General Discussion
In reply to the discussion: Giving a lecture on old-timey quack medicines tomorrow [View all]HiPointDem
(20,729 posts)harms species and in fact have implicitly acknowledged it.
however, it's not the *only* thing that harms them or extinguishes them:
Habitat loss poses the greatest threat to species...It is identified as a main threat to 85% of all species described in the IUCN's Red List (those species officially classified as "Threatened" and "Endangered" .
http://wwf.panda.org/about_our_earth/species/problems/habitat_loss_degradation/
Fewer than 500 endangered Siberian, or Amur, tigers remain in the wild...threatened by poaching, habitat loss due to logging, road-building and development, as well as by the problem of inbreeding that has resulted from the fact that, before conservation measures were implemented in the 1930?s, the entire population had collapsed to around 40 individuals...
In June 1996 a game rancher named John Hume paid about $200,000 for three pairs of endangered black rhinos ....South Africa did not start the auctions because it had a surplus of the animals....they were still critically endangered....
But black rhinos are massive animals, and with just under 7 percent of the country set aside in protected areas, conservationists and wildlife departments had run out of room to accommodate them...
The black rhino is a trophy for many hunters, who are willing to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars to shoot them. Such men travel to Africa from Russia, Japan, Spain, and Eastern Europe, but Americans dominate the market....Leonard bemoans the common confusion of hunters with poachers. The difference, he says, is that hunters care about the environment -- and the law....(and have lots more money than poachers...)
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2010-12-09/hunters-paying-150-000-to-kill-an-endangered-rhino-may-save-the-species.html
As for your calculation that the gain/loss ratio of Chinese medicine = negative -- that's one calculus, though i doubt anyone's ever done that calculation.
But the same thing may be said of anti-depressants once the long-term effects are in. As you say, 'we've only begun to understand,' which makes me wonder why 1/10 are on these drugs, including about 3% of children.
Sorry, don't understand your reference to 'trading two species for one'.