For the third year on, RHU Sustainability Campus Initiative (SCI) celebrated the 2019 Earth Day highlighting the dramatic decline in some macro species living on our planet. To commemorate the occasion, SCI invited Mr. Ahmad Abdel Wahed and Ms. Alexandra Youssef, founder and co-founder of Lebanese Wildlife, respectively, to celebrate the day with RHU community on May 13, 2019.
Their talk was entitled “Lebanon Wildlife Conservation,” which was followed by a demonstration of selected endogenous and exotic rescued snakes. The celebration presentations were followed by planting a tree, on RHU premises, in the memory of the Earth Day 2019.
It was also alarming to note that the Lebanese national animal, stripped hyena, numbers remaining in the wild do not exceed the number 50.
Nature’s gifts to our planet are the species that we know and love, along with the many more that we have yet to discover. Unfortunately, we, humans, have upset the balance of nature and the world is facing the greatest rate of extinction since we lost the dinosaurs more than 60 million years ago. We know so little about the diversity of the living world around us, perhaps some species may go extinct before we even know they exist.