"We breathe the same air, eat from the same sources, share the same turf, need the same water [as all other living creatures]. Once we humans were just another animal, living off the savannas and shores . . . we still do—and we believe otherwise at our own peril. But—a big but—we’re now so distracted by our planet’s uncorked climate blowing away our rooftops, firebombing our forests, mauling our coasts, and scorching our crops that, too often, we forget that one of the biggest phase shifts in Earth’s history, a global holocaust against life itself, is also underway.

Like two vipers coiled in a deadly double-helix, the unbridled climate and mass extinction are "one indivisible crisis—a global health emergency,” as the world’s 300 top medical journals wrote in masse to the UN in 2023. Meaning:

• A third of humanity’s food supply doomed, should pollinators succumb.
• Protein famines after 2 degrees C, when virtually all corals die along with fish and shellfish who depend on the reefs.
• Tropical plants for our medicines withered.
• Monocultured crops, their genetic stocks extinct except for a few frozen relics in seed banks, defenseless from pandemics.

As all that happens, tempers shorten and violence heightens—any police blotter can correlate heat with mayhem. Wars break out over dwindling water. Refugees flee parched lands, stoking fears of hungry invading hordes, emboldening dictators and vigilantes to stop them. Like thawing glaciers, laws melt.

As pernicious new human pathogens race around a teeming, warming planet, governments like the US and the Dutch print extra money to sustain millions of quarantined citizens, quenching panic but inflating their economies. Even medical miracles that quash viruses can’t cure grocery sticker shock, so angry, anxious people turn to autocrats who promise to revive an affordable, mythical past when no ravenous foreigners threatened to steal their jobs. The easiest way for the autocrats to fuel their reign is to drill more, so temperatures mount even faster. Fires spread, winds roar, rivers surge, coasts shrink, species fade, and panic returns.

Eventually people overthrow self-serving, inept demagogues, but it’s a changed world. Amid the madness, the Center for Biological Diversity’s ecologists and lawyers keep on, submitting new candidates for protection. . . . It’s not just about them. Every weed, snail, or slug they shelter also means saving land and waters where they dwell.

The US still isn’t a signatory to the UN’s 30x30 goal of conserving at least 30 percent of lands and waters by 2030—the biggest conservation plan ever contemplated: more than doubling global protection of terrestrial, inland water, and coastal regions, and quadrupling marine protection. But in 2021, to circumvent entrenched fossil-fueled politics blocking participation, the US simply began its own 30x30 plan, entitled America the Beautiful. . . .  [but then, after publication of this book in 2024, came the Trump 2 administration and recession of practically all of the US environmental protection and land, water, wildlife conservation regulations and programs]. . . . 

The 30 billion tons of CO2 we still emit annually has us on a trajectory for a 4.3 degrees C (temperature) increase by the end of the century, unless business as usual radically changes.

It must. It comes down to two simple things humanity can do to rein in both runaway temperatures and the loss of at least a third of all species—likely more, as each loss cascades into many others.

Stop running modern life on ancient carbon, and let forests return.
. . . The alternative is we lose control of the situation. . . .  (S)o does it really matter that more than two-thirds of all birds now are chickens we raise? Life seems to go on, right?

It’s a question that’s unanswerable until it’s too late, when we find out the hard way. “No jobs on a dead planet,” notes Center for Biological Diversity co-founder Peter Galvin, reminding us that it’s best to err on the side of caution. It’s never smart to see how many foundation bricks you can remove before the building falls on you.

Either way, the biodefenders’ work will have been worth it. If humans aren’t among the species that survive into this planet’s next hotter phase, some percentage of the flora and fauna they’ve managed to load into the ark will replenish the Earth, just as in five previous extinctions—like the birds, who, against all hope, survived Chicxulub.

Or, if we’re lucky enough to be among them, they’ll be our companions. And our food."
​
May we thrive together.   NOTE: YOU MAY ALSO WANT TO WATCH THIS PRESENTATION BY AUTHOR Alan Weisman:

Most of the information and viewpoints found on the Conservation South website focus on issues, opportunities, and resources directly concerned with environmental conservation and restoration in the southern U.S. This book review is different: the topic is a “deep time” perspective. British paleontologist and evolutionary biologist Thomas Halliday has authored Otherlands: Journey in Earth’s Extinct Ecosystems (Penguin Random House, 2022), a fascinating overview of how Earth’s ecosystems and biota have dramatically changed over the long 4-billion-years timeline of life and tectonic forces on our planet. Each of Halliday’s sixteen chapters describes wholesale changes in ecosystems and life forms that have repeatedly occurred throughout eras of Earth history. 

