Bryony is a Communications Assistant and Policy Researcher for A Rocha International.
You will likely have heard of COP26 (also known as the United Nations Climate Change Conference or UNFCCC), but have you heard of CBD COP15?
In this instance of the Jerdon’s Courser, what should we prioritize? Saving this endangered species? Or prioritizing human lives? It isn’t unusual in conservation to face difficult choices and it isn’t always possible to find win-win solutions.
David Attenborough’s latest BBC documentary, ‘Extinction: the facts’ makes shocking but deeply compulsive watching. Viewers have spoken of being so overwhelmed as to switch off and return later, and being moved to anger and sleeplessness. I wasn’t as depressed as many, and will come back to why.
Extinction Rebellion’ (XR) has been getting plenty of media coverage recently. It’s a new nonviolent, direct-action movement aiming to provoke discussion and transform the climate change agenda. In over 80 cities across 33 countries, XR has closed bridges and roads, protested outside fossil fuel companies, and seen hundreds of people arrested. When interviewed, most XR activists have spoken of their fear or eco-anxiety for the future, and their anger at the lack of action.
How do you feel about environmental problems? In the environmental movement and in natural sciences, people usually ask ‘What do you think?’, but we have reached a time when more attention should be given to emotional resilience, the ways in which we might survive psychologically in the midst of rapidly changing environmental conditions.
How do you imagine the places we do not know much about, such as the deepest trenches of the oceans? Dark, scary, full of ugly creatures with teeth made for ripping flesh? Unknown monsters lurking in a dark soup? How do you feel about these being damaged by human activity, such as deep-sea mining, changing ocean acidity and temperature, and bottom trawling?
I attended Au Sable in 1993 and started dreaming about opening a Canadian Christian environmental school. It was why I became involved in A Rocha. In 2015 several of us had the idea to open a fish hatchery and nature centre and the community got excited.
Our demand for natural resources depends on how much stuff we consume, multiplied by how many of us there are. Readers of this blog will be no strangers to the myriad ways in which we are damaging God’s creation. Human population is discussed much less; it’s a political “hot potato” which conservation organisations, development agencies and churches tend to steer clear of.
Biology professor R. Alexander Pyron argues that ‘The only reason we should conserve biodiversity is for ourselves, to create a stable future for human beings.’ At the heart of this is a belief that humanity is the sole species that matters, and possesses not only the creative technological capacity but also the moral will to solve all of its own problems. This is the neo-religious myth of human progress, rooted in neither science nor logic.
It is easy to get increasingly technical about the year in, year out, work of nature conservation. So, from time to time it is good to be reminded, in an entirely different register, of what we are dealing with, of what creation is.
