It’s not the end of the world, it’s only the beginning.
A post about positivity in the face of catastrophe.
Without the living world, the planet will collapse and take us with it.
No bees to pollinate plants.
No forests to turn carbon from the skies into materials for our lives.
No whales to churn our oceans and give life in death.
No corals to colour the seas.
This is a highly likely, world-ending problem.
The sort of cataclysmic world event that encourages the likes of Elon Musk to shoot for Mars. Musk speaks with such certainty of the world ending. Undoubtedly, it’s an excellent communication strategy to raise interest and capital in Space X. While Musk raises millions, he’s also compelling the astronomically rich silicon valley type A’s to spend their time discussing its genius. It’s an engineers’ dream: build a silver rocket. Stick some people on it. Use all the maths you can muster to save humanity. Whoop to the skies, extol profanities, dust your hands: Job “Done Done”.
The brilliance of this plan lies in its simplistic wonderful image — humans soaring into the unknown of space is evocative. “I may not be a rocket scientist but I’m pretty sure those smart phyisicsy people in lab coats can figure it out, right?” In reality, if you ask a NASA engineer about it they would probably say something more like, “Well, it depends. It’s not that simple. We’ve got a lot of research to do first…” However, the image is it’s possible. It’s the Mars shot. It’s our one chance.
What strikes me about all of this however is that the first ‘world is going to end’ images that come to mind are the literal Meteoric event. A random moment in time which seems impossible to stop or control. What is often not talked about are those world-ending moments we do have a say in, like the massive global decline in biodiversity in which we’re losing 200 species every day. We do have a solution to stop that.
Recently the doomsday clock moved closer to midnight. A clock based on the assessment of the chance that humanity will reach a self-inflicted moment of doom. It’s at two minutes to midnight. Last orders have been called. The fella at the bar — Geoff — who’s been there since opening has gone home for his fish supper. All that’s left is a couple of students sipping on the beer they bought four hours ago and a barman giving them laser eyes.
What if we could push the minute hand back a bit?
What if we could make it a little harder for Elon to convince his bros that we need to spend billions running away from our planet?
What if we could give people an earth-bound message of hope —that the earth isn’t going to end and our children can be happy and prosperous?
What if we can show people how they can be part of that message of hope with some simple, everyday actions?
It turns out we can.
The global loss of so many species at an unprecedented pace is one of those cataclysmic events that we can stop — if we want to. A giant of a mind, E.O. Wilson, has come up with a solution: Half-Earth. If we conserve half the planet’s lands and seas, the bulk of biodiversity will be protected from extinction. It’s an idea that can turn back the clock. It’s in the same category as climate change: reduce emissions, stop climate change. Protect half the planet for more species, stop the sixth mass extinction. Easy.
The sixth mass extinction has been brought on by our insatiable demand for land and the resources it provides. We’ve altered and destroyed habitats to plant crops, graze animals, build cities and mine the things our global economy depends on. We’ve overexploited species with our demand for meat, skins and medicines. Our travels have introduced invasive species into places where they outcompete local species. Climate change — which is unequivocally a consequence of our love for burning fossil fuels — is changing the environment faster than species can adapt.
When we lose species, we lose the insects and birds that pollinate our crops and spread their seeds. We lose the species that keep pests under control and prevent massive crop failure. We disrupt the natural cycles that put nutrients back into the soil and create conditions that make our planet habitable. Every species on this planet has a role to play and we’re still learning what impact their loss is having on the planet. We need to slow down the rate of extinction before we reach the point where the damage we’ve done is irreversible. Or to put it another way; we need to stop peeing in our own bed before we run out of clean sheets.
As someone who has worked in conservation for 20 years, I know all too well that there has not been that simplicity or clarity of message. A goal people can look up to and say, “yeah, I’m not sure how, but I think it can be done. How can I help?”. The hard working people in conservation know their battles for conserving even the smallest scrap of land is exhausting and full of complicated humans with needs and biases and words and suspicion.
The path to Half-Earth isn’t a silver rocket. Life on earth is wonderfully and frustratingly complex. Where to protect is a debate still raging in the halls of academia. The human bureaucratic systems that govern and control the bits of land and sea on our planet are not homogenous. Solving the brilliantly simple goal of protecting half the planet will require a network of people. People we don’t know the names of (one will surely be called Geoff though, and they will have a beard). Millions of people in fact, using whatever legal, scientific, or emotive techniques they have in their hands. Fortunately the conservation community have formulated a thousand ways to protect nature through networks of parks. Attaching a rocket to that seems like a good place to start.The Half-Earth Project is the rocket.
And this is where Vizzuality come in, in our modest way. We’re partnering with the Half-Earth Project, doing things like telling stories with vast amounts of data, communicating the messages, and constructing tools to help people not only understand the importance of protecting most living things on the planet, but giving those practitioners the technological tools to attach that rocket.
The part we play in this story is also fraught with challenges. The truth is, our community has fallen well short in representing the wonder of nature through visualisation. Often too technical, hiding the messages behind complexity, and representing species by focussing on taxonomic structures, and details suitable for professional scientists, rather than clear messages. We’ve not yet managed to balance the complex and simple.
You don’t need a degree in astrophysics to be in awe of the vastness of the universe, you only need to gaze into the sky on a clear crisp night. To fascinate children with nature, you only need to spend a day in the woods collecting bugs and climbing trees. Our job then, is to transmit that awe and wonder into the places where people spend a large part of their working day. In front of screens, on the internet, on their phones. (A sad reality when you look at it like that). Therefore a large part of Vizzuality’s work will be visualisation research. We’ll put a team of designers, software engineers, psychologists and social scientists to work to create wonder and awe.
We will also be working on some tooling to help people figure out where to protect. Intelligently placing places. Using data to define where to protect has long been the purview of MSc and PhD graduates in spatial planning. We think this experience could do with being made significantly easier. That’s something we aim to bring to the many who need it.
The underpinnings of such ambition will be based on world leading science and data. We are working in support of the Half-Earth Project alongside Map of Life, to every species on every kilometer of the planet. We’re going to work with them to make sure that this powerful dataset — probably *the* most important dataset of the 21st century — can, and will, be seen by anyone.
At the beginning of 2018 Vizzuality challenged ourselves to focus on the big problems, the hard retractable issues of our time. Uniting and empowering people behind a cause with a simple message through compelling communication. Our job here is not to run away to Mars but to put billions of people in touch with the planet like never before. To create a living breathing map of nature. If ever there was a legacy worth having, this is it:
Save the living planet, save everything. Half-Earth.
*this writing was inspired by an article from E.O. Wilson that was published in the New York Times. It may have also been inspired by Comedians in Cars Drinking Coffee, the West Wing and Shawshank Redemption. And the book Living as a Beast. And the article I read the other day about that fella that described making a ride sharing app as going to war (still shaking my head).
