Editor’s Note: Lydia Strohl is a freelance writer in Washington, DC. More of her work can be found here. The views expressed in this commentary belong to the author. View more opinion at CNN.
CNN
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When I first learned that October 22 marks Half-Earth Day, I thought it was because the date is six months to Earth Day. (True.) But it’s got a message all its own.
Half-Earth is the notion that for humans to survive, we must retain earth’s waning biodiversity by reserving half the planet for nature, stabilizing large swaths of ocean, prairie, rainforest and desert to house the birds, insects and ecosystems that affect the water we drink, the food we eat, the air we breathe. Not to mention the economies, cultures and past-times that sustain us.
The Half-Earth Project was inspired by legendary Harvard biologist E.O. Wilson, who died in 2021 at the age of 92. In “Half-Earth: Our Planet’s Fight for Life,” Wilson wrote: “We would be wise to find our way as quickly as possible out of the fever swamp of dogmatic religious belief and inept philosophical thought through which we still wander. Unless humanity learns a great deal more about global biodiversity and moves quickly to protect it, we will soon lose most of the species composing life on Earth.”
This means us, people, who Wilson calls a “lucky accident of primate evolution during the late Pleistocene.”
Not a particularly happy accident, perhaps, for Planet Earth. Since 1970, the global population has doubled to nearly 8 billion. And in those five decades, monitored wildlife populations have declined by an average of 69%, warns the recent Living Planet Report, World Wildlife Fund’s study of the abundance of species worldwide (select vertebrate species; others are difficult to track). Freshwater populations have been hit the hardest, declining 83% over this time period. One million plant and animal species, out of the estimated 8 million out there, are in danger of extinction.
It is time to change our ways, from using to stewarding earth’s resources. People cannot thrive at the expense of nature. Latin America has seen a whopping 94% decline in species populations. Meanwhile, deforestation for crops and cattle, legal and illegal mining and logging, development, and devastating wildfires…
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