Below are excerpts and some of my thoughts on the article The Rapid Decline Of The Natural World Is A Crisis Even Bigger Than Climate Change by John Vidal. My reflections are based on much input beyond just this article, but this article makes a good platform to discuss these points. Also consider Deep Adaptation: A Map for Navigating Climate Tragedy by Jem Bendell. Or more importantly, consider gardening. And brace for impact.

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“The 1%!” Humanity makes up 0.01% of the biomass of life on Earth. Amazing what one can do when one sets one’s mind to it

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The severity of climate change is often up for debate, but I think this misses an important point. The environmental challenges we face are not climate change or nothing, fossil fuels or green energy, etc. These are false dichotomies, in reality eclipsed by the complex combined-effect of different aspects of environmental well-being.

What we face now and yesterday is severe environmental degradation (nearby example in an extremely fortunate part of the world: depleted or worse yet poisoned soils that slowly kill people and capacity for food production); loss or degradation of ecosystem processes necessary for basic human survival (think: heat wave deaths, costly algal blooms poisoning water supplies, staple crop harvests thrown off track raising the price of basic consumables); climate change (I’ll leave that to your imagination) and more. These issues overlap and exacerbate each other.

Ultimately, we all need food and water. Scarcely has any human satisfied these needs fully and long-term for themselves; we need to work together to satisfy our needs. And I hope you heed the warnings: these needs are threatened. How do the threads of infrastructure and institutions support you in the face of the strains and hazards our environment faces? How will they? What can you do to brace and support those threads, so they better support you?

Are all these issues driven by humans? Who cares, who has time to debate – Do you jump out of the way of a run away car? Do you water your plants during a drought? What do you do when a land slide is coming for your house? Let’s do it: adapt and mitigate, minimize harm.

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Nature underpins all economies with the “free” services it provides in the form of clean water, air and the pollination of all major human food crops by bees and insects. In the Americas, this is said to total more than $24 trillion a year. The pollination of crops globally by bees and other animals alone is worth up to $577 billion.

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Land degradation, biodiversity loss and climate change are three different faces of the same central challenge: the increasingly dangerous impact of our choices on the health of our natural environment.

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This destruction wrought by farming threatens the foundations of our food system. A February report from the U.N. warned that the loss of soil, plants, trees and pollinators such as birds, bats and bees undermines the world’s ability to produce food.

An obsession with economic growth as well as spiraling human populations is also driving this destruction, particularly in the Americas where GDP is expected to nearly double by 2050 and the population is expected to increase 20 percent to 1.2 billion over the same period.

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This destruction is also driving mass human migration and increased conflict. Decreasing land productivity makes societies more vulnerable to social instability, says the report, which estimates that in around 30 years’ time land degradation, together with the closely related problems of climate change, will have forced 50 to 700 million people to migrate.
“It will just be no longer viable to live on those lands,” said Watson.

The study will also recognize that much of the remaining wealth of nature depends on indigenous people, who mostly live in the world’s remote areas and are on the frontline of the damage caused by destructive logging and industrial farming. According to IPBES, indigenous communities often know best how to conserve nature and are better placed than scientists to provide detailed information on environmental change.

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“What surprised me the most about this study was that it became clear that the older cultures, like the indigenous peoples of the Americas, have different values which protect nature better [than Western societies],” said Watson. “No one should romanticize indigenous peoples, and we cannot turn the clock back, but we can learn a lot from them on how to protect the planet.”

Indigenous people, however, continue to experience discrimination, threats and murder. In Brazil, for example, Bolsonaro’s election has cemented a pro-corporate, anti-indigenous agenda that has already started to undermine the rights of the country’s native communities.

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Ultimately, Watson concludes that saving nature will require a major rethink of how we live and how we think about nature, but that it is possible to turn this dire situation around if governments want it to happen.

“There are no magic bullets or one-size-fits-all answers. The best options are found in better governance, putting biodiversity concerns into the heart of farming and energy policies, the application of scientific knowledge and technology, and increased awareness and behavioral changes,” Watson said. “The evidence shows that we do know how to protect and at least partially restore our vital natural assets. We know what we have to do.”

Excerpts from https://www.huffpost.com/entry/nature-destruction-climate-change-world-biodiversity_n_5c49e78ce4b06ba6d3bb2d44

These are all good points. Look at your fellow countryperson and your instututional leaders. Do you think they want to turn this dire situation around? Are they acting on it?

You shall know them by the fruits of their labor.

While we keep up the long-term push for slow moving institutions to help heal instead of continue degrading, I recommend also laboring to actually grow fruit and trees, for yourself and for the natural systems themselves which ultimately support you. Learn about healthy wilderness and how it satisfies our basic needs while you have the privilege of doing so. And enjoy it, reaping and sowing mutual benefit. Be a lamp, a ladder, a lifeboat.