Veronika Wild

  "The silent extinction" I’m thinking about Giraffes today. In case you are wondering why, their International Day fell on the same day as I was writing about rainforests. In fact I’ve missed quite a few other commemorative days this month while obsessing about trees – Endangered Species Day, Biological Diversity Day, World Ocean Day, World Bee Day, Parrot Day, Turtle Day, Lynx Day, Cougar Day, Croc Day, Camel Day and quite a few before that, but these topics are not unrelated – destroy the habitat and you lose the species whether its orangutans, elephants, turtles, insects, birds or anything else. It’s only when we start losing big mammals that we seem start to taking notice of the damage being done, while countless minor species sink without trace. A friend and I were talking only the other day about how rarely we see Christmas beetles these days compared to how abundant they were when we were children. The special days are good in the sense that we come to understand ...

Rainforest, Vanuatu - rich in biodiversity, retains moisture, generates rainfall and oxygen and absorbs  four times more carbon dioxide than palm plantations   Just when you and I thought we’d finished talking about trees for a while, along comes World Rainforest Day. Because Rainforests are significant in a number of ways and at a tipping point, I will touch on this briefly, because it should concern us all. We have already mentioned their importance to maintaining biodiversity – they contain 50% of species known to man (sic) and possibly quite a few that aren’t known. Their density and moisture content also mean that rainforests are considerably cooler and retain more water than regions where they have been replaced by broad scale agriculture. They also store four times more carbon than say, palm oil plantations which are replacing them in places such as Indonesia and the Congo. Most importantly however, they also play a large role in regulating climate and rainfall, not...