Climate change activists, who have been staging ‘die-in’ protests, have an important message: Action is urgently needed to prevent an environmental collapse
According to a recent report by Mattha Busby in The Guardian of Britain, protesters in France, Australia, New Zealand, Finland, Sweden, Norway, Italy, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom, lay on the ground at transport hubs and cultural and shopping centres on April 27, demanding action to prevent an environmental collapse. The “die-in”, as it was called, was organised by Wee Rebellion, a young peoples’ group combating climate change and associated with a bigger group, Extinction Rebellion.
The Guardian report quotes a spokesperson of the organisation as saying, in a statement, “Our ecosystem is threatened by collapse which will lead not only to mass extinction of countless species, the loss of soil fertility and more extreme weather but will also bring with it the social crises of famine, war and migration.” What is said here is nothing new. Warnings have been issued for quite some time. This year, protection of species was the theme of Earth Day, annually observed by over 192 countries on April 22 to remind people that the earth and its ecosystems provided them with life and sustenance, and of their responsibility to promote, as called for by the 1992 Rio Declaration, harmony with nature.
The need to protect species can hardly be over-emphasised. Ian Johnston’s report in The Independent of the United Kingdom of May 31, 2017, cited scientists writing in a special edition of the magazine, Nature, that humans were causing the sixth mass extinction of life on earth. Chris Jasurek’s piece in The Epoch Times of October 31, 2018, cites a World Wildlife Fund report as stating that humans have killed about 60 per cent of animals, including mammals, fish, birds and reptiles, on the planet since 1970.
Earlier, Elizabeth Kolbert had written in The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History (first published in 2014), “Very, very occasionally in the distant past, the planet has undergone change so wrenching that the diversity of life has plummeted. Five of these ancient events were catastrophic enough that they’re put in their own category: The so-called Big Five. In what seems like a fantastic coincidence, but is probably no coincidence at all, the history of these events is recovered just as people come to realise that they are causing another one.”
It is becoming increasingly clear that the Sixth Extinction is staring the world in the face. The causes are well-known. Johnston points out that over-hunting, poaching, pollution, loss of habitat, the arrival of invasive species and other human-caused problems are threatening tens of thousands of species — including 25 per cent of all mammals and 13 per cent of birds — with extinction.
To be specific, this terrible situation is the result of seabed mining threatening to destroy unique ecosystems besides taking pollution to the deep sea, rivers bringing toxic industrial waste from hinterlands, oil spills polluting hundreds of square miles and increasing carbon emissions, making sea water acidic and, hence, inhospitable to marine life. Container ships are killing a growing number of whales through accidents. Japan’s murderous whaling expeditions, undertaken in defiance of international judicial pronouncements, Governmental protests and public condemnation, is killing hundreds of whales. Plastic waste is polluting vast stretches of land and sea.
All this is the result of human activity, which has increased sharply as a result of growing human population, which is set to exceed 10 billion by 2060. It is not just their sustenance demands that are increasing with their numbers. Market capitalism, with advertising as its cutting edge, is manufacturing demands for ever new consumer goods and leisure activity. The result is pressure on nature. Animal habitats, for example, are destroyed to make space for townships and factories and roads and rail lines linking them.
Referring to the soaring increase in global population under way, Desmond Morris predicts in The Naked Ape: A Zoologist’s Study of the Human Animal, that time will come when “the densities we are now experiencing in our major cities would exist in every corner of the globe. The consequences of all this for all forms of wild animals is obvious. The effect it would have on our own species is equally depressing.”
Global warming has worsened matters. The Special Report on Global Warming of 1.5°C, released by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) at Incheon, South Korea on October 7, 2018, makes the chilling statement that at the current rate, the global mean temperature is likely to rise to the 1.5-degree mark sometime between 2030 and 2052. The world has already warmed 1degree Celsius since the industrial revolution, hence, it is really a question of another half-degree. The Special Report on Global Warming of 1.5°C, however, clearly indicates that warming, even if limited to 1.5 degrees Celsius, would not reduce the risks and impact of climate change. Sea levels will continue to rise beyond 2100, threatening coastal ecosystems and infrastructure. Flooding, drought and extreme weather events will wreak havoc on communities around the globe. Many species will continue to be driven toward extinction and marine ecosystems could face “irreversible loss.”
Participants in the “die-in” were absolutely right. Action is urgently needed to prevent an environmental collapse.
(The writer is Consultant Editor, The Pioneer, and an author)
