For the first time, Kenya Wildlife Service is introducing white rhino from Lake Nakuru National Park to Nairobi National Park.
Nairobi National Park will serve as a new home for ten white rhino, who are being translocated from drought-stricken Lake Nakuru National Park. The lack of water has depleted the grasses that make up the huge herbivores’ food source, and Lake Nakuru wildlife officials fear there is too much competition and not enough food for the grass-eating pachyderms.
Population control is an issue that no-one wants to talk about - even the environmental leaders. Why has this become such a poisonous topic when it is so clear that it is needed to avoid catastrophic resource depletion?
Lost in the shuffle of whether life begins at conception or at birth is the broader implications of family planning on the one issue that most affects sustainable development: population.
Sometime back on National Public Radio, a panel discussed the high cost of gasoline and what the next president should do about it. When asked if we should be concerned about running out of oil, a panelist quipped that “President Obama” will create appropriate tax incentives for photovoltaics and oil will become so much “useless sludge”. Am I alone in thinking that there is a general lack of understanding about what the future holds for all of us when petroleum runs out?
Yes, We Eat Oil
When nitrogen is allowed to infiltrate a suitable body of water, the normal population of algae grows explosively. It consumes available nutrients and oxygen, turns the water green, and kills most other species. The algae, unable to thrive under the conditions they themselves have created, begin to die. This is called an algae bloom.
Petroleum is humanity’s source of nitrogen. Increasingly, we’re aware that it doesn’t just heat our houses and propel our cars; we actually eat it. Through the twin miracles of modern agriculture and wet-milling, petroleum becomes nitrogen fertilizer, which becomes corn or soybeans, which become virtually every and any processed food product we know (including virtually all meat and farmed fish).[1] In Michael Pollan’s acclaimed book The Omnivore’s Dilemma, he documents that over sixty percent of the average American’s diet comes from (petroleum-derived) corn![2]
