Butterflies of the World - Lifecycle, Ecology, Taxonomy, Conservation, Photography, Butterfly Holidays, Photo Galleries, Book Reviews and more.........
Text and photographs protected by Copyright © Adrian Hoskins 2007, and must not be published in part or in whole elsewhere without prior written permission from the author.
 
Humans - the greatest enemy of all

A century or so ago, when the human population on Earth was smaller and less affluent, mankind required less land and consumed far less of the planet's resources. Enough contiguous wild habitat existed to ensure that butterflies and other wildlife could move easily between their breeding sites.

As the human population has grown, and become increasingly wasteful and greedy, wild places have diminished in size, degraded in quality, and become increasingly fragmented and isolated.

All butterfly species have a population threshold. Once the population, and hence the gene pool, shrinks beyond a certain point, the species plunges into a nose-dive, heading towards certain extinction. This begins with a few local extinctions at marginal sites, but within a few years the range of the species contracts towards the areas where the climate is most favourable and the area of suitable contiguous habitat is greatest.

The High Brown Fritillary - a butterfly in severe decline

By way of example, until the mid 1950's the High Brown Fritillary Argynnis adippe was regarded as a common and widespread butterfly, found in almost all of the larger woodlands of England and Wales. Rapid human expansion after the Second World War brought about the destruction of many of these woodlands, and a change in forestry practice in those that remained.

The open sunny coppiced woodlands quickly became replaced with cool, densely shaded conifer plantations, and by 1970 the High Brown Fritillary was a national rarity, found at only a handful of sites scattered across western England. In 2008 the butterfly is on the verge of extinction in Britain, surviving only at a tiny number of small and isolated sites that are managed specifically for this species.

Although the High Brown Fritillary is one of the more extreme examples, it acts as an indicator of the type of causes which have resulted in virtually all European butterfly species falling into dramatic decline.

The destruction of the rainforests

Elsewhere in the world the situation is the same, or worse.

The forests of West Africa, India and Madagascar have almost totally disappeared, replaced by agriculture and human habitation.

The rainforests of West Malaysia, Sumatra and Borneo are expected to have entirely disappeared within 20 years, replaced with vast plantations of oil palm, grown to meet the insatiable demands of the food, cosmetics and bio-fuel industries.

Papua New Guinea, home to exotic birds of paradise and incredible Ornithoptera birdwing butterflies is being rapidly deforested to make way for open-cast mining and yet more oil palm plantations.

Vast areas of the Amazon have already been burnt down to produce low quality cattle pastures which can only support livestock for about 10 years before desertification occurs. 

What remains of the Amazon is now under severe threat of destruction from US-based companies which are burning down the forests and replacing them with vast soybean plantations, used to produce bio-fuel - the production and consumption of which releases up to 420 times more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere than fossil fuels.

The Amazon, Brazil - catastrophic destruction as vast expanses of rainforest are deliberately burned down by United States companies eager to cash in on the demand for soybeans.
The Amazon, Brazil - a typical soybean plantation. The increased demand for soybeans comes primarily from producers of bio-fuels. Other major consumers of soybeans include vegetarians and the cosmetics industry.
 

The misguided policy of the British government makes it compulsory for energy companies to ensure that all petrol and diesel sold in the UK contains a minimum of 2.5 percent bio-fuel ( rising to 5 percent by 2010 ).

It is therefore safe to say that the government of Gordon Brown and the Labour Party are guilty of being a major cause of rainforest devastation, and major contributors towards the extinction of the thousands of butterflies, birds, and other animals and plants which live within them.
 
The Amazon rainforests and the cloudforests of the Andes together account for about 40 percent of all butterfly species on Earth. If deforestation continues at it's present rate, the rainforests will have entirely disappeared within 50 years, and almost half of the world's butterfly species will by then be extinct, with nothing more than museum specimens and photographs remaining.
 
learnaboutbutterflies urges every person viewing this website to take immediate action - please visit the rainforestportal and mongabay websites where you can find more detailed information, and take part in on-line petitions to save the Amazon and the rainforests of Africa and Asia.
 
 
Help save the rainforests - click here !
  • drastically reduce consumerism
  • reduce your mileage - bio-fuel in petrol and diesel destroys rainforests
  • boycott tropical hardwoods
  • boycott South American beef - the main cause of Amazonian devastation
  • boycott oil palm products - the main cause of Asian rainforest devastation
  • support initiatives to create eco-friendly employment for indigenous peoples
  • support eco-tourism - creating demand for privately owned nature reserves
  • reduce your carbon emissions
  • support rainforest conservation organisations
  • lobby politicians to make rainforest conservation a high priority issue
 
 
Text and photographs protected by Copyright © Adrian Hoskins 2007-2008 unless otherwise stated, and must not be reproduced or published in part or in whole elsewhere in any form without written permission from Adrian Hoskins. Breach of copyright will be pursued by litigation.
 
Amazon photographs on this page are copyright-free and in the public domain.
 
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