29 minute read
Feature: Our Planet, Our Responsibilty
OUR PLANET, OUR RESPONSIBILITY
Following on from his inspiring Andrew Reed Lecture in November 2019 at the Royal Geographic Society, Keith Scholey (Bristowe 1975), explains why we are the most important generation in history.
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The Context
This year - in just a few months - nature has brought our modern civilization to its knees. A pandemic has been predicted for decades, but little was done to prepare the world for this inevitable, devastating event. Reassuringly, this nightmare has an end: either through a vaccine or natural immunity. However, more concerning is that nature has far greater horrors in store for us, problems that - once they become out of control - are unstoppable. Once let loose, these other catastrophes will have no end date. Like the pandemic, all of these environmental crisis events have been predicted with considerable certainty by scientists but, once again, mankind chooses not to defend itself. Here, I will outline why I believe the dangers our civilization faces now are so extreme and why the people alive today are the only ones who can solve the situation. What we do now will impact everyone who follows us for thousands of years to come.
Credentials
My career has given me the chance to investigate the natural world in some detail. From Reed’s School, I went to Bristol University to study for both a BSc and PhD in Zoology before pursuing a career at the BBC as a wildlife film producer. Later in my BBC career, I ran the Natural History Unit and also oversaw the specialist departments of the BBC, including Science and History. This period gave me the opportunity to get to know a range of experts with detailed insights into our rapidly changing world. Furthermore, over my 25 years at the BBC, I witnessed first hand the decline of the natural world. When, subsequently, I jointly set up an independent company, Silverback Films, I endeavoured to create documentaries to try to raise awareness of this decline and help to reverse it. This culminated in the Netflix series, Our Planet, and a feature film, David Attenborough: A Life on Our Planet, to be released in Autumn 2020. Making both the series, and especially the feature- length film with Sir David, I realised that we have passed a point of just trying to save nature. Now it is very much about saving ourselves. Here is why.
Complexity of Life
Many scientists believe we are now entering an ‘extinction event’, only the sixth in the four-and-a-half billion-year history of earth. Some may dismiss an extinction event as simply sad, imagining it to be just the loss of a multitude of creatures. However, this misses the central cause of the event which is that our usually stable planet has suddenly become very unstable. That is not just a worry for other species. It is an overwhelming worry for all of us. The stability of planet earth should not be taken for granted. The only thing that keeps it stable is life itself.
Before life, earth was a barren lump of rock and it remained that way for most of its history. As an analogy, if you take a pint of Guinness representing the history of the world, only the froth at the top represents the period in earth’s history when life, as we would recognise it, existed. For some twoand-a-half billion years, microscopic life forms slowly tamed this barren rock, creating oxygen in the atmosphere and the ozone layer to shield us from the sun’s dangerous rays. It also created a delicate balance in the atmosphere with the ‘greenhouse gas’, carbon dioxide, acting like a warming blanket. As life made earth more stable, life in turn could became more complex and, subsequently, the planet’s stability increased. It was an iterative process over hundreds of millions of years. The key point is that the stable planet we enjoy is only possible because of the complexity of life on it and, the more complex nature is, the greater the guarantee of long-term stability for us all. So, the last thing mankind should ever have contemplated was to destroy it.
Lessons from the Great Extinctions
It is only on five occasions in the past that this stability has been upset: the great extinctions. These are incredibly rare events and geologists now know a great deal about them. There are clear lessons for us to learn from the great extinctions, especially from the last three, where life forms were similar in range and diversity to what exists today.
The biggest extinction event of all was the End-Permian, 252 million years ago, which almost extinguished all of life on earth and took a staggering 10 million years to recover from. 96% of marine species vanished.
As an analogy, if you take a pint of Guinness representing the history of the world, only the froth at the top represents the period in earth’s history when life, as we would recognise it, existed.
OUR PLANET, OUR RESPONSIBILITY
So what was the cause? Terrifyingly, it was carbon dioxide. As the world’s continents crashed together to form the ‘super continent’ Pangaea, there was an unprecedented increase in volcanic activity; volcanoes are the natural source of atmospheric carbon dioxide. Usually plants on land and in the ocean remove carbon at about the same rate volcanoes emit it. However, in the End-Permian extinction, atmospheric CO2 just continued to climb, with lava fields a mile deep engulfing two million square miles of Siberia and producing gigatons of the gas for hundreds of thousands of years. This triggered runaway global warming, a spiral of events that poured more CO2 into the air creating an ever hotter earth. There were other consequences. Most damaging was that the excess CO2 dissolved in the ocean made the seas more and more acidic. Many marine organisms then, as now, had shells made of calcium carbonate which dissolve in acid. So, the coral reefs of the time all died and even the microscopic plant plankton was destroyed (as each has a central calcium carbonate framework). As a result, the whole ocean food chain collapsed and the once great carbon sump of the ocean became a massive carbon emitter. Then all hell broke loose with other toxic gases spewing from a super-heated ocean which were driven around the world by hurricane winds of an unimaginable force. This is what an extinction event becomes. What is surprising about the End-Permian is that anything managed to survive at all.
