A Common Cause

In his essay “Walking”, naturalist Henry Thoreau opened with the words:  “I wish to speak a word for Nature, for absolute freedom and wildness…” This was not so much about conservation as it was about inner preservation and revelation — an appeal to his fellow townsmen to look up from heir desks and go outside, touch a tree, start walking, reconnect with Nature. Today, our concept of the natural world is a lot less Wild than it was when Thoreau wrote those words. Much of the earth has been explored and photographed as remote places have opened through accessible travel. Even back in the mid-1800s, when Thoreau was tromping the Concord woods, he was trying to strike a shaky balance between woodsman hermit and compulsory citizen of the American Industrial Revolution. It wasn’t easy. Aggressive commercialism was gridding the US with factories, highways and railroads, chewing ancient forests into match sticks.

 

Through an urban window

Roughly half of the world’s population lives in urban centers, according to the United Nations, and this number will climb to almost 70% by 2050. As urban populations continue to grow, consumption of our natural resources is soaring and vast tracts of wilderness are shrinking. According to the Wildlife Conservation Society, in an analysis published in the October 2018 issue of Nature, just 23% of the world’s landmass can be considered wilderness at this point, which the WCS describes as “ecologically largely intact” and mostly free from outside human disturbance.  Even if we can’t see this decline, the consequences on our planet and lives as we know it are tremendous.   

 

Our life support 

David Attenborough, the British naturalist and co-producer of the series Life on Earth and The Blue Planet, describes biodiversity as a “finely tuned life support machine” where the living world is “a unique and spectacular marvel” made of “billions of individuals of millions of kinds of plants and animals dazzling in their variety and richness, working together to benefit from the energy of the sun and minerals of the earth, leading lives that interlock in such a way that they sustain each other.” Humanity depends upon this healthy, balanced biodiverse world to function smoothly, to attain balance -- what the Teyuna mamos and zagas of Colombia's Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta mountains call "Se". 

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The Economics of Biodiversity

The good news is that this dawning awareness of our interconnectedness with Nature is growing beyond Indigenous cultures — those most immediately endangered — to developed countries. Even economists are realizing that the need to preserve biodiversity extends well beyond our practical needs. We are dependent on Nature not only for our physical needs but also for spiritual sustenance, what economist and author of the major UK commissioned report “The Economics of Biodiversity: The Dasgupta Review”  calls "sacredness.” The review, published in early 2021, assesses the economic benefits of biodiversity and the costs and risks of its loss and then talks about actions that can enhance biodiversity and economic prosperity.

 

But here’s one of the best parts of the report: Sir Dasgupta is speaking not just to world leaders, he’s speaking directly to you and me. “My reader is the concerned citizen. She is someone who has watched…the extent to which Earth is being degraded and biodiversity is being lost….and she wants to know how to translate explanations of how we’ve come to this pass into recommendations.” And that’s it. We’re it — we're in the fight of our lives — for our Planet, for each other and for our Earth