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Posted by
Susan Sharma
on
October 20, 2007
"So as the trees are felled and land cleared of its carbon-stripping units, the earth simmers and mourns the growing loss of creatures that have survived ice ages but not the fatal pincer of man’s insatiable hunger for land, lumber and lips-smacking mammalian
delicacies. As ecologist Richard Corlett noted, many long-studied forests in Southeast Asia have nothing left but deer and boar, and some not at all. And as the elephants, rhinos, orang-utans, gibbons, tapirs and bears vanish, they take with them the future
generations of trees that once relied on these beasts to disperse their seeds and carve new clearings in the jungle where saplings might sprout. "
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"Unfortunately, the sun bear’s preferred haunts are also where fine furniture lovers obtain their raw materials, such as Bornean ironwood, a tree so densely built that it sinks and takes nearly a thousand years to reach a harvestable size. With the additional
impetus of biofuels that now drives a crazed and counterproductive frenzy to cover the region with ’climate friendly’ oil palms, the sun bear and its homelands, face a future that is bleak at best and at worst incapable of sustaining advanced life. "
Source:
http://www.wildasia.net/main.cfm?parentID=2&page=article&articleID=359
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