World failing on every environmental issue: an op-ed for Earth Day

The biodiversity crisis, the climate crisis, the deforestation crisis: we are living in an age when environmental issues have moved from regional problems to global ones. A generation or two before ours and one might speak of saving the beauty of Northern California; conserving a single species—say the white rhino—from extinction; or preserving an ecological region like the Amazon. That was a different age.

Today we speak of preserving world biodiversity, of saving the 'lungs of the planet', of mitigating global climate change. No longer are humans over-reaching in just one region, but we are overreaching the whole planet, stretching ecological systems to a breaking point. While we are aware of the issues that threaten the well-being of life on this planet, including our own, how are we progressing on solutions?

Although not a scientist, I have a relatively unique perspective, having spent the last three years as an environmental journalist, writing on a wide-variety of issues from species-on-the-brink to indigenous rights to climate change politics. As much as I have written, I have read exponentially more. Sometimes a working day as an environmental reporter can feel like watching a slow succumbing, an endless cataloguing toward the end of the world as we know it. I don't mean that the Earth will keel over and die—hardly. But the Earth may be very different in just a hundred years than the place we inherited: species are vanishing and ecosystems are being ravaged; humans are impacting everything from the deepest ocean to the most inaccessible mountain glaciers, from lion populations in East Africa to stringweed in the Galapagos, from the oceans' chemical make-up to the boreal forest's ability to sequester carbon.