Wildlife, biodiversity and climate
A habitable climate depends on wildlife and biodiversity, because:
- Climate is a consequence of biodiversity and biodiversity is everything that ecosystems represent to life on Earth;
- A stable climate and therefore, a habitable Earth, depends on stabilising ecosystems; and
- Animals are the only mechanism that can do that.
As wildlife declines, we are breaking down biodiversity structure and losing energy (in the form of carbon) out of food chains and into the atmosphere and ocean. This way, climate and our food security are inextricably linked. We’re not only stripping soils of the material needed to feed us, we’re also introducing chaotic free energy into our atmosphere and causing huge fluctuations in the weather. The latter makes it harder for us to know when, where and how to feed ourselves.
Climate change: fossil fuels v. wildlife
Climate change has always been the symptom of biodiversity loss … that’s to say, the breakdown of the complex connectivity between lifeforms that allows Earth to flex in response to changing conditions.
Only recently have we created artificial climate change by mining carbon buried deep underground by animals millions of years ago. The animals that did that are no longer around and today’s animals, that would be busy moderating modern-day carbon, have populations that are heavily depleted.
We cannot engineer our way out of this crisis. We can only rebuild ecosystems rich in a diversity of animal life.
Latest posts about why the oceans are important
The relationship between animals, the climate and ecosystems has long been known. This week French scientists (Sauterey, Charnay et al. 2022) said that microbial life on Mars may have created an ice age and wiped itself out. Life on Mars didn’t make it to the animal stage though. On Earth, animals (not plants) became the reason ecosystems could exist. It was the rise of animal life that ultimately stabilised Earth’s environment which eventually led to humans.
‘NASA has reported as realistic the prospect of eventually terraforming Mars using a giant magnetosphere to deflect solar radiation, creating a thicker atmosphere and liquid surface water within a lifetime.271 Even if this is plausible, the climate chaos and absence of sustainable ecosystems and animal life for millions of years would make it virtually impossible to engineer the kind of stability needed to support an economically healthy human population’.
‘Wildlife in the Balance’ (2022)
It takes a family of animals interacting to create the ‘household’ that is a habitable planet. Humans can’t do this alone. Neither can any group of animals, without all the others.
Animals need each other
The fact that animals collectively need each other to survive is not yet widely acknowledged but it is the key to our own survival. Mars has never been and will never be habitable.
‘I saw a cold, dark, black emptiness. It was unlike any blackness you can see or feel on Earth. It was deep, enveloping, all-encompassing. I turned back toward the light of home. I could see the curvature of Earth, the beige of the desert, the white of the clouds and the blue of the sky. It was life. Everything I had thought was wrong … Everything I had expected to see was wrong.’
William Shatner reflects on his journey to the edge of space in his new book, “Boldly Go: Reflections on a Life of Awe and Wonder – from Variety Magazine.
The only habitable planet is Earth and that’s because it is full of wildlife.
This is the subject I cover in ‘Wildlife in the Balance’. This untold story needs to be known before we can create the change in human values required to safeguard our own future on Earth.
