The Tipping Point: Going, going, gone

By Jess Spear

“Don't it always seem to go
That you don't know what you've got 'til it's gone
They paved paradise, put up a parking lot”
- Joni Mitchell

What do you expect to see and hear when you walk outside your home? I live in Tallaght, so for me it’s cars, the roar of a lawnmower or some other garden tool, the ding ding of the Luas passing by, and maybe a few magpies and jackdaws. If I’m lucky, and it’s quiet enough, I might hear some goldfinches or some blue tits. Blackbirds and robins are common in my local park. If I’m out and about after dark I almost always see a fox crossing the road. During the first lockdown, I thrice saw a rat - in my imagination it was the same individual - frolicking near the local duck pond which has swans, tufted ducks, mallards, moorhens, and coots. More recently I spotted a hedgehog wandering into my front garden. If I’m not too distracted I can usually spot all kinds of other tiny lives - snails, slugs, bees, hoverflies, and damselflies - in addition to the mushrooms, dock, creeping thistle, dandelions, clover, and various trees around our estate. (We have some really lovely rowans planted along the footpaths and a truly stunning Silver Birch just down the road). Sometimes, I’ll see a squirrel running up a tree, but it’s quite rare. 

When I write it all down like that, it almost sounds like I live in a wildlife park. But the sad reality is that Ireland is one of the most nature depleted countries in the world. Rather than spotting the occasional bumble bee or butterfly, we should be seeing and hearing our hedgerows, gardens, and parks bursting with life. That most people don’t realise how much we’ve lost is down to something scientists call “shifting baseline syndrome”, whereby because each generation thinks the current environment, their “baseline”, is the “normal” state of affairs, they don’t recognise the magnitude and scale of what’s been lost. 

Coming from a different country can have the opposite effect. I spent my childhood camping, hiking, and exploring the Blueridge Mountains of Virginia. When I moved to Dublin five years ago, I was immediately struck by how few birds, squirrels, frogs, and insects I encountered. Compared to my baseline of a much more biodiverse environment, Ireland seemed near empty of wildlife and forests. The point is from the perspective of a single, extremely busy lifetime, it’s very hard to know what’s “normal” or not. That’s why reports such as the recent World Wildlife Fund’s Living Planet Report [1] are vital to understanding the overall health of ecosystems. 

Mass extinction

The news isn’t good. On average, between 1970-2018, we’ve lost 69% of vertebrate animal populations[2], that is, animals with a backbone (mammals, fish, reptiles, amphibians, and birds). Which means this survey doesn’t include insects, spiders, octopus, crabs, lobsters, corals, and other creatures which we know are also threatened with extinction.[3] 

Latin America and Africa have the largest reductions at 94% and 66%, respectively. Europe and the US have lost around 20% each. But this isn’t because Europe and the US are bastions of environmental protection. This report is looking at the last 50 years, not the last 100 or 150 years when industrialisation in both regions, and the genocide of indigenous peoples in the US in particular, led to the destruction of forests and the loss of many species. Ireland used to be chock full of animals and trees.[4] But colonisation, industrialisation, and capitalism, violently forced on people and nature, led to mass deforestation, the exponential growth in use of pesticides and fertilisers, the introduction of industrialised agribusiness, and the idea of the “tidy garden” with a strip of super short grass and meticulously manicured flower beds. Nature is barely hanging on here.

If you asked them, I think most people would assume climate change was the main culprit. But, it’s not. Not for most species. Not yet at least. The key factors behind the decline in animal populations are “land and water use changes”, which is just a nice way of saying that we’ve[5] either annihilated what was there or modified it so much that the animals can no longer survive. These “changes” include habitat fragmentation (for example, damming a river or paving over everything for cars), deforestation driven by an expanding industrial agriculture system, as well as overfishing - which if you think about it, basically means removing huge numbers of animals from the ecosystem.  

Freshwater habitats saw the biggest decline in animal populations - 83%! A big reason for the decline is the fact that “[o]nly 37% of rivers longer than 1,000km remain free-flowing over their entire length.”[6] The damming of rivers preventss migratory fish from reaching important breeding grounds. Agriculture plays a big role too, as well as wastewater runoff. Both of these contribute nutrients to the water, which sounds good, but isn’t. The extra nutrients - nitrates and phosphates primarily - allow algae to bloom in huge numbers which reduces the oxygen level. In Ireland we’ve gone from 500 pristine rivers to just 20 in the last 40 years.[7] 

I suppose this report is no surprise. Sure, we all know we’re in a “biodiversity crisis”. But, we shouldn’t become numb to reading headline after headline about how many ecosystems are being destroyed year in and year out or how much life is just gone. 

We could lose it all

I must admit I often feel that we aren’t helping ourselves by calling it a “biodiversity crisis”. It’s like “land use changes”. It’s a buzz word that (in my opinion) doesn’t get us one inch closer to understanding what’s really going on, how it affects each and every one of us, and what’s driving it. Why not just say “We’re in a mass extinction event akin to the one that killed off the dinosaurs”? Or how about, “All the animals are being killed off, here are 10 reasons why that’s bad for you, number 5 will blow your mind”? 

Finding the right words, of course, isn’t the most important task for ecosocialists. Nonetheless, we have to stop seeing and talking about the loss of wildlife as though it is divorced from real life. This isn’t just about losing iconic species like polar bears, pandas, and tigers. We have to find the plainest words possible that succinctly express what is really at stake. If we let it, the capitalist system will devour and destroy so much life on Earth, it will pollute so much land, water, and air, that we could actually lose our ability to grow enough food to eat and have easy access to safe, clean drinking water. We should be screaming this from the rooftops.

Article originally published in Issue 9 of Rupture Magazine. Subscribe or purchase previous issues here.

Notes

1.  WWF (2022) Living Planet Report 2022 – Building a naturepositive society. Almond, R.E.A., Grooten, M., Juffe Bignoli, D. & Petersen, T. (Eds). WWF, Gland, Switzerland.

2.  There are all kinds of metrics that indicate the precipitous loss of species, from red lists of endangered species to the number or percentage of species lost. Animal populations, on the other hand, “give a snapshot of changes in an ecosystem” and help researchers assess its overall health.

3.  See Jess Spear, “Death by a thousand cuts” from “The Tipping Point”, Rupture Issue 5, Autumn 2021.

4.  I highly recommend readers check out Pádraic Fogarty’s Whittled Away - Ireland’s Vanishing Nature which covers the history of Ireland’s ecosystems and how they’ve been eroded over time. 

5.  The “we” here just means humans. Obviously “we” are not all responsible nor in control of the decisions that led to this destruction. 

6.  WWF (2022) Living Planet Report 2022 – Building a naturepositive society. Almond, R.E.A., Grooten, M., Juffe Bignoli, D. & Petersen, T. (Eds). WWF, Gland, Switzerland.

7.  Tim O'Brien, Just 20 of Ireland’s rivers are ‘pristine’, down from 500 in 1980s, Irish Times, 10 December 2019.