There is an island in the South Pacific called Easter Island. When I was studying at Peking University, I often heard news called the mystery of Easter Island. Why the mystery of Easter Island? There are many giant stone statues looking into the distance. At that time, science and technology could not explain, saying that there was no grass, no trees, no people on the island, where did the stone statues come from? Some people said that the alien carved the stone statues on the island, so it became a mystery. Later, scientific archaeology solved the mystery. There were human beings on the island, from 1,000 to 20,000. Easter Island is very beautiful. Since the beginning of primitive civilization, human beings have totem worship, nature worship, and many religions. There is a religion, that is, among different ethnic groups, who carve larger and better stone statues than others. In this way, it becomes a kind of culture and art, a product of primitive civilization. People cut down trees, and it caused desertification before new trees planted. This rich island eventually became barren. All the plants could not grow, and the people on Easter Island were extinct. The human being is now taking the road of Easter Island again, exactly the same road, for art, for convenience, for the crazy expansion of industrial civilization.
Earth Overshoot Day, which has been studied by some international scientists. They calculated that last year's Earth Overshoot Day was August 1st, and this year's Earth Overshoot Day is July 25th, which is moving forward every year. The so-called Earth Overshoot Day means that the Earth entered the ecological deficit of this year on that day, and human beings exhausted the renewable resources of the Earth this year. Human beings have consumed all that the Earth can provide us this year, and what we are consuming now is the future. We used to have a concept called intergenerational equity, which is that our current generation should leave some foundation for future generations to survive. There is no need to talk about intergenerational equity now, or we can talk less about it. Because the foundation of our generation's survival is seriously threatened.
I have just talked about the four civilizations that mankind has experienced, and now I will talk about the five-mass extinction that the earth has experienced. This time I have further enlarged the time scale. The earth has existed for 4.5 billion years. If we compress it into one day, it will be 4.5 billion years compressed into 24 hours. Dinosaurs live on the earth for about 10 minutes, and humans only live for one or two minutes. Humans often sympathize with dinosaurs, but we have no life for them.
We are probably going through the sixth mass extinction. Since 1900, 400 species of vertebrates have been extinct, which normally takes at least 10,000 years; over the past 65 million years, one or two species of mammals have been extinct per million years, and over the past 500 years, at least 80 species of mammals have been extinct. On May 6, the United Nations Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) released its first Global Assessment of Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services, which shows that unless heavy intervention is taken, about 1 million species worldwide will face extinction and many species may be extinct in the coming decades. Therefore, it is a necessary and urgent task to carry out environmental protection actions and protect the natural ecology. This is the conclusion drawn from our study of 600 million years of earth evolution history from fossils.
Building green "The Belt and Road Initiative" together, green development and environmental protection synergy is the future of global environmental governance. The China Biodiversity Conservation and Green Development Foundation (CBCGDF) hopes that more and more young people with lofty ideals will take action to embody the concept of ecological civilization in their hearts, raise their awareness of environmental protection and take the road of green, environmental protection, and sustainable development.
(Note: This article is based on the recording and is not verified by the speaker.)
(Photo credit: CBCGDF)
Original Chinese article:
http://www.cbcgdf.org/NewsShow/4854/9606.html
By / Li Xue