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RE: Having predators in your region will lead to several different benefits for us humans! Keeping them around might actually do us a lot of goods
Wow, what a fabulous article. I wish we still had wolves in the UK. Ours became extinct in the 1800s but last year, a wildlife organisation bought a small pack for a private estate I believe with the aims of eventually getting the government to reintroduce them if there is space available. UK is so small that there is very little wilderness left apart from the remote areas of Scotland.
They did a similar thing with beavers a couple of years back and we now have a small but thriving population. The UK has very little wildlife left due to the industrial revolution and de forestation.
Sad really :-(
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/2017/06/30/wolves-brown-bears-could-return-british-countryside-naturally/
This is the article is was looking for !! Just to illustrate your point further, it seems the UK now has a massive deer population which is threatening crops and woodland! Nature always seems to know best.
Oh wow, that's interesting! I had no idea that this group also wanted to reintroduce predators to the UK. I'm excited to see how this project turns out!
Thanks for leaving such a good comment, @nathen007! I actually wrote a post about the reintroduction of beavers to the UK some time ago, so I'm familiar with it. If I remember correctly, lots of people opposed it, which is pretty much what happens most places where species are reintroduced.
We did actually wipe out all the wolves in Norway in the 1800s as well, but luckily our neighbors in Russia did not, so we got some strays that eventually established a new population.
It's very sad that there's no wilderness left in the United Kingdom. It's obviously way too late to do anything about it anymore, but at least it should be a warning for other nations who are ramping up their deforestation.
I agree, but this is a discussion I have with friends in Asia often. I cannot blame them for deforestation and their rapid industrial rises, after all, in Europe, and particularly the UK, we are reaping the huge benefits from our industrial revolution, and now other nations are catching up and developing and pulling themselves out of poverty, it seems a bit hypocritical for the currently developed nations to say 'don't do that', especially as we were the protagonists in the history of environmental damage.
It's a delicate situation which in my opinion should be addressed by us giving them both financial and scientific aid to help them progress in a cleaner and more environmentally friendly way than we did without sounding condescending. Tough balancing act !
Yeah, it's a really complicated situation. I also think the best way to solve it is to incentivize green development in order for these countries to have development that is not as harmful to the environment, by providing money and scientific help. I get why it feels unfair some these countries that the (now rich) industrial countries were "allowed" to not care about the environment back in the days while they have to answer for it, but at the same time our knowledge of why it was so bad has increased a lot, so these days we know how bad it is for a country to become industrialized.