The big picture

We live on Planet Earth, which orbits one of 100 billion stars in the Milky Way galaxy. In turn that is one of at least 100 billion galaxies in the Universe. As far as we know, our planet is the only one in all that space that supports intelligent life.

Life has existed on Earth for 3.5 billion years, and some species like the tadpole shrimp have been around for over 200 million years. Homo sapiens, or modern humans, are relatively new to the scene, evolving about 315,000 years ago. For 300,000 of those years we coexisted with all the other species inhabiting our planet as hunter-gatherers, but then about 10,000 years ago we started living in villages and agriculture was born. A little less than 300 years ago we began to industrialise and things really started to change.

Despite the uniqueness of our planet, in our short existence it is fair to say we haven't treated it or its other inhabitants well. Our population has exploded, growing from just 4 million at the dawn of civilization to over 8 billion today. But it’s not only our population that has grown exponentially, so have the numbers of the animals that feed us – to the extent that 96% of the biomass of mammals is now humans and livestock.

Our success has come at great cost to the natural world. In the year 1700, 95% of the planet’s ice-free land was either wild or so lightly used it could be classed as ‘semi-natural’. By 2000 only 5% was left. Global wildlife populations have decreased by 69% since 1970, we cut down 15 billion trees a year, and by 2050 there could be more plastic in the oceans than fish. In 2022 we used up all the resources that Earth can regenerate in a year by 28 July, the earliest Earth Overshoot Day has ever occurred.

It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to see that things can’t go on as they are. We act as though Earth’s resources are infinite when they are not. Unless we can return to a state of coexistence with our planet then we risk losing the conditions that have enabled us to become so successful.

A truly intelligent species would not let that happen.