Vanishing In Plain Sight
Read this in the NY Times this morning. What would possess us to kill/eliminate/obliterate a species forever?……. Are we mad?
SAN FELIPE, Mexico — In the shallow sea waters of the Gulf of California swims a porpoise that few have seen, its numbers dwindling so fast that its very existence is now in peril.
Known mostly by its Spanish name, the snub-nosed vaquita is the world’s smallest cetacean, a miniature porpoise with a cartoonlike features and dark smudges around its eyes. The species lives only in the fertile waters of the gulf’s northern corner.
The size of its population has always been precarious, but now voracious demand in China for a fish that shares the vaquita’s only habitat has pushed the tiny porpoise to the brink of extinction.
No more than 30 vaquitas are left, according to a November estimate based on monitoring of their echolocation clicks. Half of the vaquitas counted a year earlier have disappeared.
This calamity has hardly gone unnoticed. The vaquita has been vanishing in plain sight, to the despair of conservationists who have been advising the Mexican government on how to save it. All of the resources brought to bear, including the protection of the Mexican Navy, have proved to be no match against the illegal wildlife trade.“If we continue on the path we’re on, we’ll have no vaquitas in two years,” said Barbara Taylor, a marine mammal expert at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
The vaquita are simply bycatch, trapped and drowned in curtains of illegal gillnets set for an endangered fish called the totoaba. The fish’s swim bladder is dried and smuggled to China, where wealthy diners pay thousands of dollars for the delicacy, believing it to have medicinal powers.
When there is no liking and no disliking
and your eyes are clear
When you have clarity of consciousness
existence reveals its reality to you.
That reality is divine.
That reality is truth.
If love expects anything
there will be frustration,
there is going to be misery,
and madness.
Preferring crowds the mind
with clouds and dreams
No thoughts move in the mind.
You can see what is true.
Truth liberates.
The path to hell is filled with wishes,
Good wishes, hopes, dreams, ideals.
The path to heaven is absolutely empty.
Simply laugh and ask for a cup of tea.
—-Sosan
