There are dozens of new species being discovered as we speak. And who better to tell us about them than magical British people?
This film was created by writer/directors Stephen Poliakoff and Charles Sturridge to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the World Wildlife Federation, and it was shot in the London Natural History Museum.
(via Open Culture)
As soon as they said ‘there’s not much time’, I knew it was referring to extinction. As I tell anyone who asks: species have been going extinct in their millions well before humans were around to help. It’s called natural selection. But, as is human nature, we try to keep things constant. It’s a similar story with climate change: the climate has been changing enormously over the millennia, our current situation is but a brief moment in the earth’s history. In a mere 10,000 years, we have a pretty good chance of an ice age, to name one catastrophe. And yet, life thrives in all situations, as it always has done. How arrogant to think that only in this exact, but human-free climate, can we have biodiversity.
Other than that, however, it was indeed an interesting film. British film-making 101: Baffle them into submission ;)
Life hasn’t always thrived, it’s had some close calls. The more species that survive the current global die-off, the better chance we and the species we like to eat will be among those survivors. There have been 5 major extinction events. Check out their descriptions, and ask yourself if humans would have survived any of them.
http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/extinction/
The difference is that it normally takes hundreds of thousands or even millions of years for a large fraction of species to die out even in the famed mass-extinction events like those at the K-T Boundary and End Permian. But now humans anthropogenic causes have started a mass extinction event that may be able to kill a significant fraction of species on Earth in just a few hundred years.
@Hamish Milne: we are causing a mass extinction in a very short period.
Trust me, you don’t want to be part of a mass extinction, unless you are so naive to think that humans live in an ecological void.
Plus, the beauty we are destroying won’t recover before thousands of human generations.
This is why modern conservation seeks balance rather than permanence, and focusses on diversity rather than history.
That species die of natural causes is largely irrelevant to the ethical questions around conservation and environmentalism.
Mmmh, cute video, great aesthetics, and very important message.
I wonder, however, if such investment is more aimed to revive the tarnished image of WWF.
Can anyone define the word Happiness? What is Happiness we do not know because every single person has its own meaning of happiness. Finding the ways to be happy in life is only a way that can make everyone happy in this world.
That woman in the red dress could get me to follow her anywhere I think.
Gemma Arterton.