Monday 28 June 2010

The Way of the Dragon


Heavyweight environmental bloggers, Mongabay, have published a very insightful piece on their site today, in a revealing interview with Grace de Gabriel, Director IFAW Asia. The post is a transcript of an interview originally aired on the radio show 'The Wildlife with Laurel Neme'.

The main interest of the interview is the deep cultural dependency from some sectors of Chinese society on traditional medicine, and how that is clashing with efforts to conserve the last remaining wild tigers on the Asian sub-continent. This revealing insight into what is probably one of the conservation sector's most urgent battles raises issues that are commonly encountered in shark conservation. What can us marine conservationist hope to learn from this scenario? One would think that, having estimated that there are only 3,200 tigers left in the wild, that us humans would have an easy time in convincing perpetrators of tiger crimes that it is time to hang up the traps and guns. Sadly, the Mongabay Article reveals that quite the opposite is true....
Image Source

2 comments:

DaShark said...

Just stumbled upon it - very very clever as always!

Re-posted at http://fijisharkdiving.blogspot.com/2010/11/lessons.html!

And... I DID see your post about having to work together.
Totally agree but sometimes, when moderate arguments fail, things need to get shaken up - alas!

Keep up the good work - DEMA?

Mark Harding said...

Mike, thanks for the comment, not DEMA this time, but will be at Beneath the Sea. Thanks for the post, and I read your blogs more than I comment, great work and very very sound opinion! Keep it up.