What should be so concerning to us about the End-Permian is that it took hundreds of thousands of years to dredge up this amount of carbon to set off a catastrophic chain of events. By burning fossil fuels, we are managing to do the same in under two hundred years. This speed of atmospheric change is unprecedented. The telltale signs of the start of the unstoppable feedback loop are beginning. Coral reefs are dying, phytoplankton is decreasing, forests are burning, and the arctic tundra is thawing, releasing the even more powerful ‘greenhouse gas’, methane. Most scientists agree that we are heading for the point when the process will become a ‘one-way door’ and unstoppable.
The extinction event that followed the Permian was the End-Triassic extinction which was the same story again but less devastating. 201 million years ago, Pangaea started to break apart to form the continents we now recognise and, once again, the volcanic CO2 overwhelmed the planet’s balance. Finally, there was the most famous extinction event of all. The End-Cretaceous, or K-T, when 66 million years ago a meteorite brought about the downfall of most of the dinosaurs. Fortunately, a few survived and are still with us as birds. The villain that caused this event was no ordinary meteorite. It was the size of Everest, travelling at 20 kilometres per second. When it smashed into the Gulf of Mexico, and its base hit the sea floor, its top would still have been penetrating the outer atmosphere. The impact caused an explosion equivalent to 100 million megatons of TNT, enough to send a mountain into space at escape velocity. Shockwaves equivalent to a magnitude 12 earthquake shot through thousands of miles of the planet’s crust. However, the greatest impact was caused by vast quantities of rock being thrown into orbit and then falling back through the atmosphere as a blizzard of meteorites. This set the whole world on fire. The destruction of earth was spectacular but what I find fascinating is that only three-quarters of the world’s species were wiped out. In essence, life found runaway CO2 in the End-Permian harder to cope with than that of a colossal meteorite impact.
The lesson for us to take from the K-T extinction is the other impact we are having on our planet, mainly the speed at which we are changing its surface. I arrived at Reed’s School fifty years ago and, since that time, the loss of wildlife and wild space has been greater than everything that had been lost in all of our preceding history.
Now, wild mammals, from mice to whales, make up just 4% by weight of all animals on earth with the remaining 96% being either us humans or the animals we eat. Only one in ten of the large fish in the oceans fifty years ago exist today. Humanity has felled some four trillion trees.
Geological changes in our world’s history are usually seen over millions of years, but this has happened in little over half a century. If a 12-hour day represents a million years, then fifty years comes down to just two seconds. It’s a flash, much like a meteorite impact. Therefore, what we are doing is making wholesale changes to the surface of our planet, our oceans, and our atmosphere at a speed not witnessed since the end of the dinosaurs. Most scientists agree that we are heading for the point when the process will become a ‘oneway door’ and unstoppable.
Humanity has felled some four trillion trees
The History of Ourselves
Some might say that people are used to change and very adaptable and, after all, hasn’t climate always changed? There is some truth in these points, but they are inherently misleading. Again, history helps us to understand why, this time by looking at the history of ourselves.
Anatomically-modern humans have been on earth for just over 200,000 years. The term ‘anatomically modern’ means scientifically that these ancestors of ours would be indistinguishable from people today. These were not dumb cavemen. Some have argued that these distant ancestors of ours were the fittest and brightest people that have ever lived because they had to be in order to survive. They were hunter gathers relying continually on their fitness and wits to stay alive.
It was only in the last 10,000 years that we suddenly escaped from the confines of hunting and gathering by inventing farming. As a species, we became turbo charged and, in just a few thousand years, were landing on the moon. But why was humanity stuck as hunter and gatherers for more than 95% of our history? The answer was climate.
Before 13,000 years ago, the global temperature fluctuated widely by some 10°C as the world went in and out of ice ages. Then suddenly something unprecedented in recent geological history happened: global temperature stabilised and has remained so within plus or minus 1°C ever since. Scientists call this period the Holocene and it turned out to be our ‘Garden of Eden’.
