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Article One
Three years out of ten
Dr. Mark Everard
We live, as the Chinese proverb goes, in interesting times.
There seems to be an archetypal human need for apocalyptic tales, morphing through the centuries to suit cultural mores. Our history is littered with fearful characterisations from the horsemen of the apocalypse to the ‘shadow of the bomb’, the groundless demonisation of races or religions, the nuclear winter and global warming, Satan and Voldemort, and so on and on.
So when I reflect that we, the environmental professionals, have perhaps ten years to make a really significant impact upon the governance and habits of our world in order to avert serious and irreversible damage to human security and potential, am I just echoing Chicken Licken by claiming that the sky is falling? Naturally, I think not, but then self-delusion is a human trait at least as old as the apocalyptic archetype.
The difference today, however, is that we have hard, scientifically based and tested evidence that the sky may indeed be inclined to fall. This is not perceived today to be due to the ‘shadow of the bomb’, that perennial spectre haunting my childhood, even in spite of the nuclear threat being no less alarming albeit below the everyday media radar. Rather, we have spent so much of the past two-and-a-half centuries hacking away at the roots of the tree of life that we risk it toppling under our weight.
This hard evidence includes the compelling case made by the UN’s Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, developed by in excess of 1,300 scientists across 95 countries and supported by the consensus of many thousands more in other nations besides, about the parlous decline of all ecosystem types on our much-abused planet. The Assessment predicts dire consequences for the integrity of these ecosystems and their capacity to support the needs of a booming human population, and builds upon the methods and conclusions the long-running series of Living Planet Index reports from the Worldwide Fund for Nature (WWF) and UNDP’s Human Development Reports.
So too the World Scientist’s Warning to Humanity, published on 18th November 1992 just five months after the Earth Summit in Rio and signed by more than sixteen hundred senior scientists from seventy-one countries including over half of all Nobel Prize winners. This Warning did not mince its words, noting that, “Human beings and the natural world are on a collision course… A great change in our stewardship of the Earth and the life on it is required if vast human misery is to be avoided and our global home on this planet is not to be irretrievably mutilated… No more than one or a few decades remain before the chance to avert the threats we now confront will be lost, and the prospects for humanity immeasurably diminished”. Not words to inspire the kind of complacency that has been the subsequent political (non-)response, nor indeed readily dismissed as the conclusions of the uninformed.
We can add to this the unambiguous conclusions of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) that we are already witnessing the impacts of climate change, which will continue to intensify due to current let alone future gaseous discharges, but that we have perhaps ten years to make serious reductions in our carbon emissions if rapid and potentially irreversible climate change effects are to be averted.
Chicken Licken may have been right to fear the sky falling, but not in some abstract sense nor in the form of a great single ‘event’. Rather, declining quantities and qualities of fish stocks and old grown forest, loss of water-trapping habitat in uplands and flood-attenuating plains and wetlands lower in catchments, eroding soil and oxidised carbon content, persistent pollutants and development of treasured landscapes, depleting biodiversity, stocks of natural resources and a range of other measurable environmental variables are already eroding human wellbeing, enjoyment and potential. Hell, increasingly frequent and intense storms and declining reliability of production from extractive industries are already battering our pension funds, let alone the wider economy! The real-world drama of a slow apocalypse, generally at a pace or in places that do not attract media or political hype, is already our daily reality. Perhaps it is the reason why you, like many of us, got into this environmental game in the first place?
So let’s agree that we have ten years, on the weight of the collated conclusions above, to make that really significant impact upon the governance and habits of our world. We can not replace biodiversity – extinction is after all forever – but we can not only sound the alarm but contribute to positive solutions to manufacturing and design, governance, resource harvesting, transport and energy technologies, scientific discovery and education, or the spreading of positive messages. We have a mission even greater than the one that brought ‘the environment’ from fringe interest to the political mainstream way back in the 1970s. And we have a real, once-only chance to do something about healing the injuries to that metaphorical tree of life such that it can bear us into the indefinite future.
This is something to which I intend to contribute, along with you, in my three years as your chairman. Do please contact me via the IES office.