Frogs are disappearing from the Sierra Nevada in California, from the Monteverde cloud forest reserve in Northern Costa Rica and from Australia. In Central Costa Rica the population of several endemic frogs crashed. Rare and specialised species are vanishing from populated and disturbed areas and from …
Nature
People – not evil, just no morals
It is difficult to estimate the time to extinction of a species or a population. This is partly due to a time lag between degradation of a habitat to the point that it no longer supports a species to the actual death of the last member of the population or species. The species would be doomed to extinction but may …
Biodiversity – Size Matters
Apart from acidification, marine life and ocean coral reefs in particular, are threatened by illegal fishing, legal overfishing and agricultural runoff that both encourage algae growth, deforestation that causes excessive silt flowing in the seas and oceans and dynamite fishing. In fact most of marine life will …
The Age of Humans
It was Nobel Prize winning Dutch chemist, Paul Crutzen, who coined the term ‘Anthropocene’ (The Age of Humans) to represent this human dominated geological epoch. He put forward his arguments in a short essay published in the journal Nature called the Geology of Mankind in January 2002. His argument was based on …
The Sixth Mass Extinction
A study published nearly two years ago warned that “This current ‘biological annihilation’ underlines the seriousness for humanity of Earth’s ongoing sixth mass extinction”. This was a study by Gerardo Ceballos, Paul Ehrlich and Rodolfo Dirzo called ‘Biological annihilation via the ongoing …
The Safe Zone
The 2018 WWF Living Planet Report on the State of the Earth explains how in recent decades we have developed a clearer scientific picture of the complex links between climate, animal and plant life, the land and water habitats and importantly how this sustains human life. Observation and geological evidence have been used to build […]
Catastrophic Disruption of Nature
We are beginning to appreciate that everything in nature is connected and interdependent. We are able to understand some of the mechanics of nature and can now see, for the first time in human history, the unintended consequences of our actions. Human activity has caused catastrophic disruption to the …
Insect Biodiversity Apocalypse
Biodiversity of insects is threatened worldwide.Here,we present a comprehensive review of 73 historical reports of insect declines from across the globe, and systematically assess the underlying drivers. Our work reveals dramatic rates of decline that may lead to the extinction of …
The Not-So-Living Planet
Humans exist because of Nature and everything we have, everything we are comes from Nature. Nature is important for our mental and spiritual health and wellbeing, our food supply, our wealth, our science and security. And yet political and business decisions, as well many of our personal decisions, are …
The End of Civilisation
The recently published World Wildlife Fund 2018 Living Planet Report reveals that we have killed 60% of all wildlife in the last 40 years. I would remind readers that as recently as 200,000 years ago we would have considered our ancestors wildlife by any of today’s definitions. We have come to be by the same …