pause-and-wonder phase may have lasted too long in the case of these birds, for the repercussions are widespread and troubling. For two millennia the Parsi have laid out their dead at the top of Towers of Silence to be quickly eaten by vultures, but few vultures show up now. Elsewhere, especially at dumps, rat and feral dog populations climbed sharply in the absence of vultures. These second-rate scavengers are less efficient, and they harbor rabies and other diseases. Even the deaths of sacred cows now pose problems that, in some places, have elevated into health hazards.[78]

Viewing the Science
Art is not yet commonly exhibited. But it could be, and images like this need not be exhibited in a biology library to gain attention. Teaching is often compartmentalized; learning is not. Formal education has provided conditions favoring the development of discipline-specific departments and the evolution of curricula based on those departments. Thus it happens that science is taught in science class, whereas art is taught in art class. Because Science Art is relevant to both, is educationally useful, and offers an important way of drawing people’s attention, it could create a productive zone of overlap between these two disciplines. Students, instructors, and even the public at large could find out about emerging environmental issues, for example, or their resolution, in the zone of overlap. Science Art does not always have a specific agenda, nor should it, but it often provides a medium for environmental education that reaches beyond particular issues (see Plate 65). The wide appeal of Science Art is reminiscent, in some respects, of the large number of nature images produced in the 1600s, when the Golden Age of Dutch art benefited from Dutch dominance in commerce, which fostered the exploration of remote regions--leading in turn to the production of images featuring the natural history and species from these places.[79]

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Plate 64 Vultures and Crystals Oriental White-backed Vultures (Gyps bengalensis),
© 2004/2007 Darryl Wheye.Science Art--Birds

© 2008 Darryl Wheye and Donald Kennedy