Friday, September 17, 2004

How Lost World poses sustainability question

coverimage
REFLECTIONS: SUSTAINABILITY CIRCLES AND BEHAVIOUR
Michael Crichton’s ”Lost World” carries important sustainability messages.
The book describes how scientists interest themselves in the island where dinosaurs have been living freely for some time. Skeletons and even DNA do not give the full picture: they want to study dinosaur behaviour.

More importantly, to see if their behaviour gave a clue to how they became extinct.

What they found was strange behaviour in the dinosaurs. When you hatch an egg artificially there is no mother to teach the young, so they do not learn what they need to survive.

But it opens a question related to humans: can we as a species develop behaviour so inappropriate to our environment that our species becomes extinct?

In this case the human behaviour is using DNA from fossils to give birth to extinct reptiles.

I leave you to read what Michael Crichton’ s scientists conclude. Click on the image to see more about the book.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

with a overpopulated country like india, the main issue to tackle
sustainability issues becomes focussed on tackling the growth of people.
and their aspirations. who will save the environment but educated and
responsible citizens of the world? to understand some of the issues in
india here are some comments.


its out officially-----in rajasthan ,uttar pradesh and bihar the muslims
population is increasing whereas in the southern states it has gone
down.goes to say that well developed states also keep their women
educated and healthy and they in turn have a say in family matters.
religion has nothing to do with this

so less education, no healthcare is responsible for the state of
affairs in these northern states. i must find out from the BJP
leaders here what they are doing in rajasthan to check the growth of
muslim population. why cant they get the girls in schools? my son has
5 muslim boys in a class of 200 but no girls!!!! in my class of 500,
there is only one muslim girl doing science in college.

muslims are also saying that we dont kill our female foeteses,
so our man woman ratio is good. and lack of education in women is
leading to big and large families. maybe when all the punjabis
and sikhs have reduced their girl population by killing them
[foeticide?]and in the future when to their utter surprise & agony
they dont have brides to marry, perhaps they will go begging and
pay heavy bride price to the muslim girls!!!

all the tv channels and news columns are full of this debate in
india these days and population has become the topic of the day.the
parsi girls who marry outside are also shouting at the community
leaders that their kids be allowed to be called parsis too. otherwise
the parsi community will dwindle

when will all this end? or is this natures way to keep our minds active
and looking for solutions ? what do u think?

from shoma
a science teacher in india
shomad@rediffmail.com

Anonymous said...

To read more about club neon follow that link

 
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