With stable global temperature, the world fell into a rhythm of predictable weather and seasons. 10,000 years ago, mankind could finally domesticate plants and animals and the rest is history. However, to this day, our food production has always relied on this remarkably stable climate. When James Watt invented the steam engine, we set off on a rapid journey to end the very conditions that had created our civilizations. As global temperatures passed the 1°C increase this century, scientists proposed that we had left the Holocene and entered a new geological period they call the Anthropocene, the ‘age of man’. What is important to grasp is that by so dramatically changing the carbon cycle and the functioning of the natural world, we have changed the geology of the whole planet and have become a geological force in our own right.
OUR PLANET, OUR RESPONSIBILITY
Breaching our Planetary Boundaries
Over the last few years, I have worked closely with the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) and an extraordinary scientist, Johan Rockstrom. Johan created an institution to investigate the limits within which our planet functions; he calls these the ‘Planetary Boundaries’. His theory is that within the Planetary Boundaries our world self regulates. Carbon dioxide for example will be emitted from the earth by volcanoes at the same rate as life returns it to the earth, mainly by dead plants and animals becoming buried on land or sinking to the ocean floor. As rock formations weather they also help to keep the balance. In this way, the earth operates like a thermostat and stability is maintained.
Extinction rates of creatures also remain in balance in usual times. As some species naturally go extinct others evolve at the same rate to replace or increase them. Johan’s investigations show that some of these boundaries are being breached and species extinction is one of them. Alarmingly, large numbers of species are going extinct compared to their rate of replacement. Once the Planetary Boundary is broken, the earth seems to switch from helping to bring about stasis to a runaway feedback loop that causes an acceleration towards imbalance. With species extinction, for example, as too many species go extinct their ecosystems start to falter and, as a result, more species are lost. Eventually the whole ecosystem collapses. With the carbon cycle, as more CO2 warms the climate, fires and melting permafrost pump more greenhouse gases into the atmosphere and the global temperature increase accelerates.
In filming for the Our Planet series and the David Attenborough film, we wanted to show what breaking a Planetary Boundary actually looks like. One of the starkest examples is the impact of CO2 increase on coral reefs.
In 1998 I was the Head of the BBC’s Natural History Unit and we were making a series called The Blue Planet. One of our underwater cameramen, Peter Scoones, had been sent to the Maldives to film dolphins. While he was there, he witnessed and filmed a largely unknown event: the coral reefs in the shallows were turning white. Peter had witnessed one of the first, mass coral reef bleaching events and this was just over twenty years ago. Corals contain a symbiotic alga which both gives them their colour and a food source. In 1998, an extreme El Nino occurrence had resulted in very warm sea temperatures in the Indian Ocean; the
high temperatures caused the algae in the coral to produce so much oxygen they became toxic to the host coral. In an act of desperation, the corals expelled the algae, turning them white or bleaching and, consequently, the corals lost their food source. The sea temperature remained high for too long and so the corals died.
At the time, we all thought that new corals would recolonise the dead reef and that, in a few years, the Maldives would look as good as new. Sadly, this has never happened and instead there has been wave after wave of bleaching events in the Maldives killing off deeper and deeper corals. Thirty years ago, the Maldives were a coral reef paradise. Today they are largely graveyards. The culprit, CO2 warming the atmosphere and subsequently the ocean at unprecedented rates.
Since that event, we have watched nearly half the world’s coral reefs bleach and die. All the reef scientists I know say that this most complex of ocean ecosystems will be gone in just forty years. The corals of today evolved after the Permian extinction and have thrived for more than two hundred million years and even survived the K-T extinction. However, they do not seem to be able to survive the horror we have unleashed upon them in little over a century. Scientists have spotted signs that some corals are more resistant to warming and these at least may survive and give us hope. However, even their survival will be short lived because CO2 drives the two horsemen of the ocean’s apocalypse. As the concentration of CO2 builds in the atmosphere, it dissolves in the ocean to form carbonic acid. Our oceans are suffering from acidification. Corals build skeletons of calcium carbonate which dissolve in acid and so acidification will bring about their complete demise. Whenever I talk to marine scientists about ocean acidification, they offer no hope. It is a simple chemical process which is inevitable if atmospheric carbon remains at its current level, let alone continues to increase. On our current track, acidification will kill a large proportion of ocean life. This is a certainty.
