…for the Family Album
Have a good night, Venus
Month: September 2020
Bullfight in Esquivias endangers public health!
This summer we have not stopped working for animals.
In addition to holding street protests in the main cities of Spain, we have infiltrated the bullfights that continue to be organized, despite the health crisis.
We were witnesses of savagery in Salamanca and denounced.
And now we bring to light these images of the bullfight on August 21 in Esquivias (Toledo).
We have placed the corresponding complaints in the hands of the authorities.
It broke our hearts to witness the Forajido killed in the square.
There is no greater pain than seeing a helpless and bewildered being suffer, unsuccessfully seeking the help of those who applaud every time he bleeds.
We believe that it is important to make these images known, no matter how harsh, so that his death is not in vain.
We live days of uncertainty in a country in crisis and some prefer to continue torturing animals to death instead of working for better normalcy.
Did you know that extraordinary items are still being allocated to rescue bullfighting?
They touch 7.3 million euros and Madrid leads the ranking of the communities that will give the most money to the sector, with up to 4.5 million euros.
It is outrageous!
We are working so that bullfighting is condemned by society and its rejection increases.
Only by joining forces can we ensure that it continues to decline and achieve its abolition once and for all.
Only with you, we are stronger! We need your help now more than ever to confront the powerful bullfighting lobby in Spain.
And I mean… “If bullfighting is an “art form,” then so are ritualistic cult killings.
If bullfighting is “authentic religious drama,” so too is war and genocide.
If the matador is ennobled, let us praise every mass murderer” (Steven Best)
The European Union does not pay extra agricultural subsidies for bullfighting. But part of their annual 30 billion euros in direct aid for agricultural land in the EU Member States also goes to farms that breed fighting bulls.
This is known as “agricultural subsidies”!
Official figures are not available. The Greens estimate that annual subsidies of 130 million euros go to bullfighting.
This is subsidized animal cruelty – nothing less.
Perhaps someone will soon come up with the idea of reviving the witch burnings, which were well attended in the Middle Ages and very popular by bored audiences.
This was also a sad culture in Spain!
Except for a few mentally weak proletarian Germans and a few brain-sick Europeans, this form of “culture” really doesn’t even resonate with the dumbest of the very dumb.
We can be sure that every day there are more and more animal lovers and animal rights activists (= antitaurinos) who see this massacre as a disgrace for their country and want to abolish it.
Time is ticking for the animals and we know, it will end.
My best regards to all, Venus
Fish don’t audibly scream when they’re impaled on hooks or grimace when the hooks are ripped from their mouths, but their behavior offers evidence of their suffering—if we’re willing to look.
Biologist Victoria Braithwaite says that “there is as much evidence that fish feel pain and suffer as there is for birds and mammals.”
For example, when Braithwaite and her colleagues exposed fish to irritating chemicals, the animals behaved as any of us might: They lost their appetite, their gills beat faster, and they rubbed the affected areas against the side of the tank.
It is hard to imagine that swallowing a bait with a fish hook in it does not feel extremely painful.
The fish also shows a terrible fidget in the video in response.
Neurobiologists have long recognized that fish have nervous systems that comprehend and respond to pain.
Even though fish don’t have the same brain structures that humans do—fish do not have a neocortex, for example—Dr. Ian Duncan reminds us that we “have to look at behavior and physiology,” not just anatomy. “It’s possible for a brain to evolve in different ways,” he says.
Watch the video here:
https://www.space.com/melting-ice-sheets-sea-level-rise-2100.html
Melting ice sheets will add over 15 inches to global sea level rise by 2100
By Chelsea Gohd 2 days ago
If humans continue emitting greenhouse gases at the current pace, global sea levels could rise more than 15 inches (38 centimeters) by 2100, scientists found in a new study.
Greenhouse gases emitted by human activity, such as carbon dioxide, contribute significantly to climate change and warming temperatures on planet Earth, studies continue to show. As things heat up, ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica melt. A new study by an international team of more than 60 ice, ocean and atmospheric scientists estimates just how much these melting ice sheets will contribute to global sea levels.
“One of the biggest uncertainties when it comes to how much sea level will rise in the future is how much the ice sheets will contribute,” project leader and ice scientist Sophie Nowicki, now at the University at Buffalo and formerly at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland, said in a statement. “And how much the ice sheets contribute is really dependent on what the climate will do.”
The results of this study show that, if human greenhouse gas emissions continue at the pace they’re currently at, Greenland and Antarctica’s melting ice sheets will contribute over 15 inches (28 centimeters) to global sea levels. This new study is part of the Ice Sheet Model Intercomparison Project (ISMIP6), which is led by NASA Goddard.
