Reflections

David Bowman works in the University Of Tasmania, Australia. He is the Professor of Environment Change Biology of the School for Plant Sciences there. He published a comment in Nature on the 2nd February issue that has raised a storm of controversy and led to many comments from his critics. “Nutty professor” is one of the more polite ones. What is this proposal that has raised this tornado of comment? Let us put it in context. On the 7th February, 2009, now dubbed as Black Saturday, 400,000 hectares of forest burned down in Southern Australia. It caused the death of 173 people who were trying to run form the fire, prevent it from burning their homes or seeking shelter at what they thought were safe spots. Such fires are commonplace in Australia. According to the Nature article, 5% of the Continent burned down in 2011. This, according to Prof. Bowman is not the only issue. There is, in addition, the question of feral species of mammals and reptiles as well as by populations of pig...

There is a concept in wildlife biology called carrying capacity. This means that any stretch of wildlife habitat can support only a certain number of particular types of wildlife. Take for instance the tiger. A normal full grown tiger needs about 20 square kilometers of space. Thus s particular wildlife sanctuary can only support a finite number of tigers. Once it exceeds it carrying capacity, the tigers tend to leave the sanctuary to enter areas surrounding it with often fatal consequences as recently seen in Ranthambhore where local villagers poisoned two sub adult tigers which had entered their areas from the now crowded National Park. Unfortunately nobody thinks of extending this analogy to humans. The world population has increased to 6.8 billion and shows no sign that it will level off anytime soon. There is some hope that the world population levels will level off at 9.2 billion according to some estimates, other estimates are far more pessimistic. Occasionally we see idiot re...