Category: extinction
James “Scotty” Philip (30 April 1858 â 23 July 1911) was a South Dakota rancher, remembered as the “Man who saved the Buffalo” due to his role in helping to preserve the American Bison from extinction.
While he was building his cattle herd, Scotty Philip met Pete Dupree, whose son Fred had rescued 5 bison calves from an 1881 buffalo hunt along the Grand River. After Dupree’s death, Philip decided to preserve the species from extinction, and in 1899 he purchased Dupree’s herd, which now numbered 74 head, from Dupree’s brother-in-law, Dug Carlin.
Philip prepared a special pasture for the bison along the western side of the Missouri River north of Fort Pierre, and drove the herd there in 1901.
Scotty Philip died suddenly on July 23, 1911: by that time the herd had grown to approximately a thousand head. He was buried on a family cemetery near his buffalo pasture. As the funeral procession passed, some of the bison came down out of the hills. Newspapers of the time suggested the bison were “showing their respect to the man who had saved them”.
- Labels: death, earth, extinction, history, nature, sustainable
- Labels: clarity, earth, extinction, future, human condition, insanity, insight, nature, sustainable, waste
- Labels: earth, ecology, environment, extinction, future, humanity, humility, sustainable
Vasili Alexandrovich Arkhipov (30 January 1926 â 19 August 1998) was a Soviet naval officer. During the Cuban Missile Crisis, he prevented the launch of a nuclear torpedo and therefore a possible nuclear war. Thomas Blanton (then director of the National Security Archive) said in 2002 that “a guy called Vasili Arkhipov saved the world.”
On 27 October 1962, during the Cuban Missile Crisis, a group of eleven United States Navy destroyers and the aircraft carrier USS Randolph located the diesel-powered nuclear-armed Soviet Foxtrot-class submarine B-59 near Cuba. Despite being in international waters, the Americans started dropping practice depth charges, explosives intended to force the submarine to come to the surface for identification. There had been no contact from Moscow for a number of days and, although the submarine’s crew had earlier been picking up U.S. civilian radio broadcasts, once B-59 began attempting to hide from its U.S. Navy pursuers, it was too deep to monitor any radio traffic, so those on board did not know whether war had broken out. The captain of the submarine, Valentin Grigorievitch Savitsky, believing that a war might already have started, wanted to launch a nuclear torpedo.
Unlike the other subs in the flotilla, on board the B-59 three officers had to agree unanimously to authorize the launch: Captain Savitsky; the political officer Ivan Semonovich Maslennikov; and the second-in-command Arkhipov. Typically, Russian submarines that were armed with the “Special Weapon” only required the captain to get authorization from the political officer if he felt it was necessary to launch the nuclear torpedo, but due to his position as flotilla commander, the B-59’s captain was also required to gain Akrhipov’s approval. An argument broke out among the three, in which only Arkhipov was against the launch.
Although Arkhipov was only second-in-command of submarine B-59, he was commander of the entire flotilla of submarines, including B-4, B-36 and B-130, and equal in rank to Captain Savitsky. According to author Edward Wilson, the reputation Arkhipov gained from his courageous conduct in the previous year’s Soviet submarine K-19 incident also helped him prevail in the debate. Arkhipov eventually persuaded Savitsky to surface the submarine and await orders from Moscow. This action effectively averted the nuclear warfare which most likely would have ensued had the torpedo been fired. The submarine’s batteries had run very low and the air-conditioning had failed, so it was forced to surface amidst its U.S. pursuers and head home. Washington’s message that practice depth charges were being used to signal the submarines to surface never reached B-59, and Moscow claims it has no record of receiving it either.
(read more) (the man who saved the world)
- Labels: atomic bomb, extinction, hero, history, nuclear, war
“What are they doing mama…
They are trying to save us darling one.”
- Labels: extinction, fish, food, greed, nature, ocean, sustainable
This little piggy went to market,
This little piggy stayed at home,
This little piggy had roast beef,
This little piggy had none…
And this little piggy is an example
of what chemical and toxic pollution
is doing to biological life forms,
meaning us, the cause of it all,
we are the little guinea piggies,
and we will be the ones that go…
“Wee wee wee” all the way home.
