'Nothing less than a reordering of our
priorities based on a moral revolution can succeed.'
EDITOR'S NOTE: Trump's budget for the upcoming year calls for a 17% cut to NOAA's budget, with the greatest cuts to fall on research, weather satellites and climate science. Typical of Trump, rather than seek scientific answers to climate problems, he will probably rely on crazy Facebook postings as his source of news. W. Collette Experts in biodiversity and extinction are gathering at the Vatican this week to discuss biological extinction—and how to save the natural world on which we all depend.
The conference focuses on the alarming
signs, from various branches of science, that we are outstripping out planet's
ability to sustain us.
It
follows on Pope Francis' 2015 encyclical, Laudato Si, calling for better care
and concern for "our Common Home," as well as an Intergovernmental
Panel on Climate Change report suggesting we are on a course to destroy up to
40 percent of biodiversity on Earth by century's end.
The conference is co-sponsored by the Pontifical Academy of Science and the Pontifical Academy of Social Science.
"Our desire for enhanced consumption grows more rapidly than our population, and Earth cannot sustain it," the sponsors say.
"Nothing
less than a reordering of our priorities based on a moral revolution can
succeed in maintaining the world in such a way as to resemble the conditions we
have enjoyed here."
Among those presenting during the three
day conference are Partha Dasgupta of Cambridge University and Paul Ehrlich of
Stanford University, who make the case that we are experiencing the sixth mass
extinction of plant and animal life the globe has seen—with considerable
consequences for humanity.
The authors have given Environmental
Health News permission to post a draft of their paper online.
It's
a working paper for the Pontifical Academy workshop and will be revised before
eventual publication. You can download it here.
"In sum, the driving force of
extinction, the ultimate cause of the current sixth mass extinction crisis is
much too high a level of aggregate consumption – produced by human numbers
multiplied by too high a level of consumption among the rich," they write.
"But demand cannot exceed supply indefinitely."
"Translated into the language of
equity, humanity's enormous success in recent decades is very likely to have
been a down payment for future failure."
Download Partha Dasgupta's and Paul Ehrlich's
working paper on the sixth great extinction here.
For questions or feedback about this
piece, contact Brian Bienkowski at bbienkowski@ehn.org.