This loss will have a direct effect on all of us. Growing coral reefs are huge ‘carbon sumps’ as they take carbon out of the ocean and lay it down as stony skeletons. Rock deposits like the White Cliffs of Dover are remnants of this reef-building process and all chalk or limestone rocks hold vast quantities of carbon safely from the atmosphere. However, now coral reefs are being rendered useless as sumps and another ally of ours in the battle to keep the planet in balance has been lost due to our industrial activity.
OUR PLANET, OUR RESPONSIBILITY
The Reality
Travelling the world, the Our Planet team recorded many other ecosystems crossing the planetary boundaries, such as rapidly disintegrating glaciers, shrinking rainforests and thawing tundra. It is not just scientific data and endeavour telling us we are in trouble. Our world is crumbling before our eyes and for many people the impact is already hitting them hard with the increase of natural disasters.
I witnessed the full force of the Anthropocene in the British Virgin Islands. As a family, we have sailed around this archipelago for many years and it is a place very close to my heart. My last visit was after Hurricane Irma, the most powerful ever to form in the Atlantic. Its aftermath was truly shocking. Island townships and resorts literally looked like they had been hit by an atomic blast and were completely destroyed. Nearly every citizen lost the roof of their house and nearly everything they possessed. Two weeks later, another major hurricane, Maria, mercifully just missed the British Virgin Islands but inflicted the worst natural disaster in modern history on Puerto Rica. More than three thousand citizens died. Then there was major Hurricane Dorian that smashed through the Bahamas destroying two other islands I know well, Great Abaco and Grand Bahama. The societies of these islands have been shattered. However, what is terrifying for people living in the Caribbean is that every climate model shows that these super storms will become more and more frequent. Global warming is shifting once rare events to becoming the norm. A ‘one-in-a-hundred years’ mega storm when I was born became a ‘once-in-a-decade event’ and now is an ‘annual event’. From here on the mega storms will become more and more frequent and powerful. Sadly, the once thriving societies on these islands in the Holocene will not be able to take the continuous pounding of the Anthropocene and will become both uninsurable and uninhabitable. And it is not just a worry for the Caribbean. Last year the first ever hurricane swung east and struck the Azores. It ended up on our shores as a storm. As the ocean warms, it is only a matter of time before hurricanes will be knocking on our door.
The Australian bush fires are another example of what the Anthropocene has in store. Australia is warming faster than most continents and again the projections from climate models are very worrying. This, coupled with too much water extraction and poor land use, created the extreme events we witnessed last year with forest fires on an unprecedented scale. However, once again these will become more frequent and eventually the ‘new normal’. Agriculture in large parts of Australia is collapsing from drought and much of the continent will become uninhabitable by the end of this century.
Our weather in the UK is starting to show extremes too. This year we have had the highest ever recorded rainfall in February and the lowest ever in May. Again, this should be no surprise as climate models all show that our weather will become more extreme.
If we, as humans, have an Achilles heel, it is agriculture. By and large, farming still relies on regular seasons. I was raised in Kenya and when I was a boy the rainy seasons ran like clockwork. Guy Fawkes night was always close to the start of the ‘short rains’ and as kids we worried about this as the rains would start within a week either side of November 5th. Would bonfire night be a wash out? Then, farmers could plan precisely when to plant and harvest. Ask any Kenyan farmer now when is best to plant and they will throw their arms in the air in despair. The rainy seasons in east Africa are all over the place. Also, the quantity of rain from year to year is oscillating through extremes. This year it has been far too wet but the year before too dry. Consequently, food production in Africa is faltering.
Global food shortages are clearly now on the horizon. Perhaps the most vulnerable continent in the near future is South America. The Amazon rainforest, up until now, has created its own continental weather system called ‘the river in the sky’ which moves more water through the atmosphere than the mighty Amazon river. The sky river irrigates half the continent’s agricultural land. However, deforestation of the Amazon is pushing this greatest of rainforests to a tipping point where it will not be able to produce sufficient rain to irrigate itself and it will switch to becoming a dry savannah: the river in the sky will be no more. There is a huge irony here. The Amazon is being deforested largely to provide grazing for cattle to supply humanity’s insatiable requirements for beef but, in doing so, we will destroy most of the continent’s agriculture. Here lies the problem. Short-term gain always overrides long-term defence against environmental disaster.
OUR PLANET, OUR RESPONSIBILITY
We know what is coming… do we have the will to stop it?
