Why I started Wild World Rewilding
Today, I did something I love doing. I took my mountain bike and went for a ride in our local woods. To reset. To clear my head. To breathe fresh air. Half way through my ride I came across something that shook me to my core. And reminded me of exactly why I started Wild World Rewilding.
Our world is in a crisis. In the last 50 years we have destroyed two thirds of the Earth’s wildlife populations. Two thirds. In 50 years.
“The Living Planet Report 2020 underlines how humanity’s increasing destruction of nature is having catastrophic impacts not only on wildlife populations but all on human health and all aspects of our lives.”
Marco Lambertini, Director General, WWF International
According to the World Wildlife Fund’s (WWF) ‘Living Planet Report’, the health of our planet is in freefall.
WE MUST REWILD THE WORLD
"To restore stability to our planet, we must restore its biodiversity, the very thing we have removed. It is the only way out of this crisis that we ourselves have created. We must rewild the world."
Sir David Attenborough, 'A Life on Our Planet - My Witness Statement and a Vision for the Future'
Dr Stephen Cornelius from WWF, a former UK government IPCC negotiator, said: “A species that goes extinct at two degrees will still be extinct if you come back down to 1.5C. Some things may come back but some things are irreversible, in terms of taking a risk you’d want to try and keep below 1.5, and clearly that means faster, deeper earlier emissions cuts, and it probably means carbon dioxide removal. But these technologies – some of them we know what to do, but some are early days and need to be assessed.”
Climate action and the restoration of the natural world, rewilding, are inextricably interlinked. We have to rewild the world in order to reduce the impact of climate change on our home, Earth. Our relationship with Nature is broken. We made the fatal mistake of seeing ourselves as apart from, not a part of, Nature. We gave ourselves license to ‘rule’ over Earth, to have ‘dominion’ over it. Our arrogance blinded us to how intrinsically we are a part of Nature and completely dependent on it. Without Nature we won’t exist.
We need to take decisive, radical action. Now. We no longer have the luxury of time. Every day that passes is another day closer to the next mass extinction.
For context:
- The 94% decline in natural species across Latin America and The Caribbean is far greater than that of any other observed region.
- We’ve lost 33% in North America, 65% in Africa, 24% in Europe and Central Asia and 45% in Asia Pacific since 1970.
- We have significantly altered 75% of the Earth’s ice-free land – only 25% can still be considered wilderness.
You can download the Living Planet Report here: