From 600+ conversations with the world’s leading thinkers.
It was her death that actually made us say 'right, that's it – we've talked a lot but we haven't done anything. Now we've got to do something'. And that's when Zoo Check began which is what we were called in those days.
I am a father of two small children. When you have children, you have to ask yourself what the world will look like in the next 80-100 years, because people get that old these days if everything goes well. Last but not least, as a father I see it as my responsibility to think about my actions and my motives.
Every plant has to endlessly sense and monitor a number of environmental parameters; and is constantly called upon to make decisions. This is not the place to list numerous cases of intelligence behaviour in plants, a huge volume of such examples can be found in scientific literature.
Seeing the Earth from space gives you an unfiltered understanding of it. Until you see the Earth from this vantage point, everything you knew about the planet was based on something that someone else had told you – based on their own filtered understanding and bias.
I also worry greatly about how our world is now, with so many people and few resources to sustain them… with countries who are threatening each other with atomic weapons…. Weapons which can never be used because they would destroy the earth.
The first thing to do for our ecology is not to use less electricity, it's to cease buying things that are not useful.
If morality is the science of the good, ethics is the study of that science, and bioethics is the study of that science as it relates to biosphere.
It is difficult to imagine a graver threat; or an area of human endeavour or global ecology in which the profound consequences of runaway climate change would not be disastrous. Already, it is estimated that around 300,000 people die every year as a direct result of climate change.
We are now trapping in the Earth's atmospheric oceanic system that used to go into space dangerous amounts of greenhouse gases which is equal to four Hiroshima sized nuclear bombs per second. Imagine for a moment if we had alien spaceships hovering above earth, dropping four Hiroshima nuclear bombs into our atmosphere every second. What would we do? We would drop everything until we got rid of them.
We have the power of knowledge- for example to save the whales. The whales are obviously not going to save us. We need to have solidarity among humans, that the big problems we are facing, that affect all of humanity and we all equally have the responsibility to do something about it.
Taken together, mass migration, mass starvation and mass extinctions are what we will see if we sleep walk into a future of unmitigated climate change. These stresses will ruin economies and drive competition over dwindling resources.
We need to get out of the peacetime footing that we are on and we need to get onto a wartime footing against this climate crisis. During World War II, the US allocated 50% of GDP roughly to fighting, and I believe we need to get to 50% of GDP sustained over 5 to 10 years.