Nature Projects
View the Nature Projects we document along the course of our travels from the links on the left. To browse through a summary of projects, click the project group (eg. Forest & Bird or New Zealand).
If you have a project you wish to tell us about, please send us an email from the Contact Us page. We would be happy to add your project to our database.
Based on the Future of Life by Edward o. Wilson
The Natural World in the year 2009 is everywhere
dissapearing before our eyes - cut to pieces, mowed down,
plowed under, gobbled up, replaced by human artifacts. More than six billion people fill the world.
The great majority are very poor; nearly one billion exist on the edge of starvation. All are struggling to raise the quality of their lives any way they can. That unfortunately includes the conversion of the surviving remnants of the natural environment. Half of the great tropical forests have been cleared. The last frontiers of the world are effectively gone. Species of plants and animals are dissapearing a hundred or more times faster than before the coming of humanity, and as many as half may have gone by the end of this century. An Armageddon is approaching at the beginning of the third millennium. But it is not the cosmic war and fiery collapse of the planet foretold in sacred scripture. It is the wreckage of the planet by an exuberantly plentiful and ingenious humanity.
The race is now on between the technoscientific forces that are destroying the living environment and those that can be harnessed to save it. We are inside a bottleneck of overpopulation and wasteful consumption. If the race is won, humanity can emerge in far better condition than when it entered, and with most of the diversity of life still intact.
The situation is desperate - but there are encouraging signs that the race can be won. Population growth has slowed, and, if the present trajectory holds, is likely to peak between eight and ten billion people by century’s end. That many people, experts tell us, can be accommodated with a decent standard of living, but just barely: the amount of arable land and water available per person, globally, is already declining. In solving the problem, other experts tell us, it should also be possible to shelter most of the vulnerable plant and animal species.
In order to pass through the bottleneck, a global land ethic is urgently needed. Not just any land ethic that might happen to enjoy agreeable sentiment, but one based on the best understanding of ourselves and the world around us that science and technology can provide.
Surely the rest of life matters. Surely our stewardship is its only hope. We will be wise to listen to the heart, then act with rational intention and all the tools we can gather and bring to bear.
(Based on the Prologue in “The future of life by Edward o. Wilson, 2002, Knopf, Borzoin Books)