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INTO THE EREMOZOIC

~ perspectives on the biodiversity crisis

INTO  THE  EREMOZOIC

Category Archives: Context

Extinction explored at the Natural History Museum

03 Sunday Mar 2013

Posted by Into the Eremozoic in Context, Culture, Europe

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Art, Mass extinction, Museums, UK

London’s famous Natural History Museum is currently running a major temporary exhibition on the subject of extinction.  Extinction – Not the End of the World opened in February, and aims to explore issues around biotic extinctions; the scope of the exhibition includes the five previous mass extinction events which have punctuated the evolution of life on Earth, and the current sixth mass extinction, precipitated by human influence.

I was discouraged by the irony of UK environment minister, climate sceptic and general anti-environmentalist Owen Paterson (who has just approved the controversial UK badger cull) speaking at the exhibition launch.  Nonetheless, I’m looking forward to visiting the exhibition.  It’s good to see high-profile debate and information about extinction issues, and I’m interested to see how this important subject is presented by the museum.

I’ll be writing more about the exhibition once I’ve actually seen it.  Meanwhile, I recommend the short animation, Early Birds by Suki Best, which reflects on the beauty of birdsong and the decline in bird populations, and which features in the exhibition.  It can be watched here.

20 years of the CBD

29 Saturday Dec 2012

Posted by Into the Eremozoic in Americas, Analysis, Context

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

Barack Obama, CBD, New species, Taxonomy, USA

Today, Saturday 29th December, is the 20th anniversary of the coming into force of the United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD).  This anniversary is not generally commemorated, as the UN prefer to promote International Day for Biodiversity on 22 May instead each year.  Nonetheless, it’s instructive to use today to remember that the international diplomatic process has been in train for two decades, and to consider its effectiveness.

The 20 years of the Convention has seen biodiversity depletion continue unabated, and although there have been numerous individual success stories and some signs of hope, the general trend remains the same : a steady slide towards an Eremozoic future.  Those binding decisions which have been agreed by the Convention conferences have been disappointing in scope, and meaningful global agreements which might seriously tackle the biodiversity crisis have been elusive.  From that point of view, the CBD has failed.

In its favour, the Convention has been an important focus of international awareness, and does at least put the issue of biodiversity conservation on the diplomatic agenda – the intention is there, in black-and-white, in the text of the Convention.  Furthermore, the CBD has spawned various targets which set out measurable goals for “biodiversity indicators“, although I don’t see most of them being met; as biodiversity continues to be ravaged, it’s arguably a good thing to have the UN admitting, in terms of definite criteria, that it’s happening, and that governments are incapable of implementing their own plans to tackle it.  At least that would reinforce the urgency of the problem, and the scale of change required.

The frustration remains that the convoluted process of conferences, protocols, targets and so on are, in the main, failing to do the job.  There is a strong impression that, although the CBD is legally binding, it is not taken as seriously as certain other UN Conventions when it comes to compliance.  There is also the notable omission of the USA on the list of ratifying nations, which otherwise includes nearly every territory on earth.  It says something about how seriously the most powerful country on the planet takes the CBD process when it consistently refuses to ratify and implement it.

US President Barack Obama has a reputation for being relatively sympathetic to environmental concerns – not difficult considering his predecessors!  He has been honoured by having several new species named after him during 2012, including a darter fish, Etheostoma obama, a californian trapdoor spider, Aptostichus barackobamai, and an extinct lizard, Obamadon gracilis (which didn’t survive the previous mass extinction 65million years ago); he’s also previously had a lichen, Caloplaca obamae, named after him.

These species will, naturally, be unaware of their link to the most powerful politician on earth (and Obamadon gracilis, of course, is now, forever unaware of anything).  The taxonomists who chose the names surely did so, at least in part, with the intention of attracting attention and awareness of their new discoveries (not least from the US political establishment itself).  We don’t know how these newly discovered “Obama species” will fare over the next 20 years of the CBD; but, in common with the less-glamorously named majority of species, they’re likely to need all the good fortune they can get.  A more meaningful badge of conservation committment for Obama than these cute namings would be to prioritise persuading the US Senate and Congress to ratify the CBD, and then, crucially, to start to make that mean something.

Bankers take their cut – from rainforests

14 Wednesday Nov 2012

Posted by Into the Eremozoic in Asia, Context, News

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Campaigns, Forests, Greenwash, Habitat loss, HSBC, Sarawak, WWF

Banking giant HSBC have been getting bad press recently, with allegations of provision of bank services to criminals in the tax haven of Jersey under scrutiny.  The scandal of the bank’s involvement in permitting extensive money laundering in the USA also continues.  Another example of HSBC’s impressive grubbiness has received much less media attention, but shows a similar relaxed ethical attitude – the bank has been investing in rainforest destruction in the Malaysian territory of Sarawak, on the world’s third largest island of Borneo.


A report by campaign group Global Witness claims HSBC has provided financial services to companies linked to large-scale deforestation and “widely suspected of systematic bribery and corruption”, earning some $130 million in the process.  Four companies in particular – Shin Yang, Sarawak Oil Palms, WTK and Ta Ann – are using HSBC investment to finance clearance of biodiverse forest in Sarawak.  Several of the companies implicated have links to the family of the corrupt First Minister Abdul Taib Mahmud.

