Nov 23 2009

Desecration

(noon. – promoted by ek hornbeck)

Last night I watched the documentary on msnbc: “100 Heartbeats,” part of MSNBC’s Future Earth series on the race to save our planet.

In “100 Heartbeats,” the second premiere in MSNBC’s landmark Future Earth series, famed naturalist Jeff Corwin tells the story of the “Sixth Extinction” – caused by people and which can only be stopped by people. Keep checking futureearth.msnbc.com for information about the next premiere, “Future Earth: 2025,” which will air on Dec. 20. You can catch “100 Heartbeats” on MSNBC again on Thanksgiving at 11 a.m. ET.

I was glad to see this show in a Sunday evening slot on msnbc and I really wish to god they’d do more like this … just blanket their whole weekend programming with this instead of the prison porn they usually do. Why not? Perhaps we should think about a write-in campaign to convince them of that!

I’m suffering a ripple-over, a hangover, of thoughts and I’m attempting to share some of these thoughts here.

There is a lot of bloggage currently over the increasing volume on the xtian’s idiocy, see  this essay from gottlieb. I was struck this morning by the juxtaposition.  I am just… so … aghast at the hypocrisy and the indignity of their whining … when this is going on.

This is desecration. This is an unholy war. This is …

Every year tens of millions of sharks die a slow death because of finning. Finning is the inhumane practice of hacking off the shark’s fins and throwing its still living body back into the sea. The sharks either starve to death, are eaten alive by other fish, or drown (if they are not in constant movement their gills cannot extract oxygen from the water). Shark fins are being “harvested” in ever greater numbers to feed the growing demand for shark fin soup, an Asian “delicacy”.

Not only is the finning of sharks barbaric, but their indiscriminate slaughter at an unsustainable rate is pushing many species to the brink of extinction. Since the 1970s the populations of several species have been decimated by over 95%. source

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I can’t begin to tell you how stunned and revolted I was last night when they showed video  of it. It took my breath away.

Here’s the deal. I’m not going to write about the whole shark thing, or the rest of it. I’m confident that most of DD readers are way ahead of me on all of that.  What I’m thinking more about is how do we help move things forward and get this subject more and more into mainstream America’s (and world’s) consciousness?

When will people get it…? that it’s not just about that cute orangutan or gorgeous cheetah…. it’s the planet, stupid.

I don’t know. I just had to say something.

There’s numerous hits when you google shark finning… This one has some actions items, as I’m sure others do as well.

It’s not just the sharks, or the other animals the show highlighted. The show did a fair job of pointing out that this is all inter-related, and the demise of our Earth is in the offing. There was some video footage of some dying coral reefs somewhere. I really was just grief-stricken.

At least I’m not the only one.

15 comments

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  1. Mother Earth Pictures, Images and Photos

  2. The ancient Venus of Willendorf comes to mind as well as the various, more recent (historically speaking) Snake Goddesses of the Mediterranean. The earth does not belong to us to do as we please, but to speak to us about the gift of life. We must eat, and we are firmly planted within the food chain, but we certainly don’t own it.  

    • Edger on November 23, 2009 at 22:47
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    I’ll show you f’ing ripples. Let’s send congress on a field trip…

    “Ninety five percent of the glaciers in the world are retreating or shrinking… there is no scientific dispute about that”

    Photographer James Balog shares new image sequences from the Extreme Ice Survey, a network of time-lapse cameras recording glaciers receding at an alarming rate, some of the most vivid evidence yet of climate change. (Recorded at TEDGlobal 2009, July 2009 in Oxford, England. Duration: 19:22)

    • Inky99 on November 23, 2009 at 23:56
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    a really moving piece about a fellow and his assistant in Indonesia who are saving Orangutans.   I was really surprised to see this on a corporate news network such as NBC.  

    • dkmich on November 24, 2009 at 12:19
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    Since the last one covered the US all the way down to the south, I can only hope that there is a pole shift moving Michigan to, let’s say, where Mexico is use to be.  The planet has been stable a long time.  It is time for it to remake itself again.

    What I object to more than anything is cruely to earth’s creatures, including us.  If any species ought to go extinct, it should be us.  

  6. heres an article linked at Common Dreams Taking Care of Business: How Big Business Has Hijacked Climate Talks some of you might want to read.

    This is the new face of the climate business.

    Until recently, many of the globe’s biggest corporations were firmly in the climate change denial camp – and funding spurious research to back up their claims. Now a new realism has emerged. Climate change is no longer rejected as a bogus theory the economy can ill afford. Instead, it’s a business opportunity.

  7. this will only be our fourth extinction not the sixth.  Ah, could have been a couple we missed in there though.

    At one time I liked Big Al but evidence mounts daily via the 911 truth and Climategate as the newest exposure to things just too evil for people to believe.  Now we will have to endure WWIII and the end of America as we knew it.

  8. We ARE engaged in a mass extinction event.

    Humans are part of a food chain and no one really knows which animal loss will directly affect us. Bees? Bats? Frogs? Though not quite as cute as the cuddly Panda bear,  our food and survival depend on animals whose contribution is overlooked.

    Oh, and may I suggest you Google “Great Pacific Garbage Patch”. Just something to consider the next time you have seafood – or walk out of a grocery store with a plastic bag.

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