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It's been a good month for death. Michael Jackson has left us and left us to ponder the eternal question-what is the sound of one glove clapping.
He has also left us to ponder and even bigger question: why do we care so much?
Thousands of people filled the streets of Los Angeles and New York after his overdose. The AP reported that because of the cancellation of his next concert tour, his death will actually (and negatively) hurt England's economy. The AP also reported that many Americans believe that President Obama has not been public enough in his grief for the dying pop star.
And, no, I'm not kidding about that last bit.
Hell, they even printed tickets for his funeral. 17,5000 of them will be available at $25 dollars a pop to the general public. The hysteria got so big that folks have taken to calling his memorial service "deathapalooza."
But lost in all this fuss is the real deathapalooza.
Last week, a few days after the King of Pop passed, the International Union for Conservation of Nature, released their "Wildlife in a Changing World" report-which could be renamed the "Wildlife Vanishing from a Changing World Report.
According to their research more than 800 animal and plant species have gone extinct in the last five centuries, another 290 are suspected extinct and there is insufficient data available on another 5,561 species to make the call.
Atop of all of that, 17,000 more species are threatened with extinction-that's out of every eight birds, one out of every three amphibians, and one out of four percent of all mammals.
And that's not even the worst news. The real heartbreaker is this data is woefully inadequate. The report covers on 2.7 percent of the current 1.8 million described species. It's no exaggeration to say that if you factor out from what we know into what we don't than the actual body count could be in the hundreds of thousands.
Nor does this include those not species yet dead, but well on their way.
So while everybody is mourning the fact that Michael Jackson will Thriller us no more, I thought I'd mention that there are less than 15,000 blue whales-the largest animal on earth left in existence. We're also down to 5,000 in Siberian tigers, 3,000 black rhinos and 1,000 giant pandas. Even more depressing are the 720 mountain gorillas who have maybe another twenty years and that's if they're lucky.
The IUCN seriously understated the case when they told the New York Times, "This allows us to come to the stark conclusion that wildlife...is in trouble." The better signifier might be Conservation International's so-called "extinction clock" which records another vanishing every twenty minutes.
Every twenty minutes-think about this for a moment. Between the time you get up in the morning and the time you go to sleep at night forty-eight different life-forms disappear completely, gone forever from the earth, but thousands of people are in the streets because Michael Jackson died?
Seriously, with priorities like this, makes me proud to be human.
