Part 1: Sickening for Something

The first time I was made sharply aware that we humans weren’t doing a grand job of living in harmony with nature was when I was in high school. One of our textbooks had an extract by the fabulous Gerald Durrell, British naturalist, conservationist, and writer, from a book called Catch me a Colobus. The book is full of adventures in Sierra Leone, where Durrell sought rare endangered animals to bring home to his zoo, which was intended to help conserve various species from dying out entirely.

In the final chapter, ‘Animals for Ever’ he makes a desperate plea for some sense in our dealing with the world around us. He speaks of how humans drove to near extinction two abundant species that no one before could’ve imagined dying out. One of them was the Passenger Pigeon, one of the most numerous avian species ever and the other was the North American Bison. The latter was hunted as a matter of policy, and its slaughter was carried out as a way to starve Native Americans into submission. ‘Every Buffalo Dead Is an Indian Gone’ – that was the cry that led to this horrendous pile of buffalo skulls in this picture taken in Michigan, USA, in 1892.

A passage from his book so stirred my emotions, it awoke a gnawing worry for this planet that has never since left me. Durrell writes:

“…even today the majority of people do not realise the extent to which we are destroying the world we live in. We are like a set of idiot children, let loose with poison, saw, sickle, shotgun and rifle, in a complex and beautiful garden that we are slowly but surely turning into a barren and infertile desert. It is quite possible that in the last few weeks or so, one mammal, one bird, one reptile, and one plant or tree, have become extinct. I hope not but I know for certain that in the same time one mammal, bird, reptile, and plant or tree, have been driven just that much nearer to oblivion.

The world is as delicate and as complicated as a spider’s web, and like a spider’s web, if you touch one thread, you send shudders running through all the other threads that make up the web. But we’re not just touching the web, we’re tearing great holes in it; we’re waging a sort of biological war on the world around us. We are felling forests quite unnecessarily and creating dust bowls, and thereby even altering the climate. We are clogging our rivers with industrial filth, and we are now polluting the sea and the air.

…Conservation means preserving the life of the whole world, be it trees or plants, be it even man himself. It is to be remembered that some tribes have been exterminated very successfully in the last few hundred years and that others are being harried to extinction today – the Patagonian Indians, the Eskimoes, and so on. By our thoughtlessness, our greed and our stupidity we will have created, within the next fifty years or perhaps even less, a biological situation whereby we will find it difficult to live in the world at all. We are breeding like rats and this population explosion must be halted in some way. All religious factions, all political factions, the governments of the world, must face facts, for if we persist in ignoring them then, breeding like rats, we will have to die like them also.”

Grim words, but so prescient! Fifty years, he’d said. He wrote this in 1972. Exactly half a century ago. Climate change is now a fact of life, we are further devastating the planet in myriad ways, driving our fellow creatures into desperate pockets for basic survival, and in many cases towards outright extinction. Right now, of the assessed biodiversity, there are more than 142,500 species on The IUCN Red List, and more than 40,000 species are marked as being threatened with extinction, including 41% of amphibians, 37% of sharks and rays, 34% of conifers, 33% of reef building corals, 26% of mammals and 13% of birds.

Our agricultural practices are so unthinking, we are losing about 27,000 species (yes, 27,000 species!) of soil microbial life every year. Sawing off the very branch that we sit on… do we really imagine we can live well without having a healthy planet as well?