Humans failing the sustainability audit

With its Geo-4 report, the United Nations tells us that most aspects of the Earth’s natural environment are in decline; and that the decline will affect us, the planet’s human inhabitants, in some pretty important ways.

…More greenhouse gases, more widespread pollution, declining availability of fresh water, deforestation, degradation of farmland, ocean acidification – it is hard to come up with a more comprehensive and, frankly, a more depressing list.


So what, you might ask, is the problem?

Marine fish stocks provide perhaps the clearest example.

Three-quarters of marine fisheries are exploited up to, or beyond, their maximum capacity.

Today’s industrial-scale fleets deploy giant nets which could fit a phalanx of jumbo jets through their mouths, they use sonar to find shoals of fish and GPS to locate fertile fishing grounds.

Yet they are finding less and less to catch, because there is less and less there; eventually, there may be nothing at all worth hunting.

BBC