Future of Our Natural Environment

 

The new Department released a White Paper on our natural legacy in 1972 that was entitled'How would you like to Live?'

In the 45 years since he published we've lost green area, cut trees down, forfeited meadow and heathland, polluted our ground, water and air, we put species at risk and we have run the renewable sources -- from fish into soil -- where our future is determined. Farmland bird numbers are cut in half, species are devastated, bees and other pollinators compromised.

And in exactly the exact same time, across the planet, we have seen climate change endanger both delicate organic habitats and growing individual societies, we have enabled extractive and exploitative political systems to put waste to organic sources and we have put species of creatures and plants in fresh and deadly danger when gambling with the future wellbeing of the entire world.

Unless we choose the ideal environmental actions, we risk seeing more species expire, with possibly undreamt-of consequences concerning the wellbeing and equilibrium of character . We risk flooding damage to the houses where we reside and devastation into the islands others understand as their only residence. We'll observe the forward march of hills compelling people to be about the move along with the developing lack of water producing new battles and exacerbating old rivalries.

If we believe the fate of previous societies and civilisations, it's been, over and over, environmental elements which have caused collapse or catastrophe.

He has also summarized the modern ecological dangers we now confront with irresistible clarity -- climate change, the accumulation of toxins from our land, atmosphere and oceans as well as the spiralling amount of resource consumption, waste production and requirement for energy that all endanger human advancement later on.

Now, naturally, there's a massive difference from the scale and length of seventeenth century climate influences and the present artificial tragedy. Along with the technological breakthroughs which humankind has pioneered in the last few decades, the larger scientific knowledge we enjoy, the computational ability of their machines in our hands, means we are living in a radically different world into our ancestors.

But we reside on precisely the identical planet. The only one we know that may sustain life. Along with the history of humankind on this world tells us again and again, societies and civilisations are gripped by hubris, from the belief that this period differs. The cycles of the past have already been busted. And we've seen, lately and too graphically, how hubris in the financial markets, the notion among some that they'd become not only a worldwide elite but masters of this world, led to economic catastrophe.

Science, engineering, computational energy are certainly essential to changing our future, as I will continue to argue at greater length later in this language, however when we imagine they could liberate us from the necessity to protect our environment, to safeguard the species we share this world with, to protect and purify our air and our oceans, to maintain our ground fertile and make sure that we may revive our natural resources, then we'll have flocked into the hubris that has wrought such devastation previously, and in the future may confound us much worse compared to economic hardship.

Thus, we shouldn't aim simply to stop or slow down the deterioration of our surroundings. being one of the environment NGO we have to raise our aspirations so we attempt to restore character and reverse the decline. While the demand for activity in the environment has seldom been higher you can find also, now, forces at work that make me optimistic about our ability to rise to the question -- and optimistic about the role our nation can perform with.

The future could be better

Environmental organisations -- from WWF into the RSPB, the Wildlife Trusts to Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth -- like memberships in the thousands of thousands, along with the aid of more and a capacity to move hearts stronger than every other group of associations within our civic society.

And their campaigning power and idealism, while sometimes uncomfortable for those people in power, that need to stay in a world of compromise and deal-making, is crucial to ensuring that we continue to create progress in safeguarding and improving our environment.

On what from alerting us to the threat posed by compounds from our oceans and nitrogen oxide within our atmosphere, to the dangers posed to dinosaurs by poaching and cod by over-fishing, it has been ecological organisations that have driven authorities to make progress. They've shown that we could, with sufficient will, stop and reverse those trends and forces degrading the organic world and we could, if we've got that can, enhance the environment we're handing on to another generation.

Today I've been frank before when speaking about animal welfare and my own feelings for wildlife, landscape and natural beauty spring out of opinion.

But while natural attractiveness moves us deep within our spirits, an ecological policy also should be rooted, everywhere and always, in mathematics. There will, of course, always be a necessity to make judgements regarding the best approach to achieving environmental objectives, in a way which enhance instead of upend people's lifestyles. Nonetheless, it's only by adherence to scientific method, through recognising the very important importance of analyzing and re-testing hypotheses in the face of new signs and through meticulous adherence to empirical justification, we could be sure our policies would be the very best modern reply to the eternal concerns of the way we live nicely and honor the world we've inherited and has to pass enhanced to our kids.