And the extent of the polar ice has been critical, reflecting sunlight back off its white surface, cooling the whole earth. A thick belt of jungles around the equator has piled plant on plant to capture as much of the sun’s energy as possible, adding moisture and oxygen to the global air currents. Mangroves and coral reefs along thousands of miles of coast have harbored nurseries of fish species that, when mature, then range into open waters. Huge herds on the plains have kept the grasslands rich and productive by fertilizing the soils. Phytoplankton at the ocean’s surface and immense forests straddling the north have helped to balance the atmosphere by locking away carbon. And the rich and thriving living world around us has been key to this stability. The Holocene has been one of the most stable periods in our planet’s great history.įor 10,000 years, the average temperature has not wavered up or down by more than one degree Celsius. For 65 million years, it’s been at work reconstructing the living world… until we come to the world we know… our time. A meteorite impact triggered a catastrophic change in the earth’s conditions. The last time it happened was the event that brought the end of the age of the dinosaurs. Above, very few.Ī mass extinction has happened five times in life’s four-billion-year history. Below the line are a multitude of lifeforms. A boundary that marks a profound, rapid, global change. Great numbers of species disappear and are suddenly replaced by a few.Īll that evolution undone. And then, every hundred million years or so, after all those painstaking processes, something catastrophic happens, a mass extinction. Over billions of years, nature has crafted miraculous forms, each more complex and accomplished than the last. By and large, it’s a story of slow, steady change. Over time, I began to learn something about the earth’s evolutionary history. This particular one has a scientific name of Tiltonicerus, because the first one ever was found near this quarry here in Tilton, in the middle of England. And it lived about 180 million years ago. And in life the animal itself lived in the chamber here and spread out its tentacles to catch its prey. When I was a boy, I spent all my spare time searching through rocks in places like this… for buried treasure.įossils. All this was absolutely clear, it was… only just stopped being a working quarry. It was a great place to come to as a boy, because this is, um, ironstone workings, but it was disused. It was called natural history because that’s essentially what it was all about… history. We had very little understanding of how the living world actually worked. Boo! As much now as I did when I was a boy.ĬARBON IN ATMOSPHERE: 280 PARTS PER MILLION I’ve always had a passion to explore, to have adventures, to learn about the wilds beyond. In truth, I couldn’t imagine living my life in any other way. I’ve experienced the living world firsthand in all its variety and wonder. I’ve traveled to every part of the globe. I’ve been lucky enough to spend my life exploring the wild places of our planet. It’s only now that I appreciate how extraordinary. This film is my witness statement and my vision for the future, the story of how we came to make this our greatest mistake, and how, if we act now, we can yet put it right. This too is happening as a result of bad planning and human error and it too will lead to what we see here. Yet the way we humans live on Earth now is sending biodiversity into a decline. And it relies on its biodiversity to run smoothly. We rely entirely on this finely tuned life-support machine. Leading lives that interlock in such a way that they sustain each other. Working together to benefit from the energy of the sun and the minerals of the earth. Billions of individuals, and millions of kinds of plants and animals… …dazzling in their variety and richness. The living world is a unique and spectacular marvel. I’m talking about the loss of our planet’s wild places, its biodiversity. The true tragedy of our time is still unfolding across the globe, barely noticeable from day to day. Many people regarded it as the most costly in the history of mankind.īut Chernobyl was a single event. It triggered an environmental catastrophe that had an impact across Europe. The explosion was a result of bad planning and human error. The nearby nuclear power station of Chernobyl exploded.Īnd in less than 48 hours, the city was evacuated. It had everything a community would need for a comfortable life.īut on the 26th of April, 1986, it suddenly became uninhabitable. This city in Ukraine was once home to almost 50,000 people.
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