Biodiversity, contraception and perverse subsidies… what do they have in common? Anthony Field, Senior Campaigns Officer at WWF, talks to WWF ambassador and Oxford University environmental scientist Professor Norman Myers. Norman defies us to see the links between our own lifestyles and our impact on species and climate change.


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Interview transcript

WWF: You met Margaret Thatcher many years ago. She gave you 30 seconds to make your pitch. What did you say in those 30 seconds to make Margaret Thatcher want to hear more?
NM: I would like to have run past her what I view as the ethical argument, that is, what right do we have to knock off all those species. But knowing that her life revolved around the economy I thought I'd emphasise that a lot of species out there support our utilitarian daily welfare in the form of new drugs, new food, new industrial raw materials. I gave her the figures for the rosy periwinkle in Madagascar. I think it confers about half a billion dollars worth of benefits now in terms of prolonging life, it saves 60,000 lives per year. She was quite impressed by that.

WWF: In the early Seventies you challenged the theory on extinction rates and identified that we are on a threshold of the sixth mass extinction the world has faced to our knowledge. Can you describe what you found?
NM: Yes I can. I looked at all species. The analyses up till that point had been pretty much limited to mammals, birds and plants which is only two or three per cent of all species in the world. I did look at insects insofar as I could but I then came up with a very rough and ready guesstimate of one species per day disappearing rather than the previous official estimate of one species per year.

WWF: Now am I right in saying you're looking at 50 species a day; you are suggesting...?
NM: Yes, they'll hang on for decades, maybe till the end of the century, but effectively they are doomed.

WWF: You also talked about extinction hotspots. Can you elaborate on what they are?
NM: While we've tried to do many things for many species we've effectively ended up doing only a few things to a moderate number of species. Could we derive some priority opportunities which would enable us to use our scarce funds to more productive effect?

And I pondered this for 20 years, and after that time I had a thought. I began to look at areas which featured two criteria. One is that they possess exceptional concentrations of endemic species, that is species found nowhere else. And they are also subject to exceptional threat of habitat destruction. I call these areas biodiversity hotspots. Today we've got 35 hotspots, and these 35 hotspots contain just over half of all plant species and about two-fifths of all animal species including the insects.

WWF: To the man on the street, why are mass extinctions so important to the world and to us?
NM: If we lost half of all mammals and birds, which is on the cards if we don't do a better job, smartly, there will be a big tragedy. It would be awful, it would be dreadful. But in ecological terms we could probably get by. But this is a bug driven world. If we lost half of all insects we might find our agriculture would be in trouble quite swiftly because we'd lose a lot of the pollinating services of insects, you know our food crops are pollinated primarily by insects of various sorts and if they disappeared we'd really be caught with our pants down.

WWF: What is driving this mass extinction, what is creating this new wave?
NM: This new wave is being created partly by pressure of... big deep breath... too many people, still increasing at quite a rapid rate, an extra 72 million per year. That's one factor, and we know how to fix it, we know it will not cost the Earth. We could supply contraceptives to all those 180 million people in the developing world who don't want any more children but they lack the contraceptive hardware. We should supply them as a basic human right even if there was no population problem. And the cost of that would be only about the same as we spend on military activities every day.

The second big factor driving species extinct is the spread of human activities. In the so-called developing world there are now one and a half billion people. Their collective spending power matches that of the United States. They are buying cars all over the place, using fossil fuel-derived electricity for their household appliances and that generates greenhouse gases. They want to eat meat once a day at least instead of once a week at most. Most of the meat is being raised on - well in China at any rate - most of the meat is being raised on grain and soya beans. The soya beans come from, guess where, comes from Brazil at cost of natural forests.

Here we are at 10 o'clock in the morning and I've had a banana for breakfast. That may have come from a plantation in western Ecuador which used to be one of the hottest of hotspots. It isn't any longer because it had to make way for banana plantations. So maybe I've been lending a hand with a machete and matchbox at work in Amazonia or Borneo, goodness knows.

WWF: At the very end there you mention one connection between the UK and mass extinctions.
NM: People in this country are helping to drive the mass extinction that's occurring right around the world but most especially in the tropics and most especially the tropical rainforests, by their consumption habits. If we boil the kettle and we put in enough water for two cups rather than one, that is contributing to the day when one third of Bangladesh will disappear beneath the waves. And most especially the Sundarbans Reserve which contains 600 tigers, the biggest remaining population of tigers in the whole world. So our consumption habits in the UK is overtaking the last remaining habitat of the biggest population of tiger... and there's lots and lots of linkages like that.

I have a little notice on my bathroom mirror and when I brush my teeth in the evening I say to myself: "Hey, what have you done during the world [day] that is unwittingly but effectively and increasingly threatening species in Borneo, in Amazonia, in South Africa, in god knows where."

And I also ask myself: "What have I done during the day," and often enough my answer has to be 'nothing', "to persuade government to cut back on all those subsidies that promote excessive use of fossil fuels?" We should be getting out of fossil fuels as fast as we can move. They should be taxed up to the elbow. But instead of that they're subsidised, it's crazy! We should work to get rid of those perverse subsidies. When we look at all subsidies in six sectors, that is agriculture, fossil fuels, road transportation, water, forests, fisheries, they amount to two trillion dollars a year. Two trillion dollars. In Britain a typical taxpayer pays £1,500 to fund these stupid subsidies and then has to pay another £500 a year to clean up the environmental mess. Why should we subsidise the oil companies? They're making huge profits, they don't need a penny of subsidies. Somewhat similar in the agricultural sector: subsidies for farmers to overload their croplands which leads to soil compaction and soil erosion, overuse of synthetic fertilisers, overuse of pesticides and so on and so on.

I think if people in this country knew that their tax money is being spent in ridiculous ways like that they would march on Whitehall. But they don't know. And so I think that one of the main functions of WWF could be to educate the public to this absurd schemozzle that's going on. I do believe that's there's nothing we could do that would help biodiversity more than by leaning on the government to get rid of these subsidies.

WWF: What would happen if the current trend in mass extinction were to run its course? Mass extinction isn't just about species being lost.
NM: The stock example in that context lies with the tsunami of Boxing Day a couple of years ago. There does seem to be no doubt at all that the impact of that huge wave would have been reduced by half if the mangrove forests along the coast of Sumatra and where else had been safeguarded. But most of the mangrove forests have gone and so the tsunami had huge gaps and could rush in land long distances. This was somewhat the same with the Hurricane Katrina disaster. But we're still getting rid of mangrove forests in various parts of the tropics at a time when we're being told time after time that global warming is on its way and we can soon expect Hurricane Katrinas hitting us every couple of weeks.

WWF: Finally, is there still hope for the planet?
NM: I've been asking myself for the last 20 years: "Well why do I get out of bed in the morning and go into battle to struggle with all these problems which just keep getting bigger and bigger?" So why don't I go off and sell second-hand cars and make myself a nice comfortable living without all this hassle of battling with political leaders who will not lead?

So I ask myself: "Well why do I keep at it?"

I think that I am alive at a time when this generation of people in the world have the chance to stop a mass extinction. Now no other generation in the past has faced a challenge like this because the problem wasn't there. And no generation in the future will have this opportunity to stop a mass extinction, because if we don't fix it in this generation then folks in the future will have nothing left to do but pick up the pieces off the floor that we pass on to them.

So I think we are a very privileged generation. My god, we could stop a mass extinction, the sort of thing that's happened only five times in the past in, what is it, four billion years of life? And we're alive at this particular time? I think I'm fortunate beyond dreams to be alive at a time like this and engage in a campaign of this sort. Wow, fantastic!