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Jason Anthony's avatar

Thank you, Bill. This sensitivity to the larger crisis (our rapid impoverishment of the community of life) should be an essential part of the daily climate conversation. It's easy to forget that for all its terrifying power, the climate crisis is just one symptom of the deeper illness. I'm not sure whether we are, metaphorically, a slow-moving asteroid or a fast-moving supervolcano, but as the new numbers from the Living Planet Index make clear the impact on species and their ecological communities is approaching the literal definition of "decimate": to reduce by 90%. It's not a mass extinction, but it certainly feels like the event horizon of one.

It's easy to feel buffered from the losses - whether wasps, alewives, hemlocks, wolves, or painted turtles - when we live our boxed-in lives. It's even easier here in coastal Maine, for example, when eight species of birds flurry at the feeder at dusk before the rain and winds set in, when a posse of turkeys forage in the squash patch, and when the second-growth forest echoes with barred owls and coyotes. We have to pay attention to see how much has changed (like the coyotes, at least two of the feeder species, cardinals and titmice, didn't exist here 50 years ago), how much is missing, and how quickly what remains is being lost at home and elsewhere (particularly those distant communities we've hijacked).

As you note, any climate solution that isn't also a biodiversity solution is a lost opportunity at a time when we can't afford lost opportunities. It kills me to see new solar farms being built on the stubble of a former forest - there's good seed money in a clearcut, I guess - when open land is available nearby.

So again, thank you for sharing your grief and connecting the dots between climate and biodiversity. Your writing is beautiful and important, as always.

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Tim MacDonald's avatar

If we expand our framing, from carbon emissions driving climate change, to energy extraction from hydrocarbons diminishing habitats on earth that are inhabitable by humans, the link to biodiversity loss becomes, I think, a bit more logical, and maybe obvious.

Keith Johnson gives us a nice Midwestern phrase for the world we are living in today: "We are eating our seed corn."

Great fortunes for individuals are being extracted from a future that is diminshing for all of us.

The culprit?

The Growth Imperative of share price trading.

Would we ever be able to imagine a different way of providing financing to enterprises operating at scale, that is not reductionist, extractive, externalizing and uncaring about the future?

Here's a clue. The word "fiduciary" is legal for caring. Could we imagine the innovation of a new system of fiduciary financing for fiduciary-grade enterprise that is design to care?

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