THE CASE FOR NATURE
It’s as if we’re playing a game of planetary Jenga. The first few bricks we tap out seem not to affect the overall structure, but as we proceed things get increasingly tottery, until all at once it could all come tumbling down
At the start of 2020 a strange, beautiful creature, whose kind had been around for at least 200 million years, was declared gone forever. By comparison, we homo sapiens have spent a mere 300,000 years on the planet. The dinosaurs were wiped out 65 million years ago.
The Chinese paddlefish could grow to an impressive seven metres in length, with a long snout used to sense the electrical activity of its prey, tiny comical eyes and a huge flapping mouth. Its premature demise was not a natural occurrence; it had been severely overfished – during the 1970s, 25 tons of paddlefish were being netted each year – and the damming of its Yangtze river habitat blocked the route to its spawning grounds. By the time efforts were made to save it, it was too late. The last sighting of a Chinese paddlefish was in 2003, and it probably became extinct years before the formal announcement.1
In June 2020, researchers concluded that 515 vertebrate species had fewer than 1,000 individuals remaining and were thus staring extinction in the face – of these more than half were down to under 250 individuals. This is far from the full picture because so many species in our natural world are
