To my huge distress, I have been noticing the lack of house martins and swallows this year. Last year, I saw my first on the Isle of Iona, on 28th March. Iona is more than 600 miles north of where I live, in gentle temperate surroundings, where now, end of the first week in May, I have seen, in the immediate locality, just three swallows where normally I’d expect to see around 15 or 16. I still haven’t seen a single house martin, and they normally arrive earlier.
I tell myself the hirundines are all just late; but we know there’s drought and insect loss (and pesticides) affecting watering holes and feeding places in mainland Europe, Spain and France, on their long journey from Africa.
I’m heartbroken at this.
We really can’t keep ignoring species loss – as big a problem for the rest of the natural world as climate change – and of course the two are inexorably linked.
And although it’s way past time we focused only on our human needs – it’s anthropocentrism that’s caused all this in the first place, in my view, and my own focus now is on shifting to an ecocentric approach in my life and my work – there is still the truth that we actually depend on everything else in the ecosystem, from pollinating insects to trees, and everything in the earth and water zones between or adjoining. We live in an utterly interconnected and interdependent web of being.
Today, May 7th 2019, The Guardian’s leading articles, based on the very recent UN’s Global Assessment Report (‘…the most thorough planetary health check ever undertaken’) are sobering, if not ‘new’ news.
Decline in global biomass of wild mammals is 82% in fewer than 50 years (or at least, that’s my understanding from the graph).
In terms of our diet, there has been change, driven by young people mainly, over the last few years: it’s much more mainstream now to eat a vegan diet; but a great many people still don’t want to look at this problem, and its effects:
Meat & dairy production accounts for 83% of farmland; 58% of greenhouse gas emissions; 57% of water pollution; 56% of air pollution; 33% of freshwater extraction; and ironically provides only 35% of our protein (2nd-hand at that, so to speak), and 18% of our calories.
57billiondotorg 