A Life on our Planet
We are amidst a global pandemic which we are all working through, finding ways to continue to live and work, and trying to stay healthy. Children are having to adapt to a whole new way of life, schooling, socialising, etc. We are assuming (hoping) that this will soon pass and life will resume to a less volatile and disrupted normal. However, learning to live with, battle against, and adapt our lives around ‘that’ virus has given us a grave yet poignant platform by which to look at a far bigger threat to our existence.
I recently watched the most recent David Attenborough documentary - David Attenborough: A Life on Our Planet, which spans the destruction that we (humans) have been a party to, and the cause of, throughout his extraordinary ninety-three years on this earth. Attenborough has explored most of our planet during the course of his career and “experienced the living world in all its variety and wonder” due to his passion for adventure and learning about the wild.
The loss of the planet’s biodiversity is the key point made; we are deforesting and destroying the world at a rate whereby, if we continue as we are, the entire planet will become uninhabitable. Yes, that means it will no longer be a place in which humans can survive. Our lives rely on the world’s biodiversity, so if that is no longer, or has declined further due to human error, we will no longer be able to live on earth. The human species will plunder and become extinct. If you watch this documentary you will feel this realisation as truth and it shocks you to the core.
Since 1937 the understanding of how the living world has increased dramatically. We are incredible beings that have studied, researched and analysed that which we inhabit and sadly destroy. But at least that awareness is available to us all, the facts are presentable and visible.
The earth is supposed to change, it is used to catastrophic situations - within four billion years the planet has endured five mass extinctions - whereby a multitude of species are wiped out and replaced by a few. Nature then takes its course having no option but to rebuild.
Since the end of the age of the dinosaur the world has been rebuilding to make the planet as it has been during the life span of humans.
The temperature on earth, for the past 10,000 years has not wavered up or down more than 1ºC on average since. It is the most stable era the planet has ever experienced - the rich, thriving variety of the living world being key to this stability. Due to the stable life we were given, the seasons, we learned to use this for our own benefit in the form of farming. Seasonal produce.
Following this came civilisation, development and progression. Culture, tradition, language, housing, industry, technology, electricity, travel, air travel - life became a dream, until we recognised that there were problems with this dream. At the post-war time when Attenborough began his career it did not seem feasible or remotely possible that we, one single species, could one day be the cause of the downfall of the natural world on which we relied.
Space travel defined this for humanity when we were shown pictures of our planet live from the Apollo spacecraft, depicting that we are not a limitless life source, our existence has an edge to it, we are bound by the natural world that surrounds us. A visit to a remote tribe shows how the human race could simply live off the land, in a sustainable fashion, only taking what was necessary - a far cry from the increased demands of the western civilisation. If only we had been gracious enough to realise that we had everything we needed in the first place. For as these so called needs shifted and increased, we continued on a path of greed, power and our own unwitting downfall; the path to our own extinction.
We have poached, pillaged, ravaged, deforested, slaughtered, hunted, fought over, claimed, forced extinction upon, overpopulated, and blown up the natural world incessantly to our own demise. Have the feeling that we aren’t as intelligent a species as we give ourselves credit for?
The planet, the natural world, will clamber its way back from our destruction and thrive once more after we are gone, so the fight we need to take part in is not simply to help save the planet, it is to help save our place on it before it is too late. We are talking about a few generations time. During watching this documentary (whilst in floods of tears at the evidence of our mistakes) I almost felt like there was no hope, that our children’s future is so bleak that they ought not to reproduce so as not to put their children and grandchildren in danger of what is to come.
This is why I think this programme is so important for them to watch. Not to place this fear and all the problems of the world on their shoulders, but to educate them and allow them to realise that, although they are watching a programme on Netflix, this is real life. When that hit home to me, it did so very hard. We are basically being shown hard scientific evidence that if our destructive ways continue nature will chew us up and spit us out, reject us from earth and rebuild itself without us.
