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Humanity has wiped out 60% of animal populations since 1970, report finds.
Humanity has wiped out 60% of mammals, birds, fish and reptiles since 1970, leading the world's foremost experts to warn that the annihilation of wildlife is now an emergency that threatens civilisation.
The new estimate of the massacre of wildlife is made in a major report produced by WWF and involving 59 scientists from across the globe. It finds that the vast and growing consumption of food and resources by the global population is destroying the web of life, billions of years in the making, upon which human society ultimately depends for clean air, water and everything else.
"We are sleepwalking towards the edge of a cliff" said Mike Barrett, executive director of science and conservation at WWF. "If there was a 60% decline in the human population, that would be equivalent to emptying North America, South America, Africa, Europe, China and Oceania. That is the scale of what we have done."
"This is far more than just being about losing the wonders of nature, desperately sad though that is," he said. "This is actually now jeopardising the future of people. Nature is not a 'nice to have' – it is our life-support system."
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 01 2018, @02:51AM
> 3) a natural space, like we used to own 20 acres of until recently, basically fallow land along a riverbank, not "harvested" for 100+ years,
Sorry to hear you lost your wilderness property. I've still got the 110 acres that I mostly inherited (I helped buy the last of three parcels around 1980). The top third is marginal farmland in the NE USA, can't get any of the local farmers to take the hay for free. Rest is as you describe, along a small but beautiful creek. A stretch of walking trail has an easement to use one edge that we rarely get to. Since I have no direct heirs, my will specifies that the whole property goes to the trail association. In the meantime I pay the taxes, which aren't too bad, in exchange for having a relatively unspoiled place to go.