The ISMIP6 team investigated how sea levels will rise between 2015 and 2100, exploring how sea levels will change in a variety of carbon-emission scenarios
They found that, with high emissions (like we see now) extending throughout this time period, Greenland’s melting ice sheet will contribute about 3.5 in (9 cm) to global sea level rise. With lower emissions, they estimate that number to be about 1.3 in (3 cm).
Ice sheet loss in Antarctica is a little more difficult to predict, because, while ice shelves will continue to erode on the western side of the continent, East Antarctica could actually gain mass as temperatures rise because of increasing snowfall. Because of this, the team found a larger range of possible ice sheet loss here.
The team determined that ice-sheet loss in Antarctica could boost sea levels up to 12 in (30 cm), with West Antarctica causing up to 7.1 in (18 cm) of sea level rise by 2100 with the highest predicted emissions.
However, to be clear: These increases in global sea levels are just predictions for the years 2015 to 2100, so they don’t account for the significant ice sheet loss that has already taken place between the pre-industrial era and modern day.
“The Amundsen Sea region in West Antarctica and Wilkes Land in East Antarctica are the two regions most sensitive to warming ocean temperatures and changing currents, and will continue to lose large amounts of ice,” Helene Seroussi, an ice scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California, who led the Antarctic ice sheet modeling in the ISMIP6 project, said in the same statement.
“With these new results, we can focus our efforts in the correct direction and know what needs to be worked on to continue improving the projections,” Seroussi said.
These results are in line with estimates made by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), whose 2019 Special Report on Oceans and the Cryosphere showed that melting ice sheets would contribute to about one-third of the total global sea level rise.
According to the 2019 IPCC report, melting ice sheets in Greenland will contribute 3.1 to 10.6 inches (8 to 27 cm) to global sea level rise between the years 2000 and 2100. For Antarctica, the report estimates that melting ice sheets will add 1.2 to 11 inches (3 to 28 cm).
The results from this new work will help to inform the next IPCC report, the sixth overall, which is set to be released in 2022, according to the same statement.
“The strength of ISMIP6 was to bring together most of the ice sheet modeling groups around the world, and then connect with other communities of ocean and atmospheric modelers as well, to better understand what could happen to the ice sheets,” Heiko Goelzer, a scientist from Utrecht University in the Netherlands who is now at NORCE Norwegian Research Centre in Norway, said in the same statement.
“It took over six years of workshops and teleconferences with scientists from around the world working on ice sheet, atmosphere, and ocean modeling to build a community that was able to ultimately improve our sea level rise projections,” added Nowicki, who led the Greenland ice sheet ISMIP6 project. “The reason it worked is because the polar community is small, and we’re all very keen on getting this problem of future sea level right. We need to know these numbers.”
This work was published Sept. 17 in a special issue of the journal The Cryosphere.
Regards Mark
A 12-storey pig farm: has China found the way to tackle animal disease?
21 September 2020
Biosecure farms complete with staff quarantine and chutes for dead pigs are seen as progress, but may carry their own risks.
The buildings do not even look like farms. They are huge grey concrete blocks, many storeys high, which stand side by side in the middle of what might look like a quarry, a “hole” of red earth dug in the heart of a mountain.
We are on the Yaji mountain, which in Chinese means “sacred”, a few kilometres south of the city of Guigang in southern China. What we are looking at is the tallest pig farm in the world; units up to nine storeys high housing thousands of pigs, with construction of a 12-storey pig unit under way.
“On each floor we can breed 1,270 pigs,” says Yuanfei Gao, vice-president of Yangxiang, the company that built the farm. “But in the future with the design of the new buildings we plan to have 1,300 pigs per floor.”
Yangxiang is one of the Chinese giants of the pork industry, producing about 2 million pigs a year in a dozen farms throughout China. The Yaji mountain site is its largest and most advanced multistorey farming system, and will have the capacity to produce around 840,000 pigs a year when construction is finished.
Read much more regarding this facility at
Regards Mark
WAV Comment: We always thought that Trump had lost his marbles way before he was elected as the ‘President’ of the United States; but as money and the making of is his sole intention and concern; here we see that New York; with one of the largest Covid casebooks in the US, is now opening up its wet market doors because of Yom Kippur.
