Since 1970: 69% gone!

One of my favourite children’s books is Nick Butterworth and Mick Inkpens’ Wonderful Earth!

It’s a joyous and beautifully illustrated celebration of the wonder and diversity of creation. And sometimes creation is just gloriously weird; who could forget creatures such as the football fish, the weedy seadragon or the pink fairy armadillo? Wonderful Earth! is in part an imaginative reworking of Psalm 104, which celebrates the greatness of the Creator and His creation. There are wild donkeys quenching their thirst from mountain streams, cedars of Lebanon where the birds nest, hyraxes taking refuge in the crags, lions roaring for their prey and Leviathan frolicking in the vast sea, which teems with creatures beyond number.

As Wonderful Earth! goes on to say, you’d think that with such a wonderful world to live in, we’d take good care of it, wouldn’t you? Sadly, that is not the case, and with every month there seems to be further depressing news of how humans have messed up the world. I referred to this in last month’s column, but there’s a more recent update with one statistic that I just can’t get out of my head: since 1970, the world has seen an average 69% drop in populations of mammals, birds, fish, reptiles and amphibians. To put it another way, in my lifetime, more than two-thirds of most forms of animal life (excluding humans) have disappeared from the planet.

Shocking loss

The more I think about it, the more shocking I find it. It’s not just that there are no longer lions in Bible lands (extinct in the mid-19th century) or that the cedars of Lebanon are a tiny fragment of what they used to be, but that within living memory humanity has plundered the natural world. I don’t think plunder is too strong a word for such human-caused losses, which are highest in tropical areas, and particularly in Latin America and the Caribbean where the decline in average population abundance is a staggering 94%. It is still serious in Europe and North America, where the declines are 18% and 20% respectively. Freshwater populations have been hit the hardest, declining by an average of 83%.

This is not natural change but is almost entirely caused by human activities. The threats to wildlife come from six key sources: intensive agriculture, hunting, logging, pollution, invasive species and climate change. Land-use change is still the biggest current threat to nature, destroying or fragmenting the natural habitats of many plant and animal species on land, in freshwater, and in the seas. Climate change is a rising threat and already starting to drive loss.

In Europe, pollution is a significant concern, and the UK is one of the most nature-depleted countries in the world, a result of our early industrialisation and post-war intensification of agriculture. It’s ironic that the UK is also one of the most nature-loving countries in the world – perhaps this follows from the losses we have experienced.

If you want to know the details, look at WWF’s latest Living Planet report, which analyses the trends in every continent and presents the 2022 global Living Planet Index.

What next?

We now have a very new UK government. Pray that they wouldn’t just see their job as fixing the economy, but as restoring nature as well, and that they would lead by example at the global negotiations on biodiversity in Montreal, taking place from 7–19 December.

Meanwhile, we might feel helpless, but we can ask for change, by joining campaigns that ask our government to take action for nature; by taking action for nature in our homes and churches; and remembering that God is still in control and will give us the strength we need as we seek to serve Him through caring for creation.