By Harrison Jordan.
The human-nature dualism is one under serious threat as our desire to protect wildlife and habitats is increasingly in conflict with a societal need to develop and grow. The World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) Living Planet Report 2018, released last month, provides a stark warning that this level of consumption is unsustainable and damaging to natural systems all over the planet.
The exponential growth of the human population over the past two millennia has resulted in a significant increase in our consumption of scarce and finite natural resources at the expense of ecological systems. The human-nature dualism is one under serious threat as our desire to protect wildlife and habitats is increasingly in conflict with a societal need to develop and grow. The World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) Living Planet Report 2018, released last month, provides a stark warning that this level of consumption is unsustainable and damaging to natural systems all over the planet. This blog entry provides an explicit evaluation of the destructive nature of growing human consumption on global ecosystems.
Many scholars have pointed to the harmful impact of human development on ecosystems around the world, suggesting no area is unaffected by human influence. Perhaps the best example is the discovery of plastic in the deepest part of our oceans, the Mariana Trench. Purely noting that we are degrading natural ecosystems is not sufficient. First, we need to explore why the continued exploitation of natural resources in the endeavour for socioeconomic development is important.
Nature provides all the essential building blocks in human society, proving to be of vital importance in our health, wealth, food and security. The Living Planet Report 2018 suggests all economic activity ultimately depends on services provided by nature, estimated to be worth around US$125 trillion a year. This provides a clear indication that nature is not just something we can admire or enjoy purely for its aesthetics, it is much more important. Our dependence on nature, and the myriad of ways in which human activity influences the environment has led to a period of unprecedented planetary change, called the Anthropocene. This reliance has led to mass overexploitation in recent decades of natural resources, notably wood, oil and water as our demand for energy increases. Figure 1 below illustrates the global use of natural resources.
Who Consumes?
What this illustration shows is the vast consumption of natural resources by largely ‘developed’ or ‘western’ economies such as the United States, Canada and Russia. However, what it also displays is the regions where most natural resources are found, i.e. South America and Sub-Saharan Africa, have relatively low consumption habits. While this overexploitation of the ‘Global South’ by the ‘Global North’ is well publicised in academia, presenting numerous issues to human society such as conflict (Bannon and Collier, 2003), inequality (Leamer et al., 1999) and climate change (Stern, 2008), research on the impact of overconsumption on wildlife is not so prevalent. Despite this, we have now reached a stage where we are more aware than ever of our impact on the planet. Rather than continuing down this same path, we are starting to think about the organisms we share this earth with and what we are doing to them. This trend can largely be explained by the pervasiveness of mass media.
"We have now reached a stage where we are more aware than ever of our impact on the planet. Rather than continuing down this same path, we are starting to think about the organisms we share this earth with and what we are doing to them."
The Role of Mass Media
Recent documentary series such as ‘Blue Planet II’ and ‘Planet Earth II’ have helped to raise awareness of the impact of human consumption on wildlife and have successfully mobilised the public to participate in beach cleans, cut single use plastic out of their lives and recycle more effectively. Furthermore, it has prompted national governments and Transnational corporations (TNCs) to tackle pollution at a much larger scale through policies such as the 5p tax on single-use plastic bags in the UK, or the banning of them altogether in Kenya. More than seven billion single-use plastic bags were handed out to customers by seven main supermarkets in the year before the charge, but this figure dropped drastically to slightly more than 500 million in the first six months after the charge was introduced in 2015, according to the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra). The video below from the BBC provides a short illustration of this mobilisation.
Another serious contemporary environmental issue drawing increasing public, political and media attention is deforestation. Pinning deforestation down to an agreed upon figure is a difficult task, but most experts agree that we are losing upwards of 80,000 acres of tropical rainforest daily. Tropical rainforests are incredibly rich ecosystems that play a key role in the basic functioning of the planet. They help maintain the climate by regulating atmospheric gases and by stabilizing rainfall. Without these forests, human life would not exist and yet we seem to be pillaging them at an alarming rate. While there is a concentration on how deforestation will impact society in years to come through climate change, the threat to wildlife is much more pressing. National Geographic explains that roughly eighty percent of earth’s land animals and plants live in forests, and many cannot survive the deforestation that destroys their homes. The Living Planet Report 2018 suggests that South and Central America suffered the most dramatic decline in vertebrate populations, largely due to deforestation - an 89 percent loss compared with 1970. The video below from National Geographic highlights the serious consequences of continued deforestation.
Conclusion
What this blog entry has highlighted is that overconsumption of natural resources as a result of rapid population growth in recent decades is producing adverse effects not only on human society, but on the rich, diverse nature ecosystems that we find around the world. Wildlife is disappearing at an alarming rate, unprecedented other than in times of mass extinction events, and we are to blame. While impacts on wildlife due to human consumption is a bourgeoning topic in both academia and mass media, more must be done at a political level to halt this degradation and to break down the human-nature dichotomy that is prevailing in contemporary discourse.
By Harrison Jordan
Harrison is from England. He is a postgraduate student studying an MA in Poverty and Development at the Institute of Development Studies (IDS). His background is in geography, but he has maintained an interest in wildlife since swimming with sea turtles in Barbados in 2012 while on a cricket tour.