The Very Environment Is Now Seen Threatened : Many Species Vanishing Quickly

A single elephant is left alive in the central African state of Burundi. Last year, Burundi exported an estimated 100 tons of ivory--tusks from 11,000 elephants.

Ivory from elephants slaughtered in six countries is smuggled to Burundi and shipped to Singapore and other ports. Burundi certificates of origin are suspect, but they are legal. Sellers say the ivory was found on dead elephants, as much of it is.

World ivory sales totaled 1,000 tons in 1983, the highest this century, despite stringent international controls. Profits finance guerrilla wars and enrich officials.

But the ivory trade is only a sidelight to a crisis threatening the world’s fauna and flora, and man himself, scientists warn.

The international focus is on dramatic cases, such as African mammals and the giant panda, but experts say the danger is to the environment that sustains all life.

“The panda is a useful symbol--no one will give money to save the leech,” says George Schaller of the New York Zoological Society, a world renowned field biologist. “But we’ve got to protect all species, and not much time is left.”

Wild animals are vanishing fast, some species forever, cut down by machine guns, poisoned, snared, run to death with jeeps, or killed by starvation or disease as man and cattle muscle into their last habitats.

Only 500 rhinos are left in Kenya out of 18,000 in 1969. Ecosystems are collapsing, taking with them unexamined plant species which biologists say might have helped conquer such scourges as cancer and crippling viruses.

Balances are toppled. For example, Bangladesh last year exported 70 million frogs, which normally feed on insects, West German experts say. That country spends more money on insecticides than it earns from frog legs, but the exports continue.

Habitat destruction is a greater problem than hunting and poaching, scientists say, and the causes of the whole destructive process are intertwined.

Hunger forces peasants to poach game to survive. A single rhinoceros horn earns a hunter as much as three years’ hard work. Only 500 rhinos are left in Kenya of the 18,000 in 1969, and they are too scattered to breed.

Drought forces cattle and goats to overgraze fragile land which remains desert when rains return.

Mushrooming populations crowd into game preserves that many consider as unneeded tourist playgrounds. Logging and development take heavy tolls.

Tropical rain forests disappear at a rate of 50 acres a minute--an area the size of Pennsylvania is lost each year. Deserts advance at an even faster rate.

Gorillas and tigers, birds and butterflies, plummet toward extinction along with the once-rich forests, jungles and swamps that sheltered them.

“The basic processes of evolution are being altered more drastically than since the sudden disappearance of the dinosaur. . . . And it is all happening in a twinkling of an evolutionary eye,” British ecologist Norman Myers wrote in “The Sinking Ark,” a classic study.

In the next 15 years, he said, the world may lose a million of the five to 10 million species left.

Author Paul Ehrlich likens the process to popping rivets from an airplane until it finally crashes. Man can survive with far fewer wild species, he argues, but eventually even the human species is at risk.

Signs of it are everywhere, from damaged environment in China to West Germany’s forests, more than a third of which are dead or dying. Development continues to encroach on habitat in the United States, but there strong environmental laws are an effort to arrest the slide.

The signs are most evident where animals once roamed in huge numbers.

On East Africa’s Serengeti Plain, a fresh outbreak of rinderpest menaces the last great herds of game left in the world.

Nomadic herders fleeing drought spread the fatal disease from Mauritania and Ethiopia across much of Africa as far south as Tanzania, says Michael Woodford, an African rinderpest expert.

“There is no clinical evidence yet of an outbreak among wildlife,” Woodford says. “But if it takes hold, it could kill off 90% of the 1.9 million wildebeest (antelope).”

East Africa’s game is already under heavy pressure. Idi Amin’s soldiers massacred many of Uganda’s animals in the 1970s. In Kenya, farmers open new land and shoot elephants that trample their crops.

Poaching in Tanzania Poaching is serious in Tanzania, and elsewhere, often with the complicity of poorly paid officials.

In Botswana, farther south, perhaps 250,000 antelope and zebra have died in a decade, disoriented by fences erected to protect cattle from hoof and mouth disease. Villagers, accustomed to an inexhaustible supply of game, stone to death weakened animals for sport.

As in most of Africa, cattle are maintained as wealth and seldom eaten, but herding is killing off game.

“At this rate, I don’t see much future for wildlife--or cattle--in this area,” says Doug Williamson, a South African scientist with 10 years’ experience in Botswana.

In Latin America and Asia, as in Africa, governments say they must exploit their limited resources. But often imbalances result.

Conservationist Felipe Benavides says Peru ignored warnings not to fish the anchovies that nourish the guanay, a white cormorant that produces the world’s richest fertilizer. As a result, both the birds--once numbering 22 million--and the anchovies are almost gone.

Across the world, new roads open access to virgin regions, letting in hunters in four-wheel vehicles, with high-powered weapons, to massacre animals and upset natural balances.

Authorities, if not party to the plunder, are often powerless.

Botswana, with a stable, honest government, is an example. Its program to protect wildlife collapses in practice.

‘We Can’t Do Anything’ “Poaching and license abuse are increasing, but we can’t do anything,” says John Benn, chief game warden in northern Botswana, shaking his head sadly. “What do we do without staff or vehicles and fuel to patrol? It’s a terrible situation.”

