Once upon a time concern about nature was for people who picked up binoculars. Not any more, I hope. The latest State of Nature Report makes the issue clear:
We are heavily impacting out environment and the consequences are not beneficial.
Unless we now take biodiversity very seriously we, yet again, threaten life on earth. The lack of awareness about the fact that we live within an ecosystem on which we are utterly dependent is staggering, and as a result we have for far too long been ignoring that reality.
Protecting biodiversity is as much a part of the Green New Deal as tackling carbon is.
Please join the groups supporting biodiversity.
Piucking up binoculars is good too: I do, quite often.
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Protecting biodiversity is as much a part of the Green New Deal as tackling carbon is.
This is utterly scary. The original Green New Deal report didn’t mention biodiversity. Either two things are happening – you know this and care nothing for tackling carbon , or you are rewriting history. It’s Stalinism.
It’s obvious it’s the second frankly. And the original Green New Deal economists lacking in ethnic diversity as they did didn’t care to write anything about biodiversity.
Oh come on…
The Green New Deal was written by a group of unpaid friends and focussed on the issues we thought highest priority at the time
I don’t recruit my friends
And at the time biodiversity was not as high on the list
Your claims are just abuse
“Your claims are just abuse”
…and very, very silly.
Biodiversity is not only vital but a matter of life or death to our planet. It’s great that people love dolphins; beavers and hares but it’s the interconnections between all living things that matters the most. Education about biodiversity needs to be increased and government needs to properly fund subsidies to agriculture and fisheries to halt the terrible declines in our natural habitats that we see at present.
As things are now, a major percentage of Britain’s agricultural acreage is being mined, not farmed. We’ve been told that there only about 60 years fertility in the soils, and the agricultural vandals who own the majority of the better-quality lands are making even those 60 years a dubious timeline.
George Monbiot is correct – the British Isles need to be re-wilded, starting with the National Parks, continuing with Areas of Outstanding Natural Beauty, and proceeding from there through the poorer-quality arable land. The most fertile lands can remain agricultural; but they would need to have strict controls on fertilisers, which have effects far away from the soils into which they’re ploughed and harrowed; also hedgerows must be restored and properly maintained to mitigate the effects of wind erosion.
Big agri-businesses look only to their shareholders’ dividends; the land, I believe, needs to be returned to people who will farm it conservatively to allow sufficient production of essential crops without further degrading the soils. And they are being rapidly degraded; most of the best-quality land’s fertility has been stripped out so irrevocably that those lands no longer qualify as highest quality, when we use the old standards pioneered by L. Dudley-Stamps’ mapping of all British agricultural land during the 1930s. Prairie-farming should be abandoned, if there is to be a viable longer-term future for British agriculture.
There would, of course, be objections from the powerful agri-business lobby and their toadies in the Press and in Parliament; that goes without saying.
We need a forward-looking Government implementing the Green New Deal. Unfortunately, at the moment, it seems unlikely that any major political party would be prepared to risk either proposing or implementing the necessary legislation – and, alas! we have very little time before the effects of climate change become so detrimental that much of the lower-quality land will become unusable for the kind of intensive cropping at present in fashion, followed, in rapid succession, by the higher quality lands.
Who is going to be brave enough to challenge the present dominion of the global conglomerates that have already caused so much damage, in agriculture as well as elsewhere in the economy?