Marine PAs have grown by 400% to about 2.1 million sq-km. Their report shows that since 1965, land based “Protected Areas” (PAs) have grown by 600% to 18 million square-kilometers.

Sale, from the UN University in Ontario, Canada, published “Ongoing global biodiversity loss and the need to move beyond protected areas.” In July 2011, Camilo Mora, from University of Hawaii and Dalhousie University, and Peter F. “…leave a margin, a sanctuary, where some of life’s beauty can take refuge.” After forty years of international ocean dumping bans, the oceans are more toxic and more acidic, not less. After thirty years of climate deals, we have more CO 2 emissions each year, not less. The Rio+20 Conference proved once again that government conferences change nothing. Likewise, as we gain 30% energy efficiency in heating buildings, we double the average space-per-person and then add more people, resulting in 300% more space to heat. For the last thirty years, even with a massive increase in wilderness groups, species diversity has plummeted and the rate of decline has accelerated. These failures are not necessarily the fault of environmental groups, who have helped slow down the destructive impacts the industrial juggernaut, but the failures do demonstrate that all our collective efforts are not yet remotely enough.įor example, observing the “ Living Planet Index” of species diversity, we find that after 1980 – even with the creation of new endangered species regulations, parks, and protected areas – terrestrial and marine species have declined. Today, we have more environmental groups and less forests, more “protected areas” and less species, more carbon taxes and greater carbon emissions, more “green” products and less green space. “The major problems in the world are the result of the difference between how nature works and the way people think.” - Gregory Bateson, An Ecology of Mind.įorty years have passed since the founding of Greenpeace and the first UN environment meeting in Stockholm, fifty years since the groundbreaking Silent Spring by Rachel Carson, and 115 years since Svante Arrhenius warned that burning hydrocarbons would heat Earth’s atmosphere.

Bateson ecology of mind