WHY SUSTAINABILITY HAS TO START NOW
One of the greatest ‘Insta’ arrivals of all time happened recently. Knocking Jennifer Aniston off the top spot for the quickest amassing of followers; national treasure David Attenborough joined the social media site. Whilst everyone welcomed him with open arms, his arrival was for bigger reasons than simply to join the world of social media squares, shares and likes.
The fact that he broke the world record for the fastest to reach 1 million followers is almost beside the point. His arrival to Instagram was actually to announce his Netflix special – A Life on Our Planet’. This documentary looks back over David’s life as he explores Earth, highlighting the change he has seen during his 60 year career and the fears he has for our future.
During David’s long career, he has seen the world’s population balloon while the area of natural habitats have reduced devastatingly and the carbon pollution has increased past the point of control. He predicts that if we were to continue in the same way, by 2030 deforestation will have caused the Amazon Rainforest to degrade to the point where it can no longer sustain it’s levels of moisture, transforming into a dry savanna. The Amazon currently produces around 6% of the world’s oxygen and has been thought to be a carbon sink, readily absorbing large amounts of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. With this natural resource gone, the biodiversity within the forest would be completely decimated but also the global water cycle would be forever altered and the levels of C02 starkly changed.
The documentary goes on to lay out predictions further into the future; with the 2040’s warning of the thawing of permafrost soils, in turn releasing potent methane into the atmosphere, the 2050’s bringing the bleaching of coral reefs and crashing of fish populations, the 2080’s bringing crisis to global food production as soils become exhausted by overuse, culminating in the 2100’s where huge swathes of the Earth are uninhabitable.
This grim future may seem like a bad science fiction novel – but this is the stark reality we are facing if we don’t act now. Years of bad habits, unsustainable practices and a simple lack of care for our environment have led us to the point where we have done irreparable damage to the very planet that sustains us. Instead of working with nature, as other life forms manage to do; we have taken everything we can and caused huge damage to the ecosystem, atmosphere and natural resources we were given.
We are able to change the course laid out by David. With small, actionable changes on a mass scale, we can make a difference to our future and for the generations after us. Keep tuned to our feed and blog to find out what you can do to help protect our future, and make Sir David Attenborough proud.
