Extinction Rebellion - Let's act fast!
Channel: Underminer Media
Date: 2019-05-04

Chris Engelbrecht, A South African scientist and Extinction Rebellion Rebel, talks about tipping points the human challenge we face as a planet. 

Video transcription (Chris Engelbrecht) "This affects everybody and one of the things that will come out of this movement is that the world will become a more equitable place, and whatever it's going to take to get there, it has to, because we're consuming the planet at a pace that's killing us and it's just going to make us all go away pretty soon so everybody is affected and the only way we can get through this challenge of climate change is to make things far more equitable, so everyone has a stake, but even besides the stake of having a more equitable society worldwide, it's sheer survival.

The thing that scares me the most is what I call a cascade of tipping points, and that is that the net effects of melting ice, and heating oceans, and heating air, is that the biosphere is suffering immensely, and we only learned this very recently. The immense collapse of the insect population - and people don't know what insects are doing - they're the biggest servers of life on the planet, and if they go, everything goes, including food. And besides the insects going, crops are being lost everywhere, and the problem with the tipping points is interplay between ice and ocean and air can very, very quickly reach a point where it runs away, and then literally all the plants will die within a decade.

What are we going to do? We can't eat our money. We can't eat our goods. There will be no food. And this affects everybody, and it's essential that the message goes out that this is a human challenge, and we all have to work together. Those with more resources have to put more resources in than those with fewer resources, but everyone has to pitch in and if everyone understands what's at stake - because most people on the planet who have children or grandchildren want those grandchildren or children to have a good future, and they won't have one if this goes on, and the change has to happen very quickly, so, this is a human challenge, and those of us who've had the privilege of learning about this earlier have to take the message out to everybody now so that everyone is aware of where we are going.”

According to Robert Watson, the chair of the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES). “There is no question we are losing biodiversity at a truly unsustainable rate that will affect human well being both for current and future generations,” he said. “We are in trouble if we don’t act, but there are a range of actions that can be taken to protect nature and meet human goals for health and development.”