Birds Are Becoming Totally Dependent On Our Delicious Landfills

This article is part of HuffPost’s Reclaim campaign, an ongoing project spotlighting the world’s waste crisis and how we can begin to solve it. Conservationists and those concerned about human hunger pretty much agree that the enormous amount of food wasted around the world is a huge problem — and that concerted efforts to reduce food waste are a good thing. But while tackling the issue of food waste, it’s important to consider how doing so could have some unintended, negative consequences for the natural world, says Professor Iain Gordon, deputy vice chancellor of tropical environments and societies at Australia’s James Cook University. Gordon, who has spent his career studying biodiversity and promoting sustainable land use, has researched how some animal species — particularly birds — have become dependent on human food waste. Reducing food waste without taking that into consideration, he says, could have devastating consequences for those species. In many cases, Gordon says, the animals became dependent on food sources like landfills in the first place because humans destroyed their habitat or depleted their natural food sources. “For species such as the white ibis in Australia the use of landfill sites correlates with the reduction in the wetland habitats that ibis naturally use and also prolonged droughts, which reduced the area of wetlands,” he told The Huffington Post in an email. “For other sp...
Source: Science - The Huffington Post - Category: Science Source Type: news