The World We Inherited — And What We're Doing to It

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🌍 The World We Inherited — And What We're Doing to It

In a single year — 2016 — half of the Great Barrier Reef's coral died. Not damaged. Not bleached and then recovered. Dead. Gone. 1,300 kilometres of reef, built over tens of thousands of years, killed in twelve months by ocean water that had grown too warm. The cause was a marine heatwave linked to climate change. Cameras sent by Australian scientists captured something extraordinary and terrible: vast stretches of coral turned white, then brown, then collapsed into rubble on the seabed.

It was not an isolated event. Since 1970, humanity has wiped out 60% of all wild animal populations on Earth. Not one species — 60% of everything: mammals, birds, fish, reptiles, amphibians. One million species are currently threatened with extinction, more than at any point since the mass extinction event that killed the dinosaurs 66 million years ago. Except this time, there is no asteroid. There is us.

This topic asks a question that has no easy answer: can ecosystems be managed sustainably — and if so, how? The Great Barrier Reef, the Congo rainforest, and a farm in West Sussex all give different answers to that question. Understanding those answers, and being able to evaluate them, is what this topic is about.

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