Editorials

Scarcity of tigers a lesson

(China Daily)
Updated: 2010-01-19 07:51

It is less than a month away from the Year of the Tiger on the Chinese lunar calendar, when pictures of tigers will appear everywhere. Beyond cherishing the auspicious omen that the symbol of the tiger brings - as some believe - we should lament the near extinction of this feline.

There have been no new reports of discovery of South China tigers in the wild in recent decades. You can only find the tiger in zoos. Sporadic reports of traces of Siberian tigers in southwestern China provinces can hardly justify the existence of this species in the wilderness. Stories of ancient heroes killing tigers at the risk of their own lives and various Chinese idioms using tigers in expressions are all that is left of the ferocious feline.

That explains why a fake picture of a South China tiger in the wild taken by a rural villager could be so sensational in 2008 that it touched off a national debate over its authenticity. Even today many still wish from the bottom of their hearts that the picture would have been genuine.

Under the slogan "man will finally win the battle against nature", we showed no respect for nature by thinking that the environment was at our disposal before the 1970s. We took it for granted that we could get whatever we needed from nature without ever giving a thought to ecological balance.

Scarcity of tigers a lesson

With the rapid encroachment on the habitats of wild animals, tigers have become fewer and fewer in the wild. Some tiger species have disappeared. Despite the efforts we have made in the past three decades to establish nature reserves, it is too late for tigers, who need a large habitats to roam and enough prey for it to feed on.

True, there is no challenge to the consensus of ecological balance and environmental protection. Yet talking about concepts is one thing, concrete efforts of conservation is another.

Rather than bragging about our invincibility against nature as we have done before, we should talk about the unity between man and the environment. But as far as gross domestic product (GDP) is concerned, we have placed economic and social development before everything.

A survey by scientists from several countries on the Yangtze River in more than a month failed to spot a single baiji - or the Chinese River Dolphin - in 2007. There must be many more species that have gone extinct in the past decades because of the pollution our development has caused.

Now we talk about sustainable development. This should not just mean shaping today's development will make it possible for further development in the future. It should entail the necessary respect for nature, whose cycle could be sustainable as well.

One of the most vivid Chinese proverbs using the tiger can be paraphrased as this: Once one rides on a tiger, it will be difficult to dismount. Only by making our development truly sustainable will we avoid being caught in such a dangerous situation.

(China Daily 01/19/2010 page8)