Poachers have shot the last two white rhinos in Zambia, killing one and wounding the other, in a night operation at the Mosi-Oa-Tunya national park in Livingstone, an official said on Tuesday.
Shooting the last two white rhinos reminds me of Jared Diamond’s line about the deforestation of Easter Island, where a variety of social missteps led to massive tree-cutting, which led to the near-extinction of the island’s human population:
As we try to imagine the decline of Easter’s civilization, we ask ourselves, “Why didn’t they look around, realize what they were doing, and stop before it was too late? What were they thinking when they cut down the last palm tree?”
I almost wrote about Zambia’s white rhino population when I spent a few weeks there in 2003.
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Joshua Benton is the director of the Nieman Digital Journalism Project at Harvard University, among other things. Before that, he was a staff writer and columnist for The Dallas Morning News. (More.)
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