CA bigger crisis looms within Nature than COVID
Nathalie Seddon, at another COP talk I attended (separate blog here), a professor of biodiversity at the University of Oxford and founding director of the Bunloit NbS, says:
‘We are living in an almost dead, empty ecosystem’.
- Just 4% of mammals on the planet are wild?
- 96% are either humans (34%) or for people such as food or pets (62%)
- The same is true of birds with cheap profitable chicken destined for fast food or sold in supermarkets far outstripping wild birds by a factor of 3 (a major factor contributing to the ecocide now in UK Rivers)
- WWF warn of a 68% average decline in species populations since 1970
- We are living in what scientists describe as an age known as the Anthropocene – a sixth mass extinction event
- Extinctions caused indisputably by ourselves
Declines of mammals, fish, birds, reptiles, and amphibians spell bad news for the health of people and the planet.
Indigenous Peoples from around the world have been trying to warn us of this fact for years.
Their warnings however have largely been lost amongst more powerful organisations and their messages.
A point eloquently presented by First Nation Tom Goldtooth. A Native American environmental, climate, and economic justice activist. Some paraphrasing but I believe I’ve captured the essence of Tom’s message:
The price of your Mother?
If in my culture, passed down through a thousand years, means I see the earth as my mother, the sky my father, the young head of a river, a child to care for. Not ‘to ram drills beneath and take cores’ just metres deep beneath, to exploit for gas and oil, at the existential risk of this ‘child river.
Not like ‘mother, father, child’, but in a factorial, literal sense.
Because nature gives life to us so naturally we love and want to protect nature.
How then can I put a value to this nature [ergo with carbon credits to trade in], in order to justify continued bad behaviour and exploitation of so called natural resources?
We are asked to value and measure nature, to quantify, but this is alien to us, odd, just doesn’t make sense.
Despite the mournful sorrow I feel for this loss of nature that as I am sure you do too, it still affords me a cathartic therapeutic and regenerative healing power that is incalculably invaluable.
Healing
When I am most down, tired or worn out, such as when my housing role was made redundant this year due to COVID. Or a bereavement, the most sadness that I have ever endured, as for many others my preferred go-to-place is clear.
Either sea kayaking (very long sleek fast sea-going kayaks like the Inuit Eskimo’s pioneered), most often in the Irish Sea around Anglesey (or Alaska 17 years ago) or canoeing (you know the Canadian style canoe) on our rivers, lakes and lochs.
After losing my cousin earlier in 2021 far too young, I remembered her spirit on the Welsh coastal path walk around Cemlyn Bay in North Wales on a recent visit this year. A reminder of a distant memory of a sea kayaking trip my wife and I did with my cousins Jenny and Rebecca in British Columbia.
It’s interesting that the most significant places of nature for me mostly all have memories intertwined with memories of family.
Ecocide and Protecting Mother Earth
In this talk, ‘PROTECTING MOTHER EARTH: SACRED GUARDIANSHIP & ECOCIDE LAW’, hosted by Stop Ecocide International, representatives of Alliance of Mother Nature’s Guardians, Black and Indigenous People of Colour reflect on literally thousands of different cultures and languages from across the planet and present their declaration to the UN on the vital importance of protecting nature.
I recommend listening to the talk. My main takeaway was that whilst the UK activist movement persuaded me that climate change is actually a crisis, an emergency. This talk pushed me further to see it for what it is – as a crime.
Nature based Solutions will save us from the worst effects of climate change
In some ways Nature’s Way project is about finding out from communities what nature represents to us and how we can better protect and access nature for all our physical, mental and social well being, for now and for future generations.
Written by Richard Haynes