This is a terrifying situation, and one that is not just going to go away when we switch off the TV. It is only subject to a change in how humans treat the planet. David Attenborough, after suspending us in a state of anxiety, fear and hopelessness kindly reveals to us, using all his wisdom, knowledge, and experience alongside scientific evidence, how we can work towards a planet that will allow us to continue living. It is not as simple as doing the recycling and reducing our individual carbon footprints, there are huge mountains to climb here. But, as an extremely powerful and highly-intelligent race with a new mindset in force, there are real options, actions that we can take on to secure a better future for the next generations.
Never before has the earth been attacked from within like this, by one of its own species.
We have become apart from the natural world, rather than a part of it. And this ultimately is what needs to be stopped. We need to desist what we are doing of our own accord, as there is nothing left that can restrict us. We could simply consume the earth until we have used it all up.
Rainforests have been halved, coral reefs have become vast wastelands, the earth has been stripped to produce and process meat - half of the fertile land on earth now being farmland, the carbon levels are causing the ice to melt and therefore temperatures to rise, extinction is rife, overfishing - 90% of the large fish in the sea are gone causing the oceanic nutrient cycle to stutter, freshwater populations have been reduced by over 80%, the ocean can no longer absorb the excess heat produced by human activity on earth (burning of fossil fuels and producing greenhouse gases) and so now the ice is melting - 40% in 40 years, the global temperature has risen faster since Attenborough was born than in the last 10,000 years, all of which cause instability to (our) life on this planet.
Our imprint, our impact, our global assault has caused irreversible damage. In the words of Attenborough himself and his own witness statement, “human beings have overrun the world, we have completely destroyed that wild world, the non-human world”.
SO WHAT DO WE DO?
The only thing to do now is to begin to live harmoniously with the natural world. Instead of running the planet wrongly we need to live sustainably, ethically and once again find our place in it as natural beings…
STABILISE THE POPULATION - One very straightforward way to slow down our negative impact is to stop and stabilise population growth. If we do this resources will eventually reach a balance once again. If not we will reach a population of 11 billion within this century! To achieve this, we need to educate the current population (girls in particular) for as long as possible, reduce poverty, provide access to healthcare for everyone, produce fewer children and more opportunity - raise the standard of living but at the same time reducing our impact on the world.
USE RENEWABLE ENERGY - We absolutely must start phasing out fossil fuels and utilise what we have that will not run out - sunlight, water, wind and geothermal. This is essential to the health of the planet and our position on it. Renewable energy should become the only source of natural power. We need to invest in this rather than that which can kill our future - fossil fuels. Energy will be more affordable, it will never expire, our world will be a far cleaner and quieter place.
ENFORCE OCEAN REGENERATION - Diversity in the oceans is essential in the battle against elevated carbon levels in the atmosphere, as well as being an important source of food. As we close off areas and make them unavailable for fishing, these areas will bloom again and be healthy enough to spill over into areas available for fishing. The no-fish zones will pass on their wealth, and the reefs can also recover. If we do this globally over one third of the oceans, we could restore fish supplies forever.
EDUCE FARMLAND - We need to drastically reduce the amount of area we use to farm in order to be able to improve the world’s biodiversity - to make space for the wild to return. We haven’t got room to support billions of meat-eaters, so to do this we can simply begin to change our diet and live a more natural, plant-based life. This would reduce farmed land by half! Sustainable systems can be put in place to grow these plants with less water, space, and pesticides, plus emitting less carbon. Plants can help save the world!
STOP DEFORESTATION - With the free land that would no longer be needed for farming, we need to reforest and improve biodiversity, redeveloping the wild and ecosystems. Deforestation MUST stop. Oil palm and soya must only be grown on land which was cleared many many years ago. Take a look at how Costa Rica managed to reforest itself by replanting native trees through government grants, making the rainforests cover half of the country once again. This will aid with reducing carbon levels in the atmosphere.
BOTTOM LINE - nature is our friend, we need to follow its path and instinctive plan, one species only thrives when in balance with the rest of the world. We must embrace this, recreate that balance and take care of nature so it can take care of us. Let’s teach our children that we need to become a part of nature once again so that we can secure our place, and their future, on this incredible planet.