Written by Brook Schaaf
On the occasion of Earth Day this year, I reflected on a potluck I attended last year with my three young sons. Once a year, a large ranch on the 106-mile-long Pedernales (read: PUHR-də-NAL-iss) River here in Texas hosts a gathering of landowners to share information about and best practices for preserving our riparian ecology.
Last year, a bird handler provided a wondrous demonstration with a hawk, falcon, vulture, owl, and eagle, incredible creatures to see up close, swooping and hopping. During his presentation, he shared an unsettling story about the fragility of an ecosystem and its dependence on these apex predators that I hadn’t heard before: the Indian vulture crisis.
In brief, the population of several critical vulture species in India collapsed from the 1990s through the early 2000s because of poisoning by diclofenac. Vulture species ingested this veterinary medicine through the carcasses of rotting livestock. Devastation of the bird population was just the beginning of the crisis. The carcasses, previously cleared quickly by these scavengers, led to a surge of millions of biting, feral dogs and widespread pathogenic contamination associated with half a million excess human deaths in the following two decades. The economic cost of the health crisis was estimated to reach $70 billion a year before diclofenac’s 2006 ban.
They say the dose makes the poison. In this case, a cost-effective solution applied countless times had a massive negative externality, totally knocking out nature’s own cycle with dire consequences, as we’ve seen. It made me wonder about the negative externalities of the commercial world I participate in. I know others do, too, because it comes up from time to time in conversations.
What can I say? We humans pollute the world we live in, and there is no ready solution. To paraphrase Gerald Ford, any government big enough to protect the environment will be callous enough to destroy the environment. As Mahatma Gandhi never actually said, we must be the change we wish to see.
Affiliate marketing is well-positioned to support such changes because it communicates not only ever-crucial pricing information but also associated information, such as second-hand products and why you might spend more to buy a more durable product.
Wherever we go from here, improvements in awareness and technology should give us hope for the future, such that my children’s children can enjoy their own display of these beautiful birds someday.
(We’ll return to our Star Wars trilogy with Return of the Jedi next week, just ahead of the dweeb high holy day of May Fourth.)
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