Last year, The Living Planet Report 2020 revealed that the Earth’s total animal population fell by an average of 68% since 1970.  That’s almost seven out of every ten of the world’s entire animal population gone, in only 50 years!  The report, which was provided by the World Wildlife Fund and the Zoological Society of London, went on to say that in areas closest to the equator, which we believe are on the front lines in terms of exposure to the effects of climate change, losses may have been as high as 94%.  

Alarming is not a term that even remotely comes close to describing that pronouncement!

Such numbers have enormous implications for how we need to prop up our conservation efforts, of course.  But also how we urgently need to rethink our entire approach to things like land usage, agriculture, travel and tourism, and how our every action affects every aspect of the web of life – indeed of the entire biosphere we depend on for our very existence.

It’s easy to understand how the presence of animals plays a hugely significant role in keeping the Earth’s ecology in balance.  As we go about the business of living in our techno-industrial civilization – development, resource extraction, managing our waste, runoff, and emissions, as well the million other economic activities that power our world – we run the constant risk of impacting wildlife, often burying them before we’ve even had a chance to notice our transgressions against them.  Over a long enough time horizon, it’s inevitable that we’ll disrupt the cycle of life to the point that our world is no longer habitable for humans.  This is not hyperbole or embellishment.  It is fact.  

Now an issue on this scale is difficult to get our heads around, and none of us on our own could ever figure out what to do about it.  But here is a simple guideline you can use.  Trust in the reality that there is such a thing as objective truth.  It may be difficult to know what that is many times, but know that it exists independently of how you or I, or anyone else may feel about it.  And the best principle I can give you is, follow the science.  Beware the man who tells you ‘I don’t think science knows’.  That’s cover for someone who wants to remain unaccountable.  Science is how we know.  The scientific method is one of our greatest achievements – a process by which we continuously improve our understanding of what’s really happening in our natural world.

You must also be prepared for the fact that the answer science will provide you will often clash with our perceived best interests economically.  And it most certainly won’t care about our politics.  We have to be prepared to do what our best science tells us needs to be done.  Period.

Beyond that, the solutions – the precise technologies and the specific innovations we will develop to protect our environment, restore animal populations and thus save ourselves – will come from each of us.  Millions, even billions of individual initiatives that, in their totality will make the difference.

For us here at CCA the focus is whales and dolphins.  Doing right by them, to protect their habitats, their lives and often their liberty.  This is the path we’ve chosen, and will remain committed to for the long-term, but there are a great many different pieces to this puzzle.  Pick one and run with it.  We all matter in this fight.

I’d like to talk about one of those many pieces, because it illustrates so well what we humans have done to our world, and what we’ve brought upon ourselves.  And that is the plight of sharks.

Sharks are one of the most iconic creatures associated with the ocean.  They belong to a group known as cartilaginous fishes, because the only part of their skeleton not made from this soft, flexible tissue is their teeth.  Though most of us consider them the most feared creatures in the sea, we understand very well how they are ecologically-vital.  Tragically, the number of sharks alive in the wild has plummeted by 71% over the past 50 years.   Over that time, the fishing of sharks has more than tripled.  Often only for their fins, with the animal thrown back overboard to sink and drown.  Though this practice has now been banned in many places (Canada passed its legislation in 2019)  it is still very much legal in many parts of the globe.

While shark attacks kill perhaps a dozen of us in a typical year, we kill more than 100 million of them.

Now consider that the earliest fossil evidence for ancestral sharks goes back to about 450 million years ago, during the Late Ordovician Period.  That is how long they’ve been on Earth, and you could not be more woven into the ecological fabric of life than that.  It also means that sharks have survived all five of the Earth’s mass extinction events – starting with one that predated the end of the dinosaurs by more than 300 million years.  Perhaps because they were a deep water species, or a dietary generalist that could exploit different levels of the water-column.  Likely their incredible diversity helped.  Whatever the explanation, they made it through five mass extinctions.  But it’s far from certain that they will survive us.

So how do we help them?  Well, banning shark-finning for certain.  But also we need to support efforts like those of the Convention on Biological Diversity to identify ecologically or biologically significant marine areas (what they term EBSAs).  And by supporting the development of tools, data and research methodologies, and sharing them across a range of intergovernmental, regional and national organizations that need to do the work.

We need money, volunteers, an ever-growing public awareness.  A shared understanding of what’s at stake, so that we can continuously improve the scientific basis for biodiversity conservation and sustainability.  We don’t want sharks, or any other creature, to disappear under our watch.

For The Orca’s Voice, 

Anna, Canadian Cetacean Alliance