Our Shared Planet

It’s turtles all the way down. Or at least, it used to be. For 120 million years sea turtles have been going about their business, migrating vast distances through the oceans and returning to nesting beaches with uncanny accuracy. They survived mass extinctions and both ‘greenhouse’ and ‘icehouse’ periods of Earth’s prehistory. Here I’m going to deal with the sad but predictable question: “Can turtles survive us?” I'll take you on a journey that follows the incredible life of a sea turtle, highlight the challenges they face thanks to human activity, and discuss what we can do to help them.

Humans depend on nature, but what exactly is it? Is it the ‘goods’ we extract from ecosystems like food, or the ‘services’ ecosystems provide us like clean air? Underpinning these goods and services is an abundance of plant and animal life that keeps ecosystems functioning. But, in the ‘Anthropocene’ age of human-induced environmental change and biodiversity loss, how can we protect nature for our future generations? A new approach is to think of nature as capital, or ‘natural capital’, but is it a good idea? I’ll give you the arguments for and against, and let you decide.

We are all witness to World War III, but this time it’s humans vs. wildlife. A tiger feasting on a farmer’s cow or a rabbit uprooting your flowers: animal behaviours often lead us to label them ‘pests’. ‘Pests’ find themselves at the mercy of people, who more often than not, work to eliminate offending animals. But these retaliation tactics now threaten the very existence of many species and rarely deal with the cause of the problem. I’ll examine the state-of-play and explore avenues for conflict resolution as we struggle to share our evermore crowded planet.