make the best use of their environments.
Our efforts to preserve species ill-suited to a changing environment at the expense of a species that's better suited is perhaps the ultimate of environmental rape, thwarting nature's own billion-year ability to adapt and overcome, to make the best, and most efficient use of whatever environment is available.
It's high time we as a society take a far less myopic look at this issue!
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Originally Posted by genebujold