For $2, local hunters can buy a license to kill 50 jackals, 50 genet cats and 10 small deer. “You can’t buy a bloody packet of sweets for that,” grumbles naturalist Ken Oake.

But no one is around to check, anyway. Hunters kill up to 10 buffalo on a single license, perhaps wounding another 30.

American and European hunters pay up to $30,000 to shoot lions, leopards, buffalo and elephants, tracked for them by bushmen. It is legal, but wildlife experts worry about it.

‘Killing Is Peanuts’ “It is shocking,” says Lloyd Wilmot, a former hunter who now leads camera safaris. “Killing . . . is peanuts with modern weapons. Hemingway unwittingly did enormous damage to African game by making hunting macho.”

In the Sudan, Ethiopia, Chad and Angola, warfare obliterates wildlife, and rangers can do nothing to prevent it.

In Zaire, at peace, authorities say the elephants herds have dropped from 371,000 to 150,000 in five years. A two-month army sweep last year routed 5,000 well-armed poachers, authorities say.

Specialists believe more than a million African elephants are left, but they aren’t sure. “What we do know is that numbers are diminishing, like all animals,” says Ian Parker, in Kenya.

Even in South Africa, where well-armed wardens enforce strict laws, poaching is a problem.

Shadowy syndicates smuggle ivory, skins and rhino horn from Black Africa through South African ports, authorities admit.

Conservationists say easy markets encourage illegal trade. They cite the island state of Singapore as an example.

Singapore’s Chinese “medical halls,” pet shops and tourism emporiums deal briskly in rhino horn, ivory, leopard pelts, rare birds and reptile skins. Exotic food shops feature bear paw and snakes.

Most trade is legal under Singapore’s laissez-faire policies. Some of it relies on the same falsified papers that allow an estimated $500,000 a year of wildlife products to circulate around the world.

Through “bird substitution,” dealers obtain permits for common species and sell exotic birds in their place. One European painter, preparing a book on the rare birds of Bali, found in a Singapore pet shop a bird that had not been seen in the wild for 30 years.

Rhino Horn Much Prized Singapore is a major depot for horn and hide from the rhino, one of the most tragic of endangered species.

“You got rhino horn to sell?” asked a Chinese druggist on South Bridge Road, smiling broadly at a reporter he had taken for a dealer. “I take any amount. Any amount.”

The reporter asked if he was concerned that rhinos were disappearing in the world. His eyes narrowed, and then he beamed at what obviously must be a joke.

“Any amount,” he repeated.

He offered $500 per kilo for rhino horn. A block away, a Chinese physician had a horn to sell. It weighed just over a kilo, with skin at the base where it had been hacked away from the rhino. His final price was $2,200.

Local Chinese pay $5 for a tiny palmful of shavings, alleged to cure fevers.

Rhino Population Halved Esmond Bradley Martin, world authority on the subject, says a recent count disclosed perhaps 11,000 rhinos are left in Africa, half the number reported a few years ago. Only 7,500 African black rhinos and fewer than 50 northern white rhinos remain, he says.

Asians use rhino horn as medicine and, to a lesser degree, as an aphrodisiac. But nearly half the trade goes to Yemeni Arabs who carve the horn into handles for the daggers that youths buy with new oil wealth to prove manhood.

Indian authorities protect more than 1,000 rhinos, the bulk of those left in Asia. Poachers last year killed 93 of them, including 37 in the Kaziranga Park in Assam, according to Kunal Verma, an Indian wildlife expert.

“Poachers dig a pit along a rhino trail, and the animal falls in, impaling himself on stakes,” he says. “They reach down and hack off the horn with a dao (machete). The rhino might take days to die, thrashing around helplessly.”

Researchers say a drop in annual horn trade from eight tons to three reflects more a diminishing source than effective law enforcement.

Penalties for poaching and illegal trade are often low, sometimes a fraction of the market value of merchandise seized. Potential profit far outweighs the risk.

Recently, customs officials in Tokyo stopped a traveler with 11 baby gibbons from Bangkok, Thailand, bound and gagged in a carry-on bag. Five had suffocated. He was released without a fine.

Dealers Fake Papers Primates are threatened by dealers who fake papers to sell them to zoos, private collectors or to biomedical laboratories. Profits can be large.

In one case, nearly extinct golden-headed lion tamarins were smuggled from Brazil, where wildlife exports are banned, to neighboring French Guyana which, as part of France, is in the European Common Market. A Bolivian bought them originally at $48 each. A Belgian offered each for sale at $15,000.

Only 400 mountain gorillas are left in Africa, threatened with extinction by the same process facing the last 1,200 pandas in China: farmers cut trees and build huts in low-lying areas, stranding colonies of animals--too small to breed--on mountaintops.

The orangutan is isolated across broad sweeps of Borneo and Sumatra. Forest fires, logging and pet-seeking villagers menace their survival.

Boonsong Lekagul, a respected Thai naturalist, said in an interview that he keeps working at 79 because hope cannot be abandoned.

“But,” he said, “I am afraid it is too late.”