What Extinction ?

4:52pm Tuesday 6th November 2007

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Humanity is poised to bequeath a ravaged planet to future generations, the United Nations warned last week. Their Global Environment Outlook report, compiled by 390 experts over two decades, concluded that humans are responsible for the worst spate of extinctions for 65 million years – which is when we lost the dinosaurs.

The report’s authors said their aim was “not to present a gloomy scenario, but an urgent call for action.” To date the severity of our environmental problems have not been matched by our policy response. But because the issues are complex and there is little political will to upset the status quo, solutions will be hard to come by. For the global community to reach its 2010 commitment to slow the loss of species, unprecedented action will need to be taken. This will include facing up to profound ethical questions about who benefits and who shoulders the burden of environmental degradation.

This UN report may have caught the headlines for a moment, but it slipped away a day later– just like someone else’s infidelity story. The announcement that we are in the midst the 6th great extinction, which threatens all aspects of human well being, barely warranted any editorial comment. Yet the Diana story and the Madelaine story run and run. Perhaps our obsessive interest in other people’s low dramas is directly related to our denial of the high drama we humans now find ourselves in.

As someone who works for a sustainable development charity, I find increasingly that our case has been proven. The European Quality Low Input Food Project published this week is just one more of a growing number of scientific reports which have a common message – that we can’t go on doing what we are doing. It concluded, what we have been arguing for ages - that organic vegetables are better for your health with 40% more beneficial compounds than those produced conventionally. The evidence is staring us in the face and still government’s fail to take decisive action.

When leaders become part of the problem rather than part of the solution there is a tendency for ordinary people tend to group together to provide the wise leadership that is lacking. Perhaps now is the time for ordinary folk to show extraordinary leadership.

Professor Shirley Ali Khan