Biodiversity

This saddening and frightening BBC report on the third Global Biodiversity Outlook (GBO-3) was forwarded to me this morning by my friend Gary at CHI SPHERE. The basic principle of karma makes good sense to me: that actions have consequences--good actions bring about beneficial consequences, while unskillful, harm-causing actions bring about undesirable ones. It also makes perfect sense to me that this principle should operate on a global as well as an individual scale. The logic is compelling: our actions as a species will inevitably bring proportionate returns. Skillful, conscious actions will serve to benefit all of us who inhabit this planet--including the beautiful diversity of our fellow-travelers on the journey of birth, illness, aging and death. Our careless, ignorant ones will bring the results of carelessness and ignorance that we should have learned to expect. Unhappily, along with all of our brilliant scientific and technical advancements, we are still characterized as a species by a great deal of willful ignorance and a sense of arrogant entitlement when it comes to sharing our natural home with other species, whether plant or animal. Will we learn in time to save ourselves from the perfectly well-known, well-understood and easily anticipated results of our behavior? Or will we choose, instead, to fly in the face of what we know--along with the urgent messages from the planet itself--and suffer the consequences? In the long term, frankly, it matters little to the immense universe, on the backside of which we are the merest pimple.