Improving the Efficacy of CITES by Providing the Proper Incentives to Protect Endangered Species

Tudge adeptly summarizes the escalating problem as follows: In scale, . . . the mass extinction that we are now perpetuating is comparable with those of the past; but in speed, the present turmoil far outstrips anything that has happened before.Because it is so much faster, there is no time for animals to adapt; the option of surviving by evolving into something else, which some creatures were able to do in the past, is not available.Because we have interrupted the landscape, too, reducing plains and forests to sequestered pockets, we have removed the option of migration, which in the past enabled many species to escape, for example, the worst of the Ice Ages. COLIN TUDGE, LAST ANIMALS AT THE ZOO 241 (1992).2. When more than half of all medicines today can be traced to wild organisms, and chemicals from plants are the sole or major ingredient in one-quarter of all prescriptions in the United States, the need and reliance placed upon the world's flora and fauna for human survival becomes painfully obvious.See Endangered Species Coalition, The Endangered Species Act: a Commitment Worth Keeping, in