Mediated Communication - Wildlife Decline

" Wildlife numbers halved over past four decades: WWF" I have been a wildlife lover all my life. I enjoy the creatures that swim, fly, and roam the earth. My children and I have enjoyed countless programs on TV about animals, their habitats, life cycles, feeding habits, etc. I am always interested about the efforts to save animal habitat and prevent extinction of certain species. My laptop automatically loads MSN.com when I bring up the internet. I found this article recently posted on MSN titled, " Wildlife numbers halved over past four decades: WWF" Naturally, I clicked into the article and began to read. The statistics were alarming. I continued to read to the end and then read the comments by other readers. A few comments were in support of population control and curbing the human consumption machine. Most comments were crying foul due to personal experiences with an increase in wildlife populations in the readers local areas. These posts caused me to read the article again with a more critical eye. While I think we can all agree that we need to be smart about the environment and not waste our natural resources and we can all see waste around us, the article was very slanted and incomplete in its research. The study sited only looked at a representative sample of land and sea and was incomplete in its assumptions that human consumption is the only problem. Example: the article assumed that the overconsumption by wealthy countries is to blame for the lack of enough food and clean water in the poor countries. I believe a claim like this is short sighted and doesn’t address other contributing factors such as weather related issues like droughts, corrupt governments who use the resources of their countries to increase their power and wealth rather than helping their own people, and conflicts that disrupt and destroy agricultural efforts and interfere with international efforts to help. Many of the African countries are a good example of these issues. The continent, as a whole, has a vast amount of natural resources but they largely go undeveloped due to internal strife. It seems that continent is stuck in the dark ages. Foreign aid has been pouring into that continent as long as I can remember yet it seems to have made little difference for the people. All the aid we can dump there doesn’t seem to matter. I believe the solution starts with personal responsibility to be smart about our consumption and our efforts to conserve, help our neighbors, and then expand our reach. It’s the old saying, “give a man a fish and you have fed him for a day, but teach a man to fish and you have fed him for a lifetime”.