Last month's UN climate summit highlighted how global carbon emissions continue rising, despite ever clearer evidence of the grave threats posed by climate change. This week the World Wildlife Fund reported that global animal species populations have fallen by 52 per cent between 1970 and 2010, far faster than previous studies suggested, despite repeated international commitments to combat biodiversity loss.
The two issues are closely related: climate change is listed by the WWF as a key cause of such population declines, along with habitat destruction and unsustainable fishing and hunting. There could hardly be a more poignant indicator of how severely we are degrading our global home than this dramatic collapse in the numbers of our fellow creatures. The multiple feedback signals we are now receiving from our environment should be spurring us to a radical rethink of our relationship to the Earth, to its other inhabitants, and to the ecosystems that sustain us all.
A species like ours, which characterises itself as "sapiens", ought to be able to respond rapidly and effectively to such unmistakable warnings. Yet our consumerist cultures remain fixated on the chimera of eternal growth. Common sense tells us that our economies are ultimately entirely dependent on the limited natural capital the Earth contains, and on the ecosystem goods and services that flow from that capital.
Basic economic prudence counsels households to conserve their capital and live off the interest it produces, but the human family appears intent on spending down its natural resources to the last fish and the last tree. We have recently spent trillions restoring our banking systems. Surely the restoration of a healthy and productive environment, without which our very survival is endangered, is worth at least a similar investment? We have the resources, and the knowledge, to reverse much of the damage done but very little time left in which to do so.