Can a growing human population still leave space for wildlife?
I know of no pleasure deeper than that which comes from contemplating the natural world and trying to understand it.
We are at a unique stage in our history. Never before have we had such an awareness of what we are doing to the planet, and never before have we had the power to do something about that. Surely we all have a responsibility to care for our Blue Planet. The future of humanity and indeed, all life on earth, now depends on us.
A species of willow developed that does not grow vertically upwards, like it’s European and American relatives. To do so would to risk being flattened by the ferocious Artic wind. Instead it grows horizontally, keeping close to the ground. Even in the most favorable circumstances it seldom exceeds four inches in height. But it may become as long as some if it’s southern relatives are tall. When you walk across a carpet of such prostrate tree, you are, in effect walking over a woodland canopy.
We have a finite environment – the planet. Anyone who thinks that you can have infinite growth in a finite environment is either a madman or an economist.
We moved from being a part of nature to being apart from nature.
We live our comfortable lives in the shadow of a disaster of our own making. That disaster is being brought about by the very things that allow us to live our comfortable lives.
We have come as far as we have because we are the cleverest creatures to have ever lived on Earth. But if we are to continue to exist, we will require more than intelligence. We will require wisdom.
We often talk of saving the planet, but the truth is that we must do these things to save ourselves. With or without us, the wild will return.
To restore stability to our planet, therefore, we must restore its biodiversity, the very thing we have removed. It is the only way out of this crisis that we ourselves have created. We must rewild the world!
Wherever women have the vote, wherever girls stay in school for longer, wherever women are in charge of their own lives and not dictated to by men, wherever they have access to good healthcare and contraption, wherever they are free to take any job and their aspirations for life are raised, the birth rate falls. The reason for this is straightforward – empowerment brings freedom of choice and when life offers more options for women, their choice is often to have fewer children.
All we require is the will. The next few decades represent a final opportunity to build a stable home for ourselves and restore the rich, healthy and wonderful world that we inherited from our distant ancestors. Our future on the planet, the only place as far as we know where life of any kind exists, is at stake.
We humans, alone on Earth, are powerful enough to create worlds, and then destroy them.
Give and take, that is the essence of what balance is all about.
Anybody who thinks there can be limitless growth in a static, limited environment is either mad or an economist.
Invention accumulates. If you combine the diesel engine, GPS, and the echo sounder, the opportunities they create are not just added to one another, they are multiplied.
It took a million years of unprecedented volcanic activity during the Permian to poison the ocean. We have begun to do so again in less than two hundred. By burning fossil fuels, we are releasing carbon dioxide captured by prehistoric plants over millions of years in a few decades.
Ninety-six percent of the mass of all the mammals on Earth is made up of our bodies and those of the animals that we raise to eat.
It seems that, however grave our mistakes, nature will be able to overcome them, given the chance.
Beef makes up about a quarter of the meat that we eat, and only 2 per cent of our calories, yet we dedicate 60 per cent of our farmland to raising it.
The natural world is fading. The evidence is all around. It has happened during my lifetime. I have seen it with my own eyes. It will lead to our destruction.