- Labels: extinction, planet, poison, pollution, waste
The ice age is melting and the Arctic is turning into water. On some days temperatures can hover around 70 degrees fahrenheit ..turning ice shelves into tropical zones. For me, this conjures up images of smooth sailing, sunbathing on sandy beaches and swimming in emerald lagoons. But Iâm a fucking dreamer who needs to see things the way they are. What this really means is greater opportunity for fortune-seekers looking for trade routes to China. What is now home to Eskimos, who still hunt whales and live in igloos ..is about to become an international trade zone ..occupied by oil barons ..land developers ..and casino operators. I have the feeling we are looking at the next wild frontier. Now I picture myself sailing through the North West Passage like it was California during the gold rush ..shooting polar bears instead of buffaloes.
- Labels: bill, Culture, earth, ecology, environment, extinction, world
However this happened, whoever did it, it’s business as usual for the human race. The killing of thousands of innocent people on this particular day of infamy isn’t anything out of the ordinary for you earth creatures. Isn’t it just a repeat of what’s been going on with this “Planet of the Apes” since the day you got here? The history of your pitifull existence is littered with innumerable examples of genocide and mass murder commited brother against brother in an endless theater of bloodletting. Starting with the Roman Empire, 50,000 spectators were entertained with gladiatorial games, executions and animal hunts. An estimated 500,000 people and over a million wild animals died in the Colosseum games. Let’s go down the list: the Peloponnesian War, the genocides of Amalekites and Midianites, the destruction of Carthage, the Mongol horsemen of Genghis Khan, the un-ending religious wars, the eradication of as many as 100 million indigenous natives of the Americas, the complete extinction of the Tasmanian Aboriginal population, the War in the Vendée, The Jallianwala Bagh Massacre, the Philippine-American War, the Herero and Namaqua Genocide in German South-West Africa, War of the Three Kingdoms, the complete destruction of the Zunghar people, the Armenian Genocide, the Assyrian Genocide, the Greek genocide, the Spanish civil war, the Nazi holocaust of the Jews, the American civil war, the genocide against the Don Cossacks, World War One, the Guatemalan civil war, the Srebrenica genocide, the Rwandan Genocide, the Bangladesh War of 1971, Béla Kun’s ethnic cleansing against Turkish and Crimean Tatars and other minorities in 1921-22, World War Two, Lenin’s Red Terror, Stalin’s Great Purge, the Korean War, Mao’s suppression of counterrevolutionaries, Pol Pot’s Killing Fields, massacres at the partition of India, or the Hama, Tlatelolco massacres, and the mass killing of communists by Suharto’s New Order, War and Genocide in East Timor, Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, the Nanjing Massacre, the Katyn Forest Massacre of Polish citizens, the Bombing of Chongqing, the Blitz, the bombing of Dresden and Hamburg, Pearl Harbor, the Atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the Vietnam War, the Ethiopian Red Terror, the Halabja poison gas attack, The Persian Gulf War, the genocide in Tibet, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, should I stop there or keep going? You earthlings have spent the past ten thousand years perfecting your killing skills. You are very good at it. I don’t know how long you will last.
It is estimated, based on archaeological data and written records from European settlers, that from 8 to 112 million indigenous people lived in the Americas when the 1492 voyage of Christopher Columbus began a historical period of large-scale European interaction with the Americas.
While the population of Old World peoples in the Americas steadily grew in the centuries after Columbus, the population of the American indigenous peoples plummeted.
A controversial question relating to the population history of American indigenous peoples is whether or not the natives of the Americas were the victims of genocide. After the Nazi-perpetrated Holocaust during World War II, genocide was defined (in part) as a crime “committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group, as such.”
Historian David Stannard is of the opinion that the indigenous peoples of America (including Hawaii) were the victims of a “Euro-American genocidal war.” While conceding that the majority of the indigenous peoples fell victim to the ravages of European disease, he estimates that almost 100 million died in what he calls the American Holocaust.
- Labels: death, extinction, history, indigenous, war
My guess is that all the poisons, chemicals and female hormone mimicking compounds we’ve introduced into our environment and food have begun to concentrate in our bodies and are slowly trying to turn boys into girls. Male infertility will be the method of our self-annihilation. We are killing ourselves and the planet with our waste.
There’s a million fish in the sea…
where there once were billions…
90% of the big fish in the ocean
have been caught and consumed…
thanks to overfishing, bluefin tuna
have been driven to just 3% of its 1960
abundance……………..a decline of 97%
- Labels: extinction, greed, ocean, overfishing, overpopulation