The Climate Crisis Is A Nature Crisis
There is a remarkable ignorance in the world about the importance of nature in overcoming the global crisis.
Rather than the “climate crisis” we ought to be calling it all the “nature crisis”, because destroying our natural home is what we’re doing. The climate is just one part of our natural home.
There’s a beautiful word for missing one’s own planet, and I’ve forgotten what it is, but I’m feeling it more every day.
It’s disastrous that so many misunderstand that anything that supports truly wild nature stores carbon and vice versa. Teaching this is increasingly becoming the centre of my work.
Still now, many of the world’s supposedly educated, powerful people seem to think that we can focus entirely on reducing CO2 levels, without considering nature. History will prove these people wrong.
For now though, this means that absurd projects will steam ahead, like land being “cleared” (of thriving, natural wilderness) to plant millions of the same tree over and over again, because someone somewhere calculated that this particularly tree stores carbon well.
But what about the carbon in the soil? What about the carbon in the fungi? What about the carbon in the insects, mammals, birds and amphibians that make their homes there? What about the carbon in the whole ecosystem?
What about the carbon reduction of humans actually enjoying their wild, local areas, rather than going on increasingly extreme holidays, to chase down the rapidly retreating wilderness?
I recently discovered that there’s rainforest still here in the UK, and I’m going to move house to live next to it, so that I can enjoy it and help to protect it.
Maybe I should try to move to the Amazon to enjoy and protect that one day too…
