What is nature worth?

Plants, animals, even entire ecosystems are disappearing from the Earth. So what? In "What Is Nature Worth?", the University of Minnesota's Institute on the Environment offers a three-minute look at what biodiversity loss is really costing us -- and what we can do about it.


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The Girl Who Silenced The World For 5 Minutes

 
The 20-year-old video predated YouTube, yet it has since gone viral, with 20 million views.

Its picture is grainy but the words are crystal clear.

“We’ve come 5,000 miles to tell you adults you must change your ways.”

A 12-year-old Canadian girl stands before world leaders, expressing the fears and despair of a young generation facing at a bleak future for the planet they will inherit.

All listened raptly. Some wept at the starkness of her appeal.

She became known as “the girl who silenced the world for five minutes.”

It was 1992, and representatives of world governments were gathered in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, for the first United Nations Conference on the Environment and Development — the Earth Summit.

The girl was Severn Cullis-Suzuki, daughter of environmentalist David Suzuki. Two decades later, Cullis-Suzuki, with a child of her own, cares even more passionately about the issues now than she did then.

As the world prepares for another Earth Summit in Rio, we spoke with her about her recollections of that seminal conference and what in her opinion has — and has not — changed in the years since.

Cullis-Suzuki remembers the Earth Summit coming at a time of high environmental concern. Two weeks were allotted for the talks. The heads of state from 108 countries attended, including U.S. president George Bush Sr. and Canadian prime minister Brian Mulroney. Over 10,000 journalists were on hand.

Back then, Cullis-Suzuki recalls, addressing the depletion of the ozone layer was high on the environmental agenda, as was a growing awareness of a new environmental issue called climate change. A big concern was bringing on side the developing countries who were worried that being forced to comply with environmental measures would hinder their efforts to develop.

The end of the summit saw the signing of legally-binding agreements, including the UN Convention on Biological Diversity and the Framework Convention on Climate Change, which would pave the way for the Kyoto Protocol. The nations of the world agreed to a global action plan for sustainable development: Agenda 21.

The world emerged from Rio with a sense of hope and promise.

“I look back at those documents that came out of Rio, and they were pretty amazing,” Cullis-Suzuki says. “Great promises were made at Rio, then it kind of fell off people’s agenda.”

The hope and promise were short-lived. Cullis-Suzuki recalls that, in the years following the Earth Summit, the global economy slipped into recession and economic constraints meant the environment was no longer a priority.

Cullis-Suzuki notes the parallels to today, as economic woes again displace the environment as a top concern for world leaders. She cites the fact the 2012 Earth Summit will last only three days. President Barack Obama will not be there, and Prime Minister Stephen Harper has not indicated if he will attend.

Climate change has risen to a pre-eminent concern.

“We’re in a new reality, living in a time of climate change. We already have climate refugees around the globe and now have to talk about adaptation and mitigation,” says Cullis-Suzuki, who holds a B.Sc. in ecology and evolutionary biology, and a masters of science specializing in ethnoecology.

In an ironic reversal, smaller developing countries like the island nations Grenada and the Maldives, who are already feeling the effects of climate change, are the ones begging industrial nations to address climate change.

However, this time there will be no agreements that legally bind countries to meet environmental targets. Instead countries will be asked to work voluntarily towards targets they set for themselves.

Cullis-Suzuki is now coaching young Canadians to represent the interests of the next generation as delegates at Rio 2012. We asked her if she were to stand before the Rio Summit 20 years after she first held the world’s leaders rapt, what would she say now?

“I’m hearing from a lot of people that the same speech I gave then could be given again today. That is a sobering thought,” she told us.

“Sometimes it’s hard not to feel really negative. I think I would ask why we have not succeeded? Why are we not further along?”

The answer may come from her father. In a recent blog, David Suzuki declared environmentalism a failure. Creating environment ministries and holding environment-focused conferences, he argued, made the environment just “another special interest” like agriculture or education. It was something separate from the economy and so fell to the wayside when recessions struck.

Ironically, Rio’s goal in 1992 was to integrate environmental awareness into global development. As Suzuki put it, “The event was meant to signal that economic activity could not proceed without considering ecological consequences.”

Twenty years later, world leaders once again need a child to stand up and remind them that, for the next generation, the environment is not a special interest, it’s their future.

Top 10 Eco-Books

                                    Feeling blue? ... the future of planet Earth is in our hands. Photograph: Corbis

 

From the despair of nuclear bombs to the hope of nuclear technology, the environment journalist picks out green books that are both positive and negative about our planet's future

 

I am not a tree hugger. Nor a people hater. For me, as an environment journalist for 30 years, the story is about people and how they work, live and dream on planet Earth. And how we – seven billion of us, and counting – can keep up the mad dance of civilisation in an ever more crowded and resource-depleted world. Luckily, I am an optimist. 

 

These books contain some stories of potential horrors ahead, like Bill McGuire's Waking the Giant. But we can and do step back from the abyss. John Hershey's Hiroshima, is a receding nightmare.
I have spent the past two years researching the current global frenzy of land-grabbing for my new book The Landgrabbers (Eden Project Books). It was a sobering journey. But I don't doubt that we can – as Lynas proposes – continue to live sanely and successfully into the future. Even so, if Lovelock is right that we are now Gaia's brain, then we have some hard thinking to do.