This brings me back to Covid-19. There is a very good TED talk by Bill Gates where he eloquently describes the pandemic, predicting it would cost the world three trillion dollars. Now, he did get the costs wrong as it will be a lot more than that, but we should forgive the error because he gave this talk in 2015! What is so astounding is the detail of his prediction about what was going to happen. Watch this talk and no one can say we did not know what was coming. I would say the same can be said about the environmental crisis. We can predict it just as accurately and it is an inevitability if we do nothing to prevent it. In his TED talk, Gates argued that we needed to spend to create a pandemic defence plan and defence force. Of course, most of the world did not follow his advice with the disastrous consequences we see now. Had it done, the global coronavirus pandemic crisis could have been quickly controlled.
The worst of the environmental crisis is also avoidable if we take action now. However, as with pandemics, we need to treat it like a war and create serious defence budgets. At present, what little we spend on trying to hold back the environment crisis often only comes from tourism or charitable donations. Just imagine if we funded the army in the same way!
So, what needs to be done? First, we need to urgently reduce atmospheric CO2. Right now, it is at 416 parts per million (ppm). Before the industrial revolution it was at 280 ppm and it had varied very little through the whole Holocene period. The last time the world was at 400 ppm was three million years ago and the temperature was two to three degrees warmer with sea level 15 to 25 metres higher. We have rushed to beyond 400 ppm so quickly the climate is having to catch up. We need to not just stop adding more CO2, we also have to remove it.
Reducing CO2 emissions is becoming far more feasible than it was a decade ago. Renewable energy is quickly becoming more cost effective than fossil fuel, and investors are turning to renewables as a better return for the future. We have also demonstrated in this pandemic that we can dramatically and quickly change our society and industry if we think the threat justifies it. So, while there are huge challenges ahead to make the reductions, we have demonstrated that with the will we can overcome them. The big question is, do we have the will?
Removing CO2 is more complex. There are carbon capture technologies being developed but none that can be scaled up to the needs required to get back to pre-industrial CO2 levels. Nature remains the only feasible option for removing CO2 and so if we ‘rewild’ the planet with a combination of massive reforesting, reinvigorating grasslands whose soils capture huge quantities of carbon, and restoring the oceans, we have a chance of achieving this goal.
The ocean is the quickest option to gain results. Coastal reefs, seagrass beds and kelp forests all grow very rapidly and are very efficient in capturing carbon. In the open ocean, phytoplankton does the same on a vast scale. However, the productivity of all these marine ecosystems depends on them having functioning food chains driven by a multitude of species, especially fish. At present, massive overfishing and degradation of coastal marine habitats are dramatically reducing the productivity of our oceans and, correspondingly, their ability to capture carbon. Scientists know how to solve this: if we protect a third of the oceans as marine reserves, the whole system bounces back. It is a win win because as well as removing CO2, the total fish catch from the unprotected two-thirds starts to rise again too, reversing the century-long decline in global fisheries.
On the land, we need to create more space for both forests and productive grasslands. Growing trees is known to be a very effective means of capturing carbon, but less well known is that the soils of healthy grasslands do so too. To increase both, we must use land more efficiently to feed our burgeoning population. We can do this by firstly changing what we eat and secondly changing how we produce food. Changing what we eat boils down to reducing our meat consumption. A large predator in the Serengeti needs some 100 prey animals to eat every year. That is why predators are rare and why they need a huge area of land to sustain each of them. Humans are omnivores and historically meat made up just a small proportion of our diets. However, in the last fifty years many of us have behaved like top predators and the planet simply does not have enough space to grow this quantity
If we allow it to, technology can play a big part in both feeding a larger global population and also reducing the land we need for agriculture. of cattle feed. Nearly all the deforestation of the Amazon is to provide feed for cattle. So, a reduction in the amount of meat we eat and the substitution of meat with either ‘vegetarian or synthetic meat’ will have a dramatic impact on the amount of agricultural land we need and our ability to rewild.
