Saving what's left

In a world where species are disappearing at an alarming rate, an effort to preserve the seeds of the world's plant life is underway. One vault is near the North Pole and has security measures worthy of a missile silo.

The February issue of Scientific American suggests that the only way to save the bluefin tuna may be to domesticate it.

Yesterday I was talking to Dad about the crazy solutions that we propose for the problems we've created for ourselves. It's usually an attempt to sweep something under the rug (carbon sequestration), paint over the problem (fortifying junk food), or substitute something "new and improved" (importing Australian bees when the domestic ones starts dying). Rarely these days does the proposal actually deal with the underlying mess.

The conversation turned to the Planet of the Apes movies, and in particular, that final image from the original when Charton Heston realizes, "We did it to ourselves."

We may just yet do it.