Where Has All the Wildlife Gone?

The latest Living Planet Report has been released.

A few years ago the World Wildlife Fund in conjunction with the London Zoological Society and other groups issued a LPR that found terrestrial life on Earth had declined 50% in total since 1970, The following year's Living Planet Report surveyed marine life - fish, marine mammals, sea birds - and found a similar 50% decline since 1970.

The 2016 Living Planet Report finds that global wildlife has now dropped by 58%  and is on track to reach 67% by 2020.

Global wildlife could plunge to a 67 per cent level of decline in just the fifty-year period ending this decade as a result of human activities, according to WWF’s Living Planet Report 2016. The report shows how people are overpowering the planet for the first time in Earth’s history and highlights the changes needed in the way society is fed and fuelled.

According to the report, global populations of fish, birds, mammals, amphibians and reptiles have already declined by 58 per cent between 1970 and 2012, the most recent year with available data. This places the world on a trajectory of a potential two-thirds decline within a span of the half-century ending in 2020.

“Wildlife is disappearing within our lifetimes at an unprecedented rate,” said Marco Lambertini, Director General of WWF International. “This is not just about the wonderful species we all love; Take away species, and these ecosystems will collapse along with biodiversity forms the foundation of healthy forests, rivers and oceans. the clean air, water, food and climate services that they provide us. We have the tools to fix this problem and we need to start using them now if we are serious about preserving a living planet for our own survival and prosperity.

“Human behaviour continues to drive the decline of wildlife populations globally, with particular impact in freshwater habitats. Importantly however, these are declines, they are not yet extinctions – and this should be a wake-up call to marshal efforts to promote the recovery of these populations,” said Professor Ken Norris, Director of Science at ZSL.

The good news is that we still have time to reverse the worst of this. That would involve a resolution to avert species collapse and an assessment of how to go about ensuring that.  As the decline is human driven, reversing it would mean changing ourselves. It's hard to imagine that we can cling to perpetual exponential growth and do anything but worsen the problem. Unfortunately Canada, like most developed and emerging economies is led by a political caste still in the embrace of constant growth.

We really have to wake up. On a civilizational scale, this massive decline carries ecological impacts that may not be survivable. It's like nature is trying to call and get our attention but nobody's listening.

The important thing to remember is that, when it comes to the decline in wildlife, we have no idea where the tipping point is or even how resilient our global civilization can be to a challenge of this magnitude. We're continuing to grow in numbers, in consumption of already overtaxed resources, in our demands on habitat, in the pollution of all descriptions we leave in our wake. These are the things that are crowding out all other species that share our planet. These are the things that are already savaging their numbers.

We have no interest in stopping.