David Levy – Who will take responsibility, and so act for our collective good? – Dec 16
I am an environmentalist who officially started activism in 1982.
Since then I have had the opportunity to observe the changes and improvements in conservation for the last 35 years. Despite all the talking and so called understandings about the eco-system approach to managing our resources and biology, the overall pattern I have witnessed is for exploitation to govern our thinking and our actions.
This applies to our regulator, to governance, and to industry applicants and the protective conservation lobby.
The philosophy behind their collective actions is the economics for perpetual growth.
Successive Chancellors of the Exchequer have built their policies around their understanding that the country is a bottomless pit of opportunity. To husband resources, to lay fallow and to allow for re-growth, isn’t part of their planning repertoire.
Where a law for protection exists, it is failed by the lack of resources to deliver enforcement. In other words, the collective powers are not serious about the delivery of future focused planning or genuine protection.
What is most damning of all is that environmental bodies have been reluctant to press the case for change. Having taken a seat at Government’s table, where their finances are assured, they have become a neutered voice only able to tackle small issues and not the overall patterns of degeneration.
They have become the justification leg of this stool of ineptitude.
Withdraw this support, and the stool of inaction would collapse. Things would then be more transparent and change would inevitably have to happen.
That means words would at long last have the support of enforcement action.
Nowhere is this matter more critical than in the management of global oceans, and nowhere is there more need for change to the constant destruction of species and ecosystems around the world.
Until we can function as humanity taking responsibility for our collective good then we as a species are destined for famine and ultimate extinction.
David Levy
