International Day for Biological Diversity May 22.
Promises, promises everywhere, not much action in sight.
Every year, countless govt agencies, NGOs, schools and millions of others ritualistically ‘celebrate’ this day (and many other ‘days’). And yet our high speed destruction of wilderness, of wild species shows no sign of stopping 😨. Very likely, we have already started the Sixth Mass Extinction in Earth’s 4.56 billion year history.
From the time of the beginning of ‘civilisation’ nearly 7000 years ago, our increased hunting, expanding agriculture, and now rapid urbanisation & industrialisation — have wiped out over 83% of All Mammals, and over half of All Plants on this planet.
Though the 8 billion humans represent only about 0.01% of all biomass (plants, animals, microbes,.. ) on Earth, we already are 2.5% of all Animal biomass on Earth! And humans outweigh All Wild Mammals combined, by over 8 times !!
Our forcible occupation of the Earth is so big that only 4% of all Mammals are now wild animals – we ourselves are 36% with the rest of 60% being our domesticated mammals (cattle, pigs, sheep, goats,…).
Though we do not ‘live in air’, we have also wiped out a huge proportion of birds – with 70% of all birds on Earth today being poultry, with less than 30% being wild birds.
This year’s theme of Biodiversity Day is “From Agreement to Action : Build back Biodiversity”, ‘inspired’ by the success of the recent 15th UN Convention on Biological Diversity, and the adoption of “Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework”.
Reminds of so many UN “agreements and protocols” and what not ? We can only hope for the better.
