And he writes more eloquently about ecological devastation than I possibly could in the second part of his weekly tri-partite diary entry for New York:
For my own part, I’m haunted all the time by the knowledge of what my lifetime will have witnessed. Humans are committing countless species to death; we are destroying the life of our oceans and skies; we are changing the planet’s ecosystem more quickly than at any time since the asteroids wiped out the dinosaurs. From the perspective of life itself, we are conducting a holocaust of the natural world. How is the knowledge of this not traumatizing?
Same here.
A new report from the Institute for Public Policy Research notes, according to the BBC, that “since 1950, the number of floods across the world has increased by 15 times, extreme temperature events by 20 times, and wildfires seven-fold.” Last week, research emerged showing that the insect biomass is declining by 2.5 percent a year, which means that we may wipe out the entire insect population within a century — and lose a quarter of it in the next ten years. This amounts to what Jill Kieldash describes as the “actual structural and functional collapse of the natural systems which have supported life on Earth for the last 400 million years.”
This is what ecologists and environmentalists have been living with for decades. American “conservatives,” who these days seem to be anything but, don’t seem to comprehend how gut-wrenching this can be.
Andrew doesn’t seem to connect the dots to get to over-population, but it’s probably percolating and will come spilling out, by and by.
