The Time to Act on the Planet is Now

The scale of this immense construction in Dubai is awe inspiring evidence of the power that we now have in our hands with which to transform the face of the earth.

When in prehistoric times these stones were first put up to build this temple in the West of England at Avebury, they too must have been an astonishment to the local people and an amazing demonstration of how clever, how powerful human beings have become. Yet that was less than five thousand years ago, a mere moment in the history of life.

 

In the brief period since then, men have gone on to learn how to build huge skyscrapers, how to mould animals and plants to suit their needs and how to transform whole landscapes. Immensely powerful though we are today, it is equally clear that we will be even more powerful tomorrow. Once more there will be greater need upon us to use our power as the number of human beings on earth increases still further. Clearly we could devastate the world.

 

 

 

If we are not to do so we must have a plan and just such a plan has been formulated by environmental scientists in  1980, they called it the World Conservation Strategy and it rests on three very simple propositions;

 

1) One, that we shouldn't so exploit natural resources that we destroy them. Common sense you might think and yet look at what we have done to the European Herring, the Javan tiger and are still doing to the last remaining rhino species.

 

 

2) Two, that we should not interfere with the basic processes of the earth on what all life depends; in the sky, on the green surface of the earth and in the sea and yet we go on pouring poisons into the sky, cutting down the tropical rainforests and dumping our rubbish into the oceans.

 

 

3) Third, that we preserve the diversity of life, that is not just because we depend on it for our food, though we do, nor that we still know so little about it that we do not know what we are losing. But it is surely that we have no moral right to destroy other living organisms of which we share the earth.

 

 

 

As far as we know the earth is one of the only places in the Universe where there is life. In the two hundred thousand years of man's existence the greatest threat to the survival of our species is happening now. The earth's continual survival now rests in our hands.

 

 

 

 

To find out more about how you can act on climate change please visit the Leonardo DiCaprio Foundation page at http://leonardodicaprio.org/.

 

References:

https://portals.iucn.org/library/efiles/documents/WCS-004.pdf