Reposted from Energy Resources Yahoo! Group.
Which Button would you Push?
Ron Patterson
I have found an article, Elimitating the Tsetse Fly, that helps explains the tremendous pain and conflict that wrenches at the heartstrings a tiny percentage of people who truly understand where this anthropocentric world is heading.
A little background is in order here. The tsetse fly, pronounced tet’-se, looks much like the common house fly, occupies a swath of African territory from just south of the Sahara Desert in the north almost to Zimbabwe in the south. The fly carries a parasite that causes Trypanosomosis (sleeping sickness) in humans and Nagana or Animal Trypanosomosis in animals that are not native to the area. Animals that are native to the area have long become immune to the disease. That is, they carry the parasite but do not get the disease. From the article:
African sleeping sickness affects as many as 500,000 people, 80 percent of whom eventually die, and the bite of the fly causes more than $4 billion in economic losses annually.
Now I ask you, who could be against saving 400,000 Africans from a death due to sleeping sickness, not to mention $4 billion in losses, mostly due to dead cattle? Well, there are two sides to this story. And it is a perfect example of Garrett Hardin’s assertion that the choice is never between good and evil, but always between the greater evil verses the lesser one.
The article refers to the area infected with the tsetse fly as a green desert. A green desert because it is fit for nothing but forest, savanna and wildlife. But the article is misleading in its statement that the tsetse fly has TURNED the area into a green desert. It always was a green desert.
This green desert is home to three of the four remaining wild primates, the Chimpanzee, Bonobo and the Gorilla. Already near extinction, these three primates would not last long if their territory was turned into grazing land. But there are thousands of others from baboons to antelope, from the lion and hyena to exotic monkeys like Spot-Nose Guenon. Gone, they will all be gone if the green desert is ever eliminated.
If the tsetse fly is ever eliminated, the green desert will eventually become a brown desert and all the exotic wildlife that once occupied the area will be but a distant memory to any surviving humans. And of course human population overshoot will also have its drastic effect. Humans will die in far greater numbers than those that currently die from sleeping sickness.
Elsewhere, I found this excerpt from a different viewpoint:
The tsetse fly is one of nature’s only defences against man’s influence. The indigenous wildlife is immune to the disease carried by the tsetse fly, but cattle being exotic are not. This forced man to live in areas where there were no tsetse flies, as their cattle were quickly decimated. But today man is ruthless in his use of insecticides, and is spraying vast areas of Africa. This serves the purpose of killing the tsetse fly, but it has dreadful effects on the rest of the environment. The poisonous insecticides kill many other species, and when they enter the water streams, the potential for disaster is great, as the poison strengthens as it gets passed on by the ingestion of an infected animal. So the insecticide can cause damage to humans as well as destroying an already fragile and dying ecosystem.
Cattle are certainly the biggest culprits in the destruction of the environment and an alternative to cattle seems necessary to preserve African environment as we now it. The farming of wildlife today is very popular and is arguably a better option than cattle. Wildebeest, as an example, being indigenous are immune to disease and do not require expensive dipping, as cattle do. Their reproductive rate is much higher and they live longer. They do not destroy the environment as cattle do; therefore the land can sustain them for longer and the vegetation regenerates. The expense of farming wildlife such as Wildebeest and Springbok, as opposed to cattle, is much lower, as the animals do not require such attention and are extremely hardy, they have adapted to their surroundings over thousands of years whereas cattle have only had about 150 years.
QUESTION FOR THE READER:
Imagine that there are two buttons before you. If you pushed the first one it would eliminate the tsetse fly forever. If you pushed the second button, it would make it impossible for humans to eliminate the tsetse fly.
WHICH BUTTON WOULD YOU PUSH?
I would, without a moments hesitation, push the second button.
Elimitating the Tsetse Fly
The End of Eden - Desertification in Africa
