 Global Connections
with David Suzuki
Deeds not words for a better future
Media reports about the findings of a massive new United Nations-sponsored study have been decidedly grim, but buried beneath the avalanche of bad news is a message of hope.
Four years in the making, the project was given the tongue-twisting name Millennium Ecosystem Assessment and it brought together nearly 1,400 experts from 95 countries. Their goal was to conduct a global inventory of the state of our ecosystems, quantify the effect that human activities are having on them and make suggestions for the future.
Although many people still consider nature as something that is "out there" and not relevant to our everyday lives, we are, in fact, deeply embedded in the natural world. As a result, the health of natural systems actually has a profound impact on our quality of life. Natural systems purify our air and water, stabilise our climate and soils, provide us with raw resources and much more. That's why the assessment focused especially on how ecosystem health affects human wellbeing.
As expected, the findings are sobering. According to the assessment, some 60 per cent of the planet's ecosystem services are currently being degraded by human activities. These activities include polluting the atmosphere with excess greenhouse gases, draining freshwater aquifers, overharvesting our forests and fisheries, polluting our oceans and introducing alien species to new regions. As a result, 20 per cent of the world's coral reefs have been lost, 40 per cent of the planet's rivers have been fragmented, and our climate has been disrupted.
Directly or indirectly, these problems affect us all. They affect our health, our security, our capacity to plan for the future and even our freedom.
Protecting natural areas and conserving resources is not a luxury for the rich. With six billion of us now on this planet, conservation is essential to maintain and enhance humanity's quality of life.
This is especially true for those living in the developing world. These people rely most directly on ecosystem services for survival. For them to have a bright future requires us all to reduce our resource consumption to levels that the planet can sustain. Learning to live in balance with our natural systems will directly affect our capacity to provide humanity with all that we consider necessary to lead a fulfilling life - health, freedom and justice, for example. Simply put, we must find sustainability.
The Millennium Assessment was a first step. It has created a baseline for us to measure successes and failures of future policies and actions. It has given us a snapshot of where we are and where we are headed if we do not start making changes soon. Humanity really won the lottery with this planet. It provides everything we need to survive and to thrive. But right now, like some lotto winners, we are spending as if there is no tomorrow. We are eating away at our natural capital rather than living off the interest.
The good news is that there is time to change. As the Millennium Assessment tells us, we still have enough natural capital left to give humanity a bright future for our children and grandchildren. We just have to start making changes - and quickly. Steps like the Kyoto Protocol are pointing us in the right direction, but we keep losing sight of what these processes are for. They are not political games. They are not fodder for industry and pundits to blithely and callously pick apart over details and minutiae. They are urgent, necessary measures to correct humanity's course and put us on a path to a better future.
If the Millennium Assessment tells us one thing, it's that it is not enough to talk about change, or to bicker incessantly about the tools needed. In many cases, we've already created the tools. Now we must use them.
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