Saving a planet under attack

Robert Macfarlane, in his book Landmarks, about the connection between words and landscapes, tells a revealing but stunning story about how recent editions of the Oxford Junior Dictionary (aimed at seven-year-olds) dropped certain “nature words” that its editors deemed less relevant to the lives of modern children.

These included “acorn”, “dandelion”, “fern”, “nectar”, “otter”, “pasture” and “willow”. The terms introduced in their place, he noted, included “broadband”, “blog”, “cut-and-paste”, “MP3 player” and “voice-mail”.

While this news was first disclosed in 2015, reading it in Mr Macfarlane’s book still shocks me for what it signifies. But who can blame the Oxford editors for dumping Amazon words for Amazon.com ones?

Our natural world is rapidly disappearing. Just how fast was the major topic here last week at the global conference held every four years by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), which I participated in along with some 8,000 scientists, nature reserve specialists and environmentalists.

The dominant theme running through the IUCN’s seminars was the fact that we are bumping up against and piercing planetary boundaries — on forests, oceans, ice melt, species extinctions and temperature — from which Mother Nature will not be able to recover. When the coral and elephants are all gone, no 3D printer will be able to recreate them.

In short, we and our kids are rapidly becoming the Noah generation, charged with saving the last pairs. (This is no time to be electing a climate-change denier such as Mr Donald Trump for President.)

The renowned oceanographer Sylvia Earle put it well to a sustainability conference hosted in the United States by the East-West Center alongside the IUCN meetings. In her lifetime, she said, she has felt as if she has been “witness to the greatest era of discovery and the greatest era of loss” in our planet’s history.

So now, she said, “We are at a crossroads. What we do right now or fail to do will determine the future — not just for us, but for all life on Earth”.

Those really are the stakes — there is a reason nature words are being removed from children’s dictionaries.

Last week, for instance, The New York Times reported on a study that revealed how “the African elephant population is in drastic decline, having shrunk about 30 per cent from 2007 to 2014. ... The deterioration is accelerating: Largely because of poaching, the population is dropping 8 per cent a year, according to the Great Elephant Census. ... Patricia Awori, an official with the African Elephant Coalition, said, ‘These numbers are shocking’.”

Ok, so you do not care that your kids may never see an elephant in the wild, only in a zoo. That is not all. The species extinction rate is now about “1,000 times faster than before the global spread of humanity”, explained the great biodiversity expert E O Wilson, another speaker at the event.

“Half of the species described today will be gone by the end of the century, unless we take drastic action.”

These species, he noted, evolved over 3.5 billion years “to create an exquisite and careful balance of interconnected resilience”. These plants and animals, and their ecosystems, sustain the foundations of life on which we depend.

When we lose the trees that maintain watersheds, the coastal mangroves that protect against storm surges, the glaciers that store fresh water and the coral reefs that feed fish, we humans become less resilient. Indeed, strip them all away, said Dr Wilson, “and the world as we know it will unravel”.

The magazine, Discover, just noted that we have been tracking the average temperature over global land and ocean surfaces since 1880 — or for 1,639 months. Due to global warming, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration reported that July 2016 was the hottest “of all 1,639 months on record”.

That is why actress Alison Sudol, an IUCN goodwill ambassador, opened the plenary by observing that our planet is now “under attack”.

“Our vast oceans, full of mysteries and wonders, are thick with plastic and mercury,” she noted. “Rainforests — abundant sources of oxygen and medicine; land of ancient lore and tradition; home to thousands of species of wildlife, many as yet unknown to us — are being ploughed down before we have a chance to properly discover what it is we are losing.

“These are the lungs of the Earth, the oceans and the forests, and we are destroying them. Deeply, desperately, we are hoping someone will do something before it is too late. That someone we are hoping for is you.”

So do we have a plan? Dr Wilson has one — a big, audacious plan. It’s the title of his latest book Half-Earth, a call to action to commit half of the planet’s surface — land and oceans — to protected zones.

Right now, the IUCN says, close to 15 per cent of the Earth’s land and 10 per cent of its territorial waters are covered by national parks and protected areas. If we protect half the global surface, Dr Wilson argues, the fraction of species protected will be about 85 per cent, which would keep life on Earth, including the human species, in a safe zone.

Naive, you say? Not so. Naive is thinking we humans will survive without the healthy natural systems that got us here. Naivete is the new realism — or else we, the human species, will become just another bad biological experiment. THE NEW YORK TIMES

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Thomas Friedman is a Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist at The New York Times.