The Ark has been Depleted

You have heard of the Tassie Devil, of course. He's a noisy little bugger but quite endearing to watch, if you can get the chance. Heavy too, despite being no bigger than a medium sized cat.  Jaws like a vice. If he gets you it would take a hydraulic jack to prize him off you. Or a feather tickling in his ear. They are dying out, unfortunately. When I arrived in Tasmania they were everywhere: now only in heavily protected spots or zoos and very few. I am not the cause of their drastic reduction. 

Their numbers have not been reduced by Owls or Owl's feathers either. They have a cancer which they infect one another with, through all the fighting and biting they do. 

So if we should we need a new Ark, on account of the impending destruction of nature by men's (not women's, of course) wicked exploitation of the Environment, there will be plenty of room. Perhaps a smaller Ark, or a more well appointed one? Because it ain't just the Tassie Devil but apparantly tens of thousands if not millions of other critters that are dying out. 

And its all your fault.

The World Wide Fund for Nature folk have told us and told us, so I am told. Not that I believe a word of it. They rely on the taxpayer, sundry coercive 'campaigns' and sundry 'public' appeals - as well as having some very odd 'products' to sell which appeal to the gullible - to get the monies to pay all the bigwigs who count earwigs, and there is now't like the tried and tested way of scare, blame and demand.

So I take what they say with a heap of skepticism. As I did this evening. I still poured a drink for Rob Lyons who is science and technology director at the Academy of Ideas, and who told us of the latest WWF scare.

Have we really wiped out half of all animals?

Since 1998, WWF (the Worldwide Fund for Nature) has been producing the Living Planet Report, an assessment of the changing state of animal populations (specifically, vertebrates).

WWF says about the latest edition, featuring its Living Planet Index (LPI): ‘The main statistic from the report is the global LPI, which shows a 60 per cent decline between 1970 and 2014. 

https://www.spiked-online.com/2018/11/01/have-we-really-wiped-out-half-of-all-animals/ 

This means that, on average, animal populations are well over half the size they were in 1970.’

Scary stuff. 

Humanity has been on a rampage, clearly. 

As WWF boss Marco Lambertini says in his foreword to the report: ‘The astonishing decline in wildlife populations shown by the latest Living Planet Index – a 60 per cent fall in just over 40 years – is a grim reminder and perhaps the ultimate indicator of the pressure we exert on the planet.’

According to Lambertini, this is not just about saving fluffy animals. 

Apparently, the future of humanity itself is at stake:

"The nature conservation agenda is not only about securing the future of tigers, pandas, whales and all the amazing diversity of life we love and cherish on Earth. It’s bigger than that. 

Our day-to-day life, health and livelihoods depend on a healthy planet. There cannot be a healthy, happy and prosperous future for people on a planet with a destabilised climate, depleted oceans and rivers, degraded land and empty forests, all stripped of biodiversity, the web of life that sustains us all."

This is quite the litany of misery. 

I pondered and pulled a dozen pints for the customers who had looked up with alarm. 

So what should we be doing about it? Marco, helpfully, has the answer: 

"In the next years, we need to urgently transition to a net carbon-neutral society and halt and reverse nature loss – through green finance and shifting to clean energy and environmentally friendly food-production. In addition, we must preserve and restore enough land and ocean in a natural state to sustain all life."

That's Steam !!

Of course ! It's 'Carbon'.  

We have just 10 years !

Where have I heard this before?

Er... all our fauna, including human beings, are carbon-based life-forms. And he wants a carbon-neutral state?

 (Preferably a 'One World' State, too)

And it is carbon dioxide that he should be talking about. That's what all his ilk bang on about. Does he know the difference? 

And talking of that 'reversing nature-loss' bizzo, has he not seen what CO2 is actually doing? Even with the miniscule additions that human beings produce?

Now, it seems pretty obvious that as the human population has expanded, the space for other living beings is restricted. If we cut down rainforest, a rich environment of animals and plants, then the numbers of those animals and plants will fall. If we trawl the oceans for fish and other sea creatures, the numbers, again, will fall. 

But the implication that we have lost 60 per cent of all the world’s vertebrates seems way too much.

Luckily, WWF thinks so, too: 

"Does this mean we have lost 60 per cent of animals? Well, luckily, no!"

He's not very clear, this Marco fellow. 

Unfortunately, I’m really not sure what the hell this 60 per cent figure means, in that case. For example, while explaining the trends, WWF says: 

"In fact, the number of species that show positive and negative trends within the LPI data are more or less equal.’"

So some populations of animals are doing better and roughly the same amount are doing worse. 

Now I’m really confused. 

Fish and amphibian numbers seem to be falling rather a lot. Birds and mammals less so. It really doesn’t sound like we’ve only got 40 per cent of the creatures left.

Go back to the old Ark dimensions fellows. 

What is actually being measured? The latest Living Planet Index is based on time-series data for 16,704 populations of 4,005 species of mammal, bird, reptile, amphibian and fish from around the globe. But that, according to WWF, is ‘only 6.4 per cent of the estimated 62,839 vertebrate species that have been described globally’, and it surely doesn’t cover all the populations of those species that are included.

Why would anyone measure the population of a specific group of animals, fish, bird, etc? Sometimes it may be for commercial reasons, like wanting to know how many fish are available for your trawler fleet. But it might very well be to do with the fact that you already have reason to believe that the particular species is under threat. 

Those who do all the counting are a protected species too and if the fauna populations drop, the fauna-counters too will become redundant. 

There is also the question of which populations are easiest to monitor. Such as the ones that have the most direct relationships with humanity and might be most directly affected by human encroachment. 

Finally, counting animals is pretty damn difficult, given they keep walking, slithering, flying or swimming around. 

Just how accurate are these numbers?

Taking a step back, the overall implication of WWF’s report is that we should potentially reduce human welfare – by having less economic development – in order that we can protect a very particular kind of newt or specific species of fish. Ones you have never heard of, and which are not even photogenic enough to make it into a David Attenborough documentary. 

I think that is a tough sell, to be honest.

Yes, it is true that maintaining biodiversity could allow us to uncover naturally occurring chemicals that might one day become a useful drug, say. But genuine extinctions in the wild are surprisingly rare and we can easily maintain ‘libraries’ of plants and seeds, just in case. 

There are so many species that losing a few surely won’t lead to some existential crisis. Is this report justification for a fundamental reordering of our economies and societies? 

Of course it isn’t.

This is not an invitation to vandalise the natural world. I may never see an African elephant in the flesh, but I suspect it is probably a good thing that they survive in the wild. 

But one thing I would love to see die out is eco-scaremongering from the likes of WWF.

Get yours from WWF. 

I wonder if Owl Feathers can ward off Greenies? UN rats? 

Meanwhile, enjoy the animals you can see.

From my reading of history (a lot of which I have lived through) it seems the best husbander of the natural resources, the flora and the fauna, are the few Western, Capitalist Countries and their civilised folk, that the WWF and fellow blamers want to hamper and cause to go extinct. 

Look after your place in the world.

Wipe the table when you've finished.

Drink up and return your glass.

Pax