by admin
Zoo
August 31, 2009 in Uncategorized by admin
I have been going to London Zoo for over 40 years and during that period of time my opinion of zoo’s has changed from thinking that they are a good place to go on a cold and windy day to they are depressing places that imprison animals away from their natural environment to a place that is essential for the protection of rare species.
A trip to the London Zoological Garden’s today confirmed the last of these points. There were a number of interesting parallels demonstrated today in the zoo between what is happening in (what is left of) the wild and the human race. In a way today’s trip was like observing the whole of humanity in a single place and mixing with wild animals.
The zoo was full, literally of people today because it is a bank holiday. This is the first point, there are far too many people. There were people from all over the world as well as there are outside. Another observation that was made is that there are a lot of overweight people around and a lot of these are extremely overweight, obese in fact. Many of these people are parents and it was easy to see the seeds of obesity starting in some of the smallest children.
People were arriving at the zoo entrance and immediately going to a a hot dog stand to buy snacks of hot dogs and coca-cola’s for themselves and their children. There were also a huge number of children. Obviously this is not a surprise at the zoo on a bank holiday but as a representative sample of people a lot of them are children as is the case outside the walls of the zoo. And there were also a lot of pregnant women.
This mass of people in the vicinity of the wild animals was like a real life metaphor for what is happening in the wider world with an increasing human population consuming vast amounts of food resources and decreasing numbers of wildlife and wild habitats.
As I stated at the beginning of this post I have been going to the zoo for over 40 years and during this time there has been a massive increase in the human population and a relative decrease in the wild animal population and in the area of wild habitats. In the zoo there is a tank of fish from Madagascar that are the only remaining representatives of their species in the world. There is also a habitat for a type of fruit bat that is extinct in the wild and there are only just over seventy remaining in captivity.
The last 40 years has been one of increasing consumption of natural resources in the quest for cheap easily available food and cheaper goods and most importantly an increase in the human population. Each one of the children at the zoo will consume over their lifetime tons of food, plastic, timber, oil, gas, electricity, animals and space. A lot of this will come from unsustainable sources. The Amazon rain forest is still being cut down at a rapid rate.
The media and increasingly private and public sectors talk about sustainability but over the time that I have been going to the zoo the amount of natural resource, wild space and wild species that have gone forever has increased year on year to the point where the world and all living creatures are now in an critical condition. Those unborn children are likely to be the last big consumers before the world starts to visibly run out of those precious resources.
For real sustainable living it’s going to be necessary to reduce consumption of products especially cheap food and reduce the human population. It’s also going to be necessary to stop travelling to far flung exotic places. The human race will have to learn to live without going on package tours and disturbing the indigenous animals, plants and fishes.
I have a terrible feeling that if I continue to go to the zoo over the next 40 or so years the number of species, animals, vegetables and fishes will be even lower than now and the number of human’s even higher. The zoo is for some species literally the last place on Earth. If you want to save the planet go to the London Zoo or wherever your local zoo is and pay some money to help conservation efforts. Bur if you really want to do some good you are going to have to bite the bullet and avoid having any or anymore children. Your children are the future of but also the end of the world as we know it.
Let some other species have a chance before it’s too late for the lot of us.
