Love Your Relations
Fight for them. Biodiversity is as crucial as climate.
Our relatives are dying. Every year now, dozens of species are declared extinct, meaning no one will ever see them alive again. Scientists say the current rate of extinction is 100 to 1000 times the normal rate, which had been 1–5 species per year. Thousands more are at the brink of extinction or live only in captivity. Do we mourn their loss?
Indigenous people do grieve the murdered animals and plants, but do the rest of us? Have we even noticed the 80% drop in insect populations worldwide, or the sharp declines in birds, and fish, as well as mammals and amphibian populations?
Without their animal friends, 69% of flowering plants are at risk of extinction, according to Andrea Thompson, writing in Scientific American. Plants need animals to move their seeds around by eating them and shitting them out, or by flying pollen from one plant to another.
Insects aren’t just delightful to watch, like fireflies and butterflies. They help reproduce the plants that we eat. They also feed birds and small mammals with their bodies. The small birds and mammals feed the larger ones, and they all fertilize the soil. It’s the same in the water with fish.
That’s what is called an ecosystem, lots of diverse species feeding each other and enriching the ground for those who…
