Killing off biodiversity is going to cost the planet dearly - Andy Brown

Here in Britain, we like to pride ourselves on the amount of effort we put in to protect wildlife. Yet in my own lifetime we have lost almost all the wildflower meadows that used to exist and there have been drastic declines in the number and the diversity of plants, insects, soil organisms, birds, bats and fish that share the environment with us.

The air around us used to teem with such great quantities of insects that it was not possible to drive through the Yorkshire countryside without having to stop and clean windscreens. Experiments have been done that prove modern cars are just as likely to hit any flying creatures that exist as the vehicles that existed fifty years back. The reason we don’t hit them anymore is that they’ve gone. We’ve lost both the bulk numbers of those creatures and much of the variety.

The consequences of that are that there is a lot less food left for birds to eat and so there are fewer swallows for our children to see arriving on our shores in summer as well as fewer butterflies to entrance them.

Globally the damage has been faster and more extreme. We have lost great swathes of rain forest and the wonderful variety of trees and creatures that survived within it. Our oceans have been stripped of fish and the sea floor scraped clean in many places. Fish such as cod which once grew to the size of a large human being are now rarely able to survive and grow to anything like that size.

The loss of the rainforests has been particularly relentless. Mile after mile of plantations of one single crop such as soya bean have replaced complex ecosystems where wildlife thrived.

Part of the problem has been the sheer number of people that the planet now feeds. Creatures such as rats which live comfortably in the environments we create have prospered. Carefully selected and highly bred species such as Cavendish bananas have been grown in enormous numbers. But variety has gone as land has been sprayed with chemicals to try and protect overbred monoculture crops.

It isn’t, however, just the increase in the number of people that is the problem. What is much more challenging is the lifestyle more and more of us have developed. Some of our greatest successes such as the huge increase in living standards which has taken place for millions of people are also the direct cause of much of the loss of variety of life which we are inflicting on our planet.

Somehow, we have to learn how to provide good quality standards of living for around 8 billion people without impoverishing the environment we live amongst. So far most of the efforts that have been made to do this have focused on encouraging us all to consume and recycle in responsible ways.

The truth is that this is a very small part of the solution that requires individuals to try and make a big difference to their lifestyles in order to put right problems that they didn’t actually create. Much more of the problems can be traced to irresponsible production and distribution systems that make individual companies a lot of money but put our future at risk.

When a water company systematically decides to dump sewage into our rivers bacteria suck up increased amounts of oxygen and other creatures die. When huge factory ships are allowed to hoover up entire stocks of fish it can take decades for life to recover, and sustainable local fishing fleets lose their livelihood.

Each year the amount of plastic that is produced increases and that has resulted in a thin layer of plastic particles covering the entire planet which microscopic organisms eat. Oil and gas companies are still increasing the amount of carbon they pump into the environment directly and knowingly heating up the entire planet.

At the moment those who cause the most damage don’t pay for that damage. They are able to ignore the costs of the consequences of irresponsible methods of production and distribution and leave the rest of us to pick up the bill or to live with the consequences. So, if we want to live in a world where wildlife thrives and life on earth is prospering there is one simple principle that we need to apply to taxation. The polluter pays.

Signing a trade deal that allows some of the most irresponsibly produced food on the planet to come onto British markets in order to placate a bullying arrogant President who is thinking only of short term profit is, by contrast, certain to make things worse.

Andy Brown is the Green Party councillor for Aire Valley in North Yorkshire.