1. The Kraken Wakes by John Wyndham

Something deep in the ocean has grabbed control of the Earth. Sea levels begin to rise. London floods. Our hero is on a mission to find out what is happening to the planet before it is too late. A tale of climate change? Well, no. Wyndham was writing his sci-fi thriller long before global warming was a gleam in any boffin's eye. But the story of how society collapses under the environmental onslaught is terrifyingly contemporary.

2. The History of the Countryside by Oliver Rackham

The British landscape is richer and more layered with the remains of human activity than almost any other. This is the classic telling of how a curious amalgam of nature and nurture has moulded moorland and fen, hedgerow and woodland. Much that is ancient persists. Simply country lanes turn out to be sunken "greenways" dating back thousands of years. But vital features such as dewponds, mires, sacred springs and wildwoods are disappearing. Rackham, a Cambridge botanist and landscape antiquarian who lives near Grantchester meadows, opens our eyes with wonderful humanity. They say a squirrel could once have crossed Britain without having to touch ground. Oh, but it's much more interesting than that.

3. Gaia: A New Look at Life on Earth by James Lovelock

This is Lovelock's first, slimmest and best telling of his marvellous thesis that planet Earth is, to all intents and purposes, a living organism that has evolved to manage its environment to suit the living things that comprise it. Planet Homeostasis. Richard Dawkins hates the very idea, but no matter. How could selfish genes be so altruistic? But actually Lovelock proposes nothing more subversive to science than that the planet's organisms can act together as a super-organism, like bees in a hive. He ends with the proposition that Gaia needs a brain, and we may be it. This is environmental science at its best, rigorous but mind-blowing. A work of wonder.

4. The Ultimate Resource by Julian L Simon

To many, this is an anti-eco book. An economist tells why there are no limits to growth, why Malthus and Paul Ehrlich and the rest of the doomsayers simply don't understand the ability of humans to come up with answers. That necessity is the mother of invention. The past may not be an infallible guide to the future, and Simon's addiction to free-market economics may be absurd (markets are an invention of man not a law of nature, and should be cast aside if they fail us). But his optimism about our inventiveness (the ultimate resource of the title) is important. We may need environmental doomsters to point out the planetary perils, but we surely need optimists like Simon to encourage our response. Otherwise we may give up, head for the hills and party to the end.

5. Waking the Giant by Bill McGuire

Just out, and dreadfully alarming. Bill McGuire, a distinguished geologist and brilliant science writer, charts how changing climate may trigger not just wild weather but also volcanoes, earthquakes and tsunamis. Perhaps it already is. The last time that ice caps were melting and sea levels were rising, geology was in overdrive. Faults shuddered, magma melted and mayhem followed. As McGuire persuasively shows, it could be kicking off again. This is science so scary that even the climate scientists widely dismissed as alarmists do not dare speak of it.

6. The Death and Life of Great American Cities by Jane Jacobs

Most of us live in cities. They are the environment we know best. This classic assault on town planners almost single-handedly destroyed the arrogance of 20th-century modernists who wanted to build homes and cities as "machines for living in". As if we too were machines. Cities don't need zoning and shopping malls and industrial estates; they need back alleys and unplanned corners, where humans can be human and a chaotic jumble can take over. She may have been writing about the US, but she makes you cry afresh for the vandalism inflicted on Britain in the past half century.

7. Bad Land by Jonathan Raban

I went to Montana, to the beautiful badlands on the American prairies, a couple of years ago. It is magnificently empty, dotted with abandoned shacks and haunted by big skies, the sound of wind and freight trains carrying coal west. I met a dentist who had a part-time ranch the size of the Isle of Wight. Raban's extraordinary bitter-sweet romance is about how this forgotten corner of America, once the new frontier for migrants, got this way. This empty. It is a story of broken dreams and recurring nightmares, of a socialist past and a sometimes rabid Republican present. It is about what happens when people and the land don't get along.

8. The God Species by Mark Lynas

This is a brave book by a green who changed his mind. After years writing about our environmental perils, Lynas decided that technology was not our nemesis but our saviour. Many greens feel profoundly betrayed. But Lynas has not renounced his concerns about climate change and the other "planetary boundaries" that he says threaten our life-support systems. He just thinks those concerns are so important we can no longer have the luxury of seeing being green as a lifestyle choice. Whatever we may feel, we cannot rule out GM seeds or nuclear technology. To say otherwise is dilettante foolishness at least as irrational as that of climate sceptics.

9. Hiroshima by John Hersey

I was brought up in the shadow of the bomb. One day, before I went to school, my dad told me what to do if I saw a mushroom cloud in the sky during lunch break. This was during the Cuban missile crisis, when many though that what had happened to Hiroshima and Nagasaki could happen any moment to Maidstone and Maidenhead. Hershey's contemporary report of what actually did happen to Hiroshima and its people – how an entire city was destroyed one bright sunny morning with one piece of munitions – is journalistic brilliance. These days, we are inclined to forget what nuclear weapons can do. This is a chilling reminder. Not even our worst climate-change nightmares can compare.

10. Beyond the Last Village by Alan Rabinowitz

We hacks call him the Indiana Jones of conservation. Alan Rabinowitz goes out and finds undiscovered species in some of the most remote places on Earth. Places we thought the world was too crowded to sustain any longer. His narrative of a journey into the back woods of northern Burma, on the southeastern-most edge of the Himalayas, is beautifully written, sharp-eyed and mysterious. It feels like Conrad's Heart of Darkness in reverse, as he escapes the "civilisation" of a brutal military regime to find peace and light in the farthest lands. A Shangri-la.

This list was compiled by Fred Pearce@The Guardian