April 22, 2020: Saving Nature's President, Stuart Pimm, reflects on the state of the planet 50 years after the first Earth Day.
Today is the 50th Earth Day
HOW ARE WE DOING?
We’ll celebrate Earth Day 2020 under the house arrest COVID-19 has imposed. Let’s not miss that this has happened because we have failed in the task of saving nature.
The current pandemic is just one of a series. The lessons before from MERS, SARS, and the 2009 H1N1 is that there’s a lot of nasty things out there — and they want to flourish by infecting us.
The more we move into nature, chopping down forests, killing animals for bushmeat or putative medicines, the more likely we will encounter these and similar diseases. They come from the habitats we destroy, from the forest edges where susceptible people contact infected species that are disease reservoirs.
Or when we enter the forests: butchering apes or bats or pangolins is a bloody, unsanitary business. While some societies must depend on wild-caught species, for many it’s a luxury good. This Earth Day, human society is paying an appalling price for their indulgence.
So what can we do to honor Earth Day?
Protect nature as best we can. We can minimise that edge between us and nature. Keep the forests we have. Restore ones we have destroyed. More technically, we need to reduce those edges for they are very much greater than they need to be because we have fragmented natural habitats. That’s what we do at Saving Nature. It’s not an accident: we’ve long understood we need to keep nature intact.
Second, how are our projects doing during COVID19?
Not well. A lot of our partners depend on tourists on one kind or another. Tourism has stopped. The communities where our partners work and often live were poor to start with. The threats of poaching and logging have increased along with the diminished funds to pay staff to stop them. And, of course, our partners have the same fears for their friends and families as we do.
If you want to help — to reforest to reduce the edges, to help our partners, to Save Nature — please be in touch. We know these are difficult times.
The Planet Needs your help
Learn more about the facts here.
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