A Brief History On September 6, 2013, ivory poachers in Africa poisoned and killed 41 elephants at the Hwange National Park in Zimbabwe. The WWF reports about 20,000 elephants are killed illegally each year in Africa by poachers, out of a world wide total of only 415,000 African elephants. Incredibly, in 1930 there were about 10 million wild elephants in Africa! Digging Deeper Despite strict anti-poaching laws, poaching takes a terrible toll on many types of animals. There may be about 30,000 Rhinos left in Africa, of which only 6000 are Black Rhinos, which numbered over 100,000 as recently as…
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A Brief History On August 30, 1974, the third World Population Conference was held in Bucharest, Romania. The first such conference was held in Geneva, Switzerland in 1927, the idea of birth control advocate Margaret Sanger, under the aegis of the League of Nations. Experts in health, food supply, fertility and other relevant subjects met to examine how many humans the Earth could sustainably host. Subsequent conferences have been arranged by the United Nations starting in 1954. Digging Deeper The conference spawned the International Union for the Scientific Study of Population, a subject fraught with religious, moral, and ethnic considerations. …
A Brief History On August 23, 1898, a new age of exploration began when the Southern Cross Expedition set sail for Antarctica in the aptly named ship, Southern Cross. Digging Deeper Thus began the Heroic Age of Antarctic Exploration, a British venture exploring the Southernmost part of the Earth, an era that ended in 1922. Inspired by previous Antarctic explorers, Norwegian born Carsten Borchgrevink first gazed on Antarctica from the deck of a whaling ship, prompting his desire for further exploration. Carsten pursued financing in Britain and succeeded in organizing the expedition with the Southern Cross, the first such visit…
A Brief History On August 10, 1961, the US began Operation Ranch Hand, a ten year program of using chemical herbicides against the flora of Vietnam and surrounding countries to both deprive the Viet Cong of food crops and of foliage for cover. Digging Deeper Chemical weapons are banned by international treaty, including the 1925 Geneva Protocol and The Chemical Weapons Convention of 1993. Not only are deadly chemicals prohibited, but irritants such as “tear gas” are also banned for use in war. Herbicides escaped mention in previous prohibitions against deadly chemicals used in war, but in 1978 the Environmental…
A Brief History On August 7, 1978, President Jimmy Carter recognized the toxic waste that had been disposed of negligently into a residential area canal as a federal emergency. Digging Deeper The Love Canal neighborhood of Niagara Falls, New York had been planned in 1890, but only reached a portion of its planned size. The eponymous canal in the neighborhood was used for industrial dumping of various chemical by-products by the Hooker Chemical Company as well as municipal waste products. By the 1950s, people took notice of the health problems experienced by people in the neighborhood, finally drawing the attention…