The trail of destruction left behind by us human beings is mammoth - Andy Brown

When humans first arrived in the Americas there were giant sloths that were capable of eating whole avocados which then germinated after passing through their digestive systems. The 20 foot high sloths have gone and the plant now relies on humans doing the propagation job artificially. When the Europeans arrived, there were over a billion passenger pigeons flying across the plains. They proved to be very good eating. The species is now completely extinct.

Much the same happened when humans arrived in Australia. The first peoples finished off the giant kangaroos whilst the European immigrants killed off a lot more animals including the Tasmanian tiger.

When it comes to entire habitats the evidence is a little harder to interpret. In a museum in Morocco I saw stone paintings showing people swimming in rivers and hunting in a green and pleasant land. It is now the Sahara desert. It is not thought that human removal of trees and growing of cereal crops is entirely responsible for the change. But it didn’t help - and ever since the Romans that desert has been expanding because of human activity.

We do know for certain that right now the great chunks of the world’s rain forests are being cut down every year. Even the huge Brazilian rain forest is experiencing growing frequency and larger coverage of droughts.

In Britain we are in real danger of losing some iconic species. Each year there are fewer curlews calling out across our moors and it is now rare to hear a cuckoo. Butterfly populations are way down, and a sighting of a dragonfly is no longer a common experience for children.

We do however have the advantage that we can see some of the worst destruction in real time both up close and via satellites and we know that there have been some very successful efforts to stop and reverse the damage.

Here in Britain, we have managed to restore species like the red kite and are making good progress with storks. Some of the restoration projects make excellent economic sense with beavers in the right places being a very cheap way to reduce downstream flooding.

Unfortunately, those efforts are nowhere near as successful when it comes to our oceans. There things are getting worse, not better and not just globally but locally. Britain used to have some of the finest marine environments on the planet and a strong and economically important fishing industry. Much of that has now gone.

The main cause of the problem is the way that some fishing fleets have operated. Dragging cages across our ocean floors is a very successful way of catching some very tasty scallops which fetch a high price. It is an even better way of smashing everything on the sea bed so comprehensively that it can destroy every other form of fishery and devastate wildlife.

Factory fishing vessels can do every bit as much harm with their nets that are many miles long taking everything from the ocean only to discard much of the catch.

Allowing such practices to damage wildlife and ruin the livelihoods of Yorkshire communities operating smaller and more sustainable fishing boats is criminally short sighted. Yet, almost unbelievably, we have allowed that practice to take place not just in the open oceans but also in areas that carry official designation as ocean nature reserves.

Many of Britain’s offshore nature reserves are protected only in name with it being completely legal to destroy their ocean floor.

If we want our oceans to thrive then they need genuine protection not just lip service and we must immediately ban cage dragging not just in the 5 per cent of British waters that are claimed to be protected but everywhere in our waters. Doing that would benefit the British fishing industry. It would increase fish stocks and bring back viable small boat fishing to our Yorkshire coastal community.

At the moment our coastal communities are beginning to see some jobs return as a result of the need to service offshore wind farms. Whilst being constructed these do significant harm to coastal environments but once up and running they come with an important and little reported side benefit. You can’t industrially trawl for fish around a wind farm and they are accidentally turning into some of our best protected marine environments.

If we use our creativity there are plenty of excellent ways to combine food production with environmental protection and energy generation. If we allow short term greed to dominate our policy making then we should fear for our wildlife on land and in the seas.

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