Originally posted by I. S.:
Unfortunately, your average policy maker takes cues from your average American, which means that the ecosystem takes a back seat to essentially everything else. If you told John Q. Public that drilling in ANWR were necessary to continue broadcasting episodes of "American Idol", we would have lost that fight years ago.
Unfortunately, I believe you are right. The pygmy owls are the tip of the iceberg, what with developers encroaching on more and more marginal land to build their ideas of ideal habitat for man. Maybe someday we'll learn to live in harmony with Nature and quit demanding more and more space for ourselves and our offspring. In the meantime the pygmy owl lives in a precarious balance. I hope it makes it another fifty years. Maybe by then we'll be shipping off our excess population to space stations like the ones in Kate's post.
