The WWF’s report on the shockingly rapid decline in wildlife should surely move us to action

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/oct/05/wwf-report-wildlife-decline-should-make-us-act

Version 0 of 1.

Last week, when the WWF released its annual Living Planet report, the conservation organisation promised that the contents were “not for the faint-hearted”. The report’s leading statistic is as grim as advertised: Over the past 40 years, there has been a more than 50% decline in the size of 10,000 representative populations of mammals, birds, reptiles and fish. Two human generations; half the animals gone. (That’s not even counting invertebrates.) The leading causes of this continuing decline, say WWF scientists, are exploitation – unsustainable levels of hunting and fishing, whether for food or profit – habitat degradation and loss, and climate change.

Just days before the report’s release, a pilot flying over northwest Alaska as part of a national marine-mammal survey photographed an estimated 35,000 Pacific walruses on a single beach, packed so densely that they looked, from a distance, like a mass of termites. The walruses usually rest on sea ice, but this year, the extent of Arctic ice is at its sixth-lowest point since satellite monitoring began in 1979. The animals on the beach had been forced to “haul out” of the ocean by using their tusks to pull themselves onto the rocky shore, where they have far less access to food – and are far more vulnerable to predators. Last week, the photographs went viral.

For most of us, climate change used to be distant in space and time, difficult to measure and even more difficult to visualise. It made news, but never breaking news. Now, the effects of climate change often come with solid numbers and shocking images—and we click away, duly astounded.

But the headlines still don’t move us to action—at least not to the level of action required for change. After 300,000 people joined the People’s Climate March in New York on 21 September, the satirists at the Onion reminded us who didn’t show up. “7.1 Billion Demonstrate in Favor of Global Warming,” read their headline: “Whether they were sitting in their living rooms, watching football at a bar, or just driving somewhere, a sizable portion of the world let its support for climate change be heard loud and clear.”

Part of our apathy, surely, springs from the sheer magnitude of climate change and other environmental problems. Take it from another brilliant satirist, Eddie Izzard. “If somebody kills someone, that’s murder, you go to prison,” he says in his sneakily devastating reflection on genocide. “Someone’s killed 100,000 people, we’re almost going, ‘Well done! You must get up very early in the morning.’” We may know how to react to a single death, human or animal. But the collective tragedies of thousands are difficult for even the most empathetic among us to take in.

And these global problems not only have more than one victim, but also more than one perpetrator: We’re all just a little bit at fault. That uncomfortable truth can make any individual action seem meaningless.

Yet we – and by “we” I mean those of us lucky enough not to be entirely preoccupied with our own families’ survival – demonstrate over and over again that we’re capable of doing unselfish good for others, and even for other species. As a journalist, I see it all the time: people volunteer on behalf of their own and other people’s children; they go to ridiculous lengths for their pets; when disaster strikes their neighbourhoods, they open their pockets and their homes. When properly moved, people do get up very early in the morning, and they often get a lot of good done.

Advocacy organisations know this, and that’s why they often chase shocking global statistics with exhortations to act locally. Drive less, they say. Buy energy-efficient appliances. Protect nearby habitats. It’s all good advice, certainly worth following. But as we face the increasingly tangible impacts of climate change, it’s not enough—not enough to protect other species, and not enough to protect our own, either.

Those of us who have the time and resources for altruism tend to live in places where biodiversity is lower, and where what there is of it is relatively well-protected. If we act only behalf of our neighbourhoods, we’re leaving a lot of very important places behind. Yet that often seems all we’re capable of doing.

“We’re very bad at coordinating ourselves – we’re very tribal, territorial – and we’re facing global problems,” Marco Lambertini, the director general of WWF International, said in a statement accompanying the release of his organisation’s report. “We need to learn how to work together, how to connect, and how to plan together.”

That we do, of course, and the complex threats of climate change have inspired many environmental organisations – and NGOs of all kinds – to more strongly coordinate their work on regional, national, and global scales. But what can we do as individuals in our personal lives? Are we doomed to just keep clicking on worrisome headlines, dutifully buying more efficient lightbulbs?

We can’t change the way our brains work, at least not quickly enough to clean up our global mess. We are, as Lambertini observes, inherently tribal, with a tendency to protect our own. But I think we can expand our geographic sense of responsibility, and by doing so expand our individual capacities for doing and continuing to do good.

Consider that worrisome WWF statistic: A 50% decline in the size of 10,000 wildlife populations over the past 40 years. While it makes a good headline, it’s not nearly as monolithic as it sounds. Freshwater species are declining almost twice as rapidly as either marine or terrestrial species. The most dramatic biodiversity losses are in South America, followed closely by Asia.

While there’s a lot we don’t know about the natural world, we do know—in a fair amount of detail—where the losses are worst and the threats to both humans and animals are most pressing. We know where the most work needs to be done.

So yes, act on behalf of your neighbourhood. Lighten your household footprint. But if you’re sobered by the headlines, choose another place, too. It can be somewhere you’re from, somewhere you’ve visited, somewhere you don’t know well at all, just as long as it’s a specific somewhere that needs more attention than your backyard. Figure out who’s doing or trying to do effective work there—someone is, I guarantee it—and support them however you can. Then get up early in the morning, and do it again. Repeat.

Do it alone, or with your family; do it anonymously, or take all the credit you can get. It doesn’t matter. What matters is that you’ll have found a real place inside the headlines, and found a real way to help protect it over the long term.