World failing on every environmental issue: an op-ed for Earth Day

By Jeremy Hance, www.mongabay.com
April 22, 201

The biodiversity crisis, the climate crisis, the deforestation crisis: we are living in an age when environmental issues have moved from regional problems to global ones. A generation or two before ours and one might speak of saving the beauty of Northern California; conserving a single species—say the white rhino—from extinction; or preserving an ecological region like the Amazon. That was a different age. Today we speak of preserving world biodiversity, of saving the ‘lungs of the planet’, of mitigating global climate change. No longer are humans over-reaching in just one region, but we are overreaching the whole planet, stretching ecological systems to a breaking point. While we are aware of the issues that threaten the well-being of life on this planet, including our own, how are we progressing on solutions? Today we speak of preserving world biodiversity, of saving the ‘lungs of the planet’, of mitigating global climate change. No longer are humans over-reaching in just one region, but we are overreaching the whole planet, stretching ecological systems to a breaking point. While we are aware of the issues that threaten the well-being of life on this planet, including our own, how are we progressing on solutions? Although not a scientist, I have a relatively unique perspective, having spent the last three years as an environmental journalist, writing on a wide-variety of issues from species-on-the-brink to indigenous rights to climate change politics. As much as I have written, I have read exponentially more. Sometimes a working day as an environmental reporter can feel like watching a slow succumbing, an endless cataloguing toward the end of the world as we know it. I don’t mean that the Earth will keel over and die — hardly. But the Earth may be very different in just a hundred years than the place we inherited: species are vanishing and ecosystems are being ravaged; humans are impacting everything from the deepest ocean to the most inaccessible mountain glaciers, from lion populations in East Africa to stringweed in the Galapagos, from the oceans’ chemical make-up to the boreal forest’s ability to sequester carbon. Given the challenges, how are our political leaders, corporate kings, media moguls, and the public tackling so many environmental issues? Are we implementing solutions, simply standing by, or continuing the actions that caused the problems in the first place? The answer is simple: we — the human species — are failing on every major environmental problem, including those I highlight below: biodiversity, oceans, deforestation, food and water, population and consumption, and climate change. Our inability thus far to even being solving these problems is bankrupting our Earth and will leave our children a very different — I venture to say lonelier and more chaotic — world. …