African "sex tree" endangered by own popularity
An unassuming plant in the Ugandan rainforest, nicknamed the "sex tree' , risks becoming a victim of its own success. The bush has been used by local people for generations as a medicine to restore flagging male virility, but now it's being driven to extinction through over-harvesting.
In addition to the short-term trauma of unchecked ED in a society where Viagra and its performance-enhancing cousins aren't widely available, the sex tree crisis highlights the larger problem of the growing human impact on Africa's wild areas. Rainforests are key repositories of biodiversity, and an expanding human population threatens to destroy thousands of undiscovered plant and animal species.
Residents of the region are now being trained to harvest wild plants in more sustainable ways, but that doesn't address the basic issue of habitant encroachment that's happening around the world.
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