BIODIVERSITY: A Tipping Point on Species Loss?

Humanity is destroying the network of living things that comprise our life support system. While this sawing-through-the-branch-we’re-perched-on is largely unintentional, world leaders can’t say they didn’t know what’s going on: 123 countries promised to take urgent action in 2003 but have done little to stem the rising tide of extinctions in what’s known as the extinction or biodiversity crisis.
Few people are aware that protecting biodiversity is not just about saving cute animals and pretty birds. Protecting biodiversity means protecting ecosystems that provide humanity with food, fibre, clean water and air. In the past few hundred years, human beings have greatly disrupted those natural processes through deforestation, overfishing, and more recently through pollution and emissions of greenhouse gases.

Correcting this accidental and destructive geoengineering of the planet will not be easy. Some experts now believe that at least half of the land and oceans needs to be fully protected.

“That is what the science says; this is what many aboriginal people say,” Harvey Locke, the WILD Foundation’s vice president of conservation strategy, told IPS late last year. WILD Foundation is an international, non-governmental non-profit based in the United States.

“It’s time to speak the simple truth. The whole thing unravels without protecting at least half of the planet,” Locke said.

IPS News