Agriculture has remained much the same in principle since we first invented farming. We clear the soil, plant seeds and harvest what we grow. Yes, productivity has massively improved, but we still need lots of land. However, an agricultural revolution is happening with many plants being grown indoors with massive yields per hectare. The Netherlands is the leader here and, despite being one of the world’s smallest countries, is now one of the greatest food exporters. If we allow it to, technology can play a big part in both feeding a larger global population and also reducing the land we need for agriculture. At present, the natural world receives no income for the services it supplies to us, such as clean water, clean air, food and carbon capture. There is now a growing voice to introduce carbon taxes with the revenue gained reinvested into carbon capture. If a hardly noticeable US$5 tax was charged to every tonne of carbon produced and paid for every tonne captured, the Amazon rainforest’s carbon capture would make it worth £700 billion a year. Increase the tax to US$50 and it comes to US$7 trillion! With this value attached to the rainforest, conserving rather than destroying becomes the sensible economic decision. Carbon taxing would suddenly put a realistic value on all wild places, and many would instantly become more valuable left alone rather than having them degraded by barely profitable practices as they are at present.
OUR PLANET, OUR RESPONSIBILITY
Nothing Happens in Isolation
Rewilding the world has another massive benefit: it rebalances so many other factors that are causing our planet to become unstable. Pandemics are just one example. Most scientists believe that Covid-19 made the jump from bats to humans because an infected wild animal had been brought into unnaturally close contact with other wild species and then with humans in a Wuhan wet market. Wet markets have existed for hundreds of years in Asia but, because wild and exotic animals were hard to come by, they were very expensive so the wet-market business was limited and exclusive. With the sudden growth in wealth in China, the wet-market business has grown rapidly, driving more and more illegal wildlife traffickers into remote places, bringing back more and more exotic species into the heart of our cities. So, the chances of a pathogen crossing from an exotic animal to us has dramatically increased.
Poverty also plays its role. In Guinea in the 1990s, conflict drove many refugees into the once uninhabited rainforest. Again, a bat-born disease came unnaturally into contact with people and the Ebola epidemic was born. Our invasion or destruction of the natural world is driving up the number of new ‘zoonotic’ diseases from one every century to half a dozen in just the last 20 years. The next Covid-19 is sadly just around the corner. Rewilding and isolating wilderness from people will be an essential step in preventing further pandemics.
Loss of species alone increases our chances of further pandemics. A balanced ecosystem with a complex array of species controls the spread of pathogens and pests. A good example is the global outbreak of Lyme’s disease that began in Connecticut, USA. Lyme’s disease is caused by a tick-born bacteria and has probably existed in New England forests for millennia. In the original pristine forests of East Coast America there was a diverse range of species including chipmunks, weasels and opossums which controlled the tick population. A single opossum, through grooming, can remove six thousand ticks every week. As these specialist species were removed by urbanisation, only generalist species were left like deer and white-footed mice which do not control ticks. The bacteria multiplied on a plague of ticks which now has even reached our wilderness areas in the UK. West Nile disease in the USA is similarly linked to a loss of species, this time wild birds. dependent upon insects for both crop pollination and enriching the soils. So often we focus the extinction debate on the big, charismatic creatures, but it is the loss of the little things that will lead to our undoing.
Whether it is fresh pandemics, agricultural failure or climate change, these are all symptoms of our world losing its balance. It is dangerous to consider the components of the environmental crisis in isolation, as is often the case with climate change. The danger to all of us is how all these fundamental changes, which are igniting the sixth extinction event, come together in ways our ‘Holoceneevolved’ civilisation simply cannot cope with. This is why we must now urgently step back and work on the steps we need to take to rebalance the world. The one simple and feasible action that can have a massive and rapid impact is to restore nature on an industrial scale as quickly as possible.
Sadly, we have very little time. Having lived through a pandemic, now we all understand how terrifying exponential growth is. The major factors driving us to the sixth extinction are all increasing exponentially. We know that just a one-week delay to locking down Britain had huge consequences for us because the Covid-19 virus was spreading exponentially. This is exactly the same reason why all environmental scientists are terrified by delaying actions to deal with the environmental crisis. In a decade from now the ‘environment crisis horse’ may have bolted and we will be rushing to an unstoppable sixth extinction event.
Two crucial opportunities lie ahead next year: the UN Conference on Biodiversity (COP15) and the UN Climate Change Conference (COP26). History will look back at these meetings as the crucial moments in the history of mankind but, right now, many people and politicians regard them as a low priority. One way or another, our actions in this next decade will determine the future of all who follow us. This is why we are the most important generation to have ever lived, being the only people who can prevent a catastrophe of a scale not seen for 66 million years. If we care about the future generations, then none of us can afford to fail at these crucial moments in the coming decade.
Our ancestors, before the advent of agriculture, knew that to survive they had to be a part of nature. For 10,000 years we have rushed down a road to becoming apart from nature. Now, once again, we will have to learn to be a part of it. And, once again, it is all about survival. ■