Borneo is one of the most important areas for tropical forest in the world, but its ancient forests have taken a brutal battering over the last few decades.  Nowhere is this more obvious than in the Sarawak region of the island.  The Malaysian state has only 0.5% of the world’s forest area, but exports nearly half the world’s tropical plywood, and, incredibly, more tropical timber logs than all Latin American and African countries combined.  This onslaught has predictably dire consequences for both biodiversity and the quality of life of indigenous people.

Trashed forests and logging roads in Sarawak, intact forest over the border in Brunei…..

HSBC’s involvement is significant beyond the actual money they supply to the logging mafia; their backing gives dodgy firms an undeserved legitimacy that comes in very handy in attracting other business and investment. Global Witness estimate that the Sarawak firms have expanded to pursue similar operations in a dozen other countries.

HSBC spend a lot of time in cultivating a responsible image, for example co-opting conservation giant WWF into helping present a green face to the world.  Of course, the bank hopes we’ll take this at face value and won’t ask too many awkward questions about what they do with their (our?) money – presumably WWF also share this hope, despite, ironically, having explicitly criticised Ta Ann’s corrupt practices last year.  However, the recent wave of scandals assailing HSBC mean this image is wearing extremely thin, and their involvement in the devastation of Sarawak speaks more truth about the bank than their green rhetoric will ever reveal.  There’s also a lesson here about the sort of company to which WWF are happy to lend their prestigious panda; if HSBC get to use it, what value as a conservation icon does it really have?

How much Biodiversity will $12bn buy us?

28 Sunday Oct 2012

Posted by Into the Eremozoic in Analysis, Context, News

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CBD

Last week the eleventh meeting of the Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) was held in Hyderabad, India.  The CBD is the prime international diplomatic instrument by which strategies to protect global biodiversity are negotiated.  It is, therefore, an important indicator of humanity’s collective response to tackling the biodiversity crisis.

At the Hyderabad conference, important policy outcomes included greater emphasis on marine biodiversity, but the prime achievement was an agreement for developed countries to double the global budget for biodiversity conservation, to an estimated $12bn by 2015.

This doubled budget sounds impressive, and $12bn sounds like a great deal of money.  But what does $12bn buy these days? It’s approximately equal to :

  • 126 fighter jets, bought by the Indian military from Dassault of France in Jan 2012
  • Total pay and bonuses paid by US investment bank Goldman Sachs in 2011
  • The net worth of Russian businessman Roman Abramovich, as of March 2012
  • The 2011 GDP of the British Channel Islands
  • The profit of technology company Apple for the second quarter of 2012
  • The estimated 2012 global total consumer spend on online multiplayer computer games
  • A little less than the total cost of the 2012 London Olympics

In other words, the impressive-sounding doubling of funds for biodiversity conservation turns out to be pocket money on the global financial scale.

So, what might be a more satisfactory figure? A recent report in the journal Science estimated that the total annual cost of improving the conservation status of threatened species and effectively managing key habitats worldwide is an estimated $76bn per year, significantly greater than the $12bn promised by the Hyderabad conference.  This $76bn is still a minor sum in the scheme of things – as the report’s lead author points out, it is less than 20% of annual global consumer spending on soft drinks.  To make another comparison, $76bn is less than half-a-percent of the GDP of the world’s richest nation, the USA (whose attitude to this matter is reflected by its status as one of very few countries to fail to ratify the CBD).

It’s worth noting that even the $76bn figure proposed only addresses the most endangered species as listed by the IUCN, and the conservation of key habitats – in other words, it’s fire-fighting, not addressing the roots of the crisis.  When the global diplomatic process can only agree such relatively small sums to attempt to stem the tide of the sixth mass extinction, it seems our species has got its budget priorities very badly wrong.

Image

Why “Into the Eremozoic”?

18 Thursday Oct 2012

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E.O.Wilson, Mass extinction

This blog takes its name from a word coined by the biologist E.O.Wilson, who suggested “Eremozoic” as a suitable term for the next era of the Earth’s development.  Scientists have divided the immense timescale over which living organisms have evolved into three eras – the Paleozoic, (“ancient life”), the Mesozoic (“middle life”), and the Cenozoic (“new life”).  It is this last era in which we are now live, a period characterized by a great increase in biological complexity and diversity.

There have been a number of mass extinctions throughout geological time, the fifth having ended the Mesozoic age around 65million years ago.  Most biologists agree that we are currently in the throes of a sixth mass extinction event, this time uniquely due to the activities of a single organism – Homo sapiens.  If this is indeed true, it is reasonable to suggest that the Cenozoic era is drawing to a close, and we are entering a new era for life on earth, fittingly called the Eremozoic (“lonely life”).

The human hammer having fallen, the sixth mass extinction has begun. This spasm of permanent loss is expected, if it is not abated, to reach the end-of-Mesozoic level by the end of the century. We will then enter what poets and scientists alike may choose to call the Eremozoic Era — The Age of Loneliness. E.O.Wilson, “The Creation : an appeal to save life on Earth”, 2006.

This blog will aim to consider the crises facing biodiversity – and therefore, inseparably, humanity – as we stand on the brink of the “age of loneliness”.

Posted by Into the Eremozoic | Filed under Context, Quotes

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Always think of the universe as one living organism, with a single substance and a single soul; and observe how all things are submitted to the single perceptivity of this one whole, all are moved by its single impulse, and all play their part in the causation of every event. Remark the intricacy of the skein, the complexity of the web.

Marcus Aurelius, first century CE

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