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It's comfortable to blame poaching because it makes westerners feel less complicit. But that's not at all what the article states: >“The decline in population
by JustAnotherPat 9y ago
It's comfortable to blame poaching because it makes westerners feel less complicit.
But that's not at all what the article states:
>“The decline in population density was most severe in areas that were deforested or transformed for industrial agriculture, as orangutans struggle to live outside forest areas,” said a lead researcher for the study, Maria Voigt of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Germany.
- justboxing 9y agoYou conveniently cherry picked 1 quote that talks about deforestation. See 3 other quotes that blames even the mostly densely forested areas are seeing large numbers of orangutans being killed, almost all attributed to humans.
- namelost 9y agoIt's not quite so straightforward, the deforestation enables humans to access more of the island than they otherwise would be able to.
- wahern 9y agoI was reading a great, longform article recently about deforestation in Brazil.[1] The article explained how logging is really what opens the forest up to invaders. Even when loggers selectively take a small number of trees in an attempt to keep the ecosystem intact, the logging roads they create reach deep into the jungle. These roads substantially accelerate exploitation of the jungle, including clear-cutting for farming. This isn't obvious from satellite imagery where it would appear that the jungle is intact, but if there's a logging road nearby then you can be sure poachers, miners, and others are running around underneath the canopy. [1] https://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/world/amazon-rainforest-deforestation-crisis/article37722932/?click=sf_globe https://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/world/amazon-rainforest...