Blog：Deep ignorance

He was delivering the Darwin lecture in London on Wednesday, the eve of the UN-designated International Biodiversity Day. His lecture was entitled Our Choice: How Many Species Will Survive The 21st Century?
Over the last half-century, Dr Raven said, drastic human changes to the Earth included:
• about a fifth of arable land lost to over-fertilisation, deserts and urban sprawl
• roughly a third of the forests cut down and not replaced
• atmospheric carbon dioxide increasing by a sixth, contributing to climate change
• the loss of 6-8% of the Earth’s protective ozone layer.
“We are using the Earth’s productive systems at an unsustainable rate, one that we cannot really afford,” Dr Raven said.
“We are likely never to have seen or to be aware of the existence of most of the species we are driving to extinction.”
was not “morally or ethically right” to destroy things as we were. Yet despite the 1992 Earth Summit, relatively little progress towards sustainable development had been made.
Dr Raven said the industrialised nations had not generally risen to the challenge – and if everyone lived at their standard, it would take another two planets to support the Earth’s population

Tags: ignorance