Decline and denial
Authors: None The Lancet Planetary Health
Journal: The Lancet Planetary Health (2020)

Global wildlife populations are in freefall. This is the conclusion of a recent WWF report. That might sound like dramatic language but how else should you describe a global situation in which animal populations (mammals, birds, fish, amphibians, and reptiles) have fallen on average by 68% since 1970? To bring this down to the personal, that means all but the youngest among us were born into a world much richer in natural life than the one we now inhabit, and if we don't change course that will be everybody's legacy. This report is one of the latest in a raft of work showing just how severely human activities are impacting life on earth. A common economic refrain is to argue that economic development initially degrades the environment, but then after a time further development begins to reduce degradation—an idea described by the environmental Kuznets curve. Extending this notion, it would be tempting to think that if we wait long enough, wealth creation will resolve most environmental problems. Unfortunately that downturn in environmental damages simply is not happening at any meaningful scale and, as a new UN report shows, the world has failed to meet a single one of the Aichi biodiversity targets that were intended to encourage reductions in biodiversity loss between 2010 and 2020. Perhaps it is a symptom of increasingly urban lifestyles and a reduction in the proportion of people with a direct and tangible dependence on the natural world that more people are not personally outraged and worried by the decline of nature. Damages that have terrible consequences for marginalised people and for all future generations and as described in a Comment by Kathryn Fiorella and colleagues impacts can feed back to further exacerbate environmental degradation. In a book review of Helen Macdonald's Vesper Flights, Sophia Davis explores the book's thesis that we need to notice environmental degradation despite the discomfort it brings. Beyond a degree of personal insulation from nature, there is also a pervading narrative of progress; that things are changing for the better and that the benefits will gradually spread across the globe. In short, keep doing what we are doing, and all will be well. This narrative, as with the Kuznets curve, suits rich and powerful interests, which gain most from the status quo and have the most to lose from changing it. These examples are illustrative of a wider range of habits of living and thinking which tend to undervalue the importance of nature and separate the majority of people from experiencing ecological loss. Fortunately, scientific evidence of ecological crisis is beginning to sway public opinion towards an understanding of how bad things are and therefore an openness to how things might need to change. With depressing predictability though the scientific consensus is not going unchallenged and extinction denialism is the latest in a litany of science denial agendas circulating on the internet and social media platforms. Intended to muddy the waters on what is known about, to name but a few, climate change, pandemic risk, vaccine safety, and now biodiversity decline, these agendas aim to win hearts and minds in favour of the status quo. It can seem tempting to discount these claims as ridiculous and ill-founded but they have the potential to be deeply damaging to the political progress needed to make meaningful changes, in this case against ecological loss. In the age of Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube it is hard not to consume tailored information that is often filtered so that it tends to reinforce existing points of view. This echo chamber effect may be one of the drivers of political polarisation and probably enables science denialism because theories with overwhelming scientific consensus can be presented as outlandish and driven by vested interest with little challenge within a given echo chamber. Researchers and experts need to provide compelling explanations and counterarguments in these same forums. In her book Why Trust Science? Naomi Oreskes attempts to tackle science denialism as a political strategy. If political progress is not to be blocked by effective lobbying, it is all of our jobs to increase trust in science as a means to inform policy. Oreskes argues that we will not do this by simply giving people more information, but rather scientists will be more persuasive if they are able to communicate the values that motivate them and shape the science they produce. Feedbacks from human health to household reliance on natural resources during the COVID-19 pandemicOriginating from the wildlife trade and emerging as a global pandemic, COVID-19 has shown how exploitation of natural resources can negatively affect human health. More broadly, there is growing recognition of the diverse ways that environmental degradation (eg, deforestation and climate change) negatively affects human health through myriad pathways (eg, increased risk of disease spillover from wildlife to humans). Less attention has been given to how human health then feeds back to affect the environment and exacerbate harm to people. Full-Text PDF Open AccessEcological grief and hope in Vesper FlightsGrief is necessary. Reading that “we are already inside the apocalypse” might sound bleak, but Helen Macdonald sees her new book as an effort to give much needed meaning to the loss of nature all around us. Creeping climate change, habitat loss, and mass extinction can be too much to comprehend beyond the bare numbers of science. As Macdonald writes in Vesper Flights, a collection of essays on various aspects of the natural world, we need literature “to communicate the value of things, so that more of us might fight to save them”. Full-Text PDF Open Access