Earth is now a “human planet,” asserts Halliday, nearly totally affected by we humans. He  observes, “The world as it is today is a direct result . . . of what has gone before. Much of life in the past happens in a steady state of slow-changing existence, but there are times when everything can be upended. . . .  It is by looking at the past that palaeobiologists, ecologists and climate scientists can address the near- and long-term future of our planet, casting backwards to predict possible futures. Unlike past occasions . . . our (human) species is in an unusual position of control over the outcome (of a fundamentally altered biosphere). We know that change is occurring, we know that we are responsible, we know what will happen if it continues, we know that we can stop it, and we know how. The question is whether we will try.”           <continued . . .>

Dan Chapman, veteran journalist, conservationist, and writer for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Charlotte Observer, Winston-Salem Journal, Congressional Quarterly, and the US Fish and Wildlife Service, has authored a fascinating new book. A Road Running Southward: Following John Muir’s Journey through an Endangered Land (Island Press, 2022) blends biography with an accounting of Muir’s observations in his 1867 post-war, thousand-mile transect of the American South. Chapman’s book spells out Muir’s personal awakening to threats to the natural environment, and offers a critical assessment of today’s perils to environmental resources in the southern U.S.
​
As some may recall, I authored my own account of “John Muir’s Southern Trek, 150 Years Later” in the sesquicentennial year of Muir’s southern  adventure. My perspective differs from that presented by Chapman. Because my professional career has been in land and environmental conservation, the focus of my account was to identify the many places along Muir’s route where natural areas and native biota have been protected through the efforts of conservationists, and where one today can observe and imagine the natural scenes and biodiversity that Muir would have seen in his trek across the American South. Like Chapman, my vehicle for following Muir’s route was also my trustworthy old Subaru.   <continued...>

Southern Conservation Partners shares the concerns expressed by many friends and defenders of the forest ecosystems of the southern U.S., which are currently being exploited and threatened by mass removal for export as wood pellet biofuels principally in Europe. Many of the forests being cut are already imperiled river bottomlands forests ecosystems that are critically necessary for sustenance of the environmental health of the southern U.S. region.The biofuel producing companies are “green washing” their activities and propaganda based on intentionally false and deceptive claims that cutting and burning trees on a mass scale is “carbon neutral” because the forests may regrow sometime in the long-term future and hence forests are a “renewable” resource. Most of the processing plants that collect, chip, and process cut trees in huge volumes for export are located in marginalized, economically distressed communities, and those industrial plants are operating at full capacity 24/7 and emitting huge quantities of airborne pollutants. The Southern Environmental Law Center, the Dogwood Alliance, and the National Wildlife Federation are leading defense actions to save our forests. 
      We recommend you watch this 30-minute documentary film: Burned: Are Trees the New Coal?
     In addition, the North Carolina Wildlife Federation and its coastal Island Wildlife Chapter recently presented an excellent, profoundly important webinar about this crisis. VIEW the recording of that webinar.
     Several other resources on this important issue:
Wood Pellet Map
Carbon Markets 
Article--How Marginalized Communities in the South are Paying the Price for “Green Energy” in Europe

Forests are vital elements to our nation’s infrastructure and environmental health. Strong climate action rooted in justice has never been more urgent. Valuing standing forests is our best climate defense! Take the “Stand 4 Forests Pledge” HERE.

The following is excerpted from a National Geographic magazine essay (Sept. 2020 issue) and from Enric Sala’s book, The Nature of Nature: Why We Need the Wild (2020). (Britain’s Prince Charles and Harvard biologist E.O. Wilson furnish the book’s introductions.)

“If we degrade habitats, animals become stressed and shed more viruses. On the other hand, habitats with diverse species harbor less disease. . . . Nature controls viruses – filtering them out of the system – that we’re only now recognizing. . . .
      "We are all in this together, all species on the planet. So what can we do? While the world has stepped up to help those in need during the COVID-19 outbreaks, we might also start thinking about how to prevent the next zoonotic pandemic.
       "We have seen, again and again, that even though we don’t know what most of them do, all wild animals have important jobs that keep our biosphere running. If we’ve learned anything from our study of natural ecosystems as it applies to these recent diseases, it’s that instead of exterminating wild animals to stop the passage of disease to people, we should do the opposite: We should safeguard the natural ecosystems that are their homes and, if needed, help set them back on their path to maturity through rewilding.
       "If we degrade habitats, animals become stressed and shed more viruses. On the other hand, habitats with diverse microbial, plant, and animal species harbor less disease. Biodiversity dilutes any viruses that emerge and provides a natural shield that absorbs the fallout from pathogens.
        "Clamping down on the illegal trade of wildlife, ending deforestation, protecting intact ecosystems, educating people about the risks of consuming wildlife, changing the way we produce food, phasing out fossil fuels, and transitioning to a circular economy: these are the things we can and must do.
        "Even if it’s just for selfish reasons—for our own survival—now more than ever, we need the wild. A healthy natural world is our best antivirus.”