HUMAN activity is driving many of the planet’s species dangerously close to extinction, according to a comprehensive and troubling new report by the World Wildlife Fund and the Zoological Society of London. Global vertebrate populations, the report predicts, are likely to have declined by an average of 67 per cent on their 1970 levels by 2020. These are extraordinary figures, suggesting that a mass extinction in the near future has become a serious danger.
In the longer term (but not too much longer, given that the overall rate of decrease is running at 2pc a year), the best course of action for Earth’s dominant species is for it to reproduce more slowly and make more efficient use of its own habitat.
That means continuing to congregate in cities rather than the countryside, and building up rather than out. After centuries of unfair, unequal genocidal struggles with man, the planet’s other inhabitants deserve a long period of being left in peace.
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