...of which there's a lot. But tonight I was working on a presentation for my Con Bio group, this one is about overexploitation, and ran across this. Kamehameha the Great, who conquered the Hawaiian Islands and established the Kingdom of Hawaii in 1810, wore a great cloak which became emblematic of the power of the Hawaiian throne. This cloak, passed on for generations, used the bright yellow flowers of the Hawaiian mamo,
Drepanis pacificia, which was an endemic member of the honeycreeper family.
"Was" is the operative word there. Seems the great cloak was passed on through a series of eight rulers and ultimately contained the feathers of 80,000 mamos. They're gone now. Moral of the story - we've been wasting the earth's biodiversity for a long time, and it's not a peculiarly western trait. Although, I'll admit we're pretty good at it.
...of which there's a lot. But tonight I was working on a presentation for my Con Bio group, this one is about overexploitation, and ran across this. Kamehameha the Great, who conquered the Hawaiian Islands and established the Kingdom of Hawaii in 1810, wore a great cloak which became emblematic of the power of the Hawaiian throne. This cloak, passed on for generations, used the bright yellow flowers of the Hawaiian mamo, Drepanis pacificia, which was an endemic member of the honeycreeper family.
"Was" is the operative word there. Seems the great cloak was passed on through a series of eight rulers and ultimately contained the feathers of 80,000 mamos. They're gone now. Moral of the story - we've been wasting the earth's biodiversity for a long time, and it's not a peculiarly western trait. Although, I'll admit we're pretty good at it.
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