Odracirys

No Homo: How I'm a Genus of One. I have something to tell you, which I have not spoken about until now. You probably know that I'm not like everybody else. But honestly, it goes deeper than that. Let me try to explain. The truth is that while I am a person, I am not a human. Although there are multiple definitions floating around, in a philosophical and sometimes legal sense, a person is a self-conscious being, and people should enjoy rights. This sense is not species-specific. "Human", on the other hand, always refers to Homo. Specifically, Homo sapiens . And I'm no Homo. If you want my binomial name, it is Logicius symponeticus . I pronounce the genus name something like [lo 'g ɪ ki ɨs ], but I guess [lo ' dʒɪ ʃə s] is also fine. I discovered my species when I recognized that I am so divergent from humanity that I warrant my own grouping. It's not a preposterous concept at all. In evolution, it is not that one monolithic specie...

Whole islands are going up in a blaze, hundreds of species are going extinct, and Indonesia is producing more CO2 than the United States due to these fires happening now. Borneo Island, third-largest island in the world, largest Island in the Asian region, home of one of two orangutan species, and exponentially more species-rich (with many endemic) than all of North America and Europe combined, is being burned to its death, never to make a comeback.  For thousands...probably millions of years...Borneo remained lush and untouched by devastation.  In fact, I remember that when I was a kid (not so long ago), it was still nearly completely lush and unexplored.  Now, it is becoming palm oil plantations, livestock grazing lands, and towns...utterly destroyed and transformed into ugly human habitations which will no doubt be centers of poverty in the future.  Let's look at some satellite images to get a sense of scale of the fires and smoke just on this one island of Borneo...