Finished Detectives in Togas

[conuly]

The girls were suitably happy with the ending, even though they guessed it ages ago with very little to go on. This is good, because Ana's book club assigned A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, so we're starting that tomorrow.

************

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Ivory Coast farmers face eviction, extortion in drive to save forests

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Comments

Ivory coast farmers

[elenbarathi.livejournal.com]

"Around 80 percent of Ivory Coast's primary forest, once the largest in West Africa, has been chopped down in the five decades since independence, amid an agricultural expansion that helped make it the world's top cocoa producer and most important economy in Francophone West Africa.

With new illegal plantations coming into production every season, officials privately acknowledge that around a third of cocoa output, which reached a record 1.8 million tonnes last season, now originates from protected land."

... and we're supposed to feel sorry for the poor illegal farmers, who have, alas no recourse when their illegal crops are destroyed and their illegal profits taken? Are we also to feel sorry for the poor poachers of elephant and rhino tusks then? How about the poor traffickers in albino body parts? Wah, their children are starving and they have no other way to make a living!

It would be nice if the pathetic governments of these wretched Third World countries made any provision for their poor, so they would not have to survive on bush-meat, crime and contraband while wreaking wanton environmental devastation. However, they don't, and there is damn little a US citizen can do to change that.

Therefore, since the world has both an egregious over-abundance of humans and a terrifyingly-compromised global ecology, I say that humans who will not stop destroying the irreplaceable forest can go to jail and/or die and reduce the surplus population, whichever is easiest. Harsh, I know, and YMMV, but there it is.

Note that I say the exact same thing about the white American poachers, polluters and water-thieves right here on my own Olympic Peninsula. Homo sapiens is an aggressively invasive species; control measures have to be equally aggressive.

“These folk are hewers of trees and hunters of beasts; therefore we are their unfriends, and if they will not depart we shall afflict them in all ways that we can.”
~J.R.R. Tolkien, The Silmarillion