One really has to ask where the priorities of the US lay – trying to beat the Covid virus or simply as the article blow states:
“New York Mayor Bill de Blasio; his Health Commissioner, Dr. Dave Chokshi; and his Deputy Commissioner of Disease Control, Dr. Demetre Daskalakis, allow this mass ritual slaughter to take place, in spite of the health code violations and risks to public health, because NYC’s ultra-Orthodox Jewish communities represent a powerful voting bloc that can make or break elections in NYC and NY State”.
Now we know; to hell with the deaths and families affected; as per the Trump mentality; votes and money are the thing than mean more than anything else.
If the American public understand and believe this; then vote him in once again and put money before everything else. We have exposed the links to Covid deaths and the meat industries in many posts; if you ignore the evidence and go with the money; then that is your choice. We suggest that US citizens really taken this issue on board and start asking some hard, deep down questions about the New York policy – what is most important ? – deaths or votes.
The choice, voters of the USA, is down to you.
Link – New York Times 22/9/20:
At least 5 new coronavirus deaths and 575 new cases were reported in New York on Sept. 21. Over the past week, there have been an average of 790 cases per day, an increase of 5 percent from the average two weeks earlier.
As of Tuesday morning, there have been at least 455,187 cases and 32,691 deaths in New York since the beginning of the pandemic, according to a New York Times database.
And yet……
Link: https://theirturn.net/2020/09/19/kaporos-wet-markets-yom-kippur/
Kaporos, Largest Live Animal Wet Market in the United States, Opens Ahead of Yom Kippur
In the days leading up to Yom Kippur, tens of thousands of Hasidim in Brooklyn will purchase and physically handle live chickens in a wet market setting. Wearing little to no PPE, they will swing the chickens around their heads as part of an annual atonement ritual called Kaporos. The chickens will be killed in approximately 30 makeshift slaughterhouses erected without permits on public streets in residential neighborhoods in violation of eight New York City health codes.
The body parts, blood and feces of thousands of animals will contaminate the streets of South Williamsburg, Crown Heights and Borough Park for several days.
Kaporos is, in effect, the largest live animal wet market in the country and the only one in which the customers handle the animals before the animals are killed. Many of the animals have compromised immune systems and show signs of respiratory disease.
The chickens make each other sick, and they also infect some of the people who handle them with e. Coli and campylobacter. If the viruses that these animals carry commingle and mutate into a more dangerous strain that could be spread among humans, then these Kaporos wet markets could be the source of the another zoonotic disease outbreak. According to a toxicologist who studied fecal and blood samples taken during Kaporos, the ritual “constitutes a dangerous condition” and “poses a significant public health hazard.”
In addition to putting all of us at risk of another zoonotic disease pandemic, Kaporos, which attracts hordes of people in small areas, could be a COVID “super spreader” event because Hasidic communities have been observed not wearing masks or engaging in social distancing.
New York Mayor Bill de Blasio; his Health Commissioner, Dr. Dave Chokshi; and his Deputy Commissioner of Disease Control, Dr. Demetre Daskalakis, allow this mass ritual slaughter to take place, in spite of the health code violations and risks to public health, because NYC’s ultra-Orthodox Jewish communities represent a powerful voting bloc that can make or break elections in NYC and NY State.
In fact, taxpayers help to underwrite the cost because the NYPD provides barricades, floodlights and a large police presence at many of the Kaporos sites. Given the risks and the disruption and death we have already endured already with pandemic, how can the Mayor and his health deputies allow Kaporos to take place?
For the past several years, animal rights and public health advocates have pled with Mayor de Blasio and his revolving door of health commissioners (Dr. Mary Bassett, Dr. Oxiris Barbot and now Dr. Dave Chokshi) to shut down Kaporos, given the health code violations and the risks to the public health.
Both in court and in the media, city attorneys and spokespeople for the NYC Department of Health have defended Kaporos and argued that the City has discretion over which laws to enforce. Throughout the month of September, the Alliance to End Chickens as Kaporos plastered 300 posters around New York City to sound the alarm about Kaporos.
What can you say ? – but
Regards Mark
“A good vocabulary is like a hand grenade thrown in the right place”.
We call things by their name
We do not choose a vocabulary that suits the system stabilization.
We are there for the animals, to end their slavery
There are many ways to end this slavery, one of which is direct animal liberation.
We use the right language to describe the actions, we do not take over that of the system, i.e. the perpetrators who trie to disguise the injustice and make it invisible.
We call things by their name, at least we don’t let the language take away from us.
Language is our main weapon.
Have a good night, Venus
Report from the “German Animal Welfare Office”:
The second undercover research reveals how pigs are again tortured for Tönnies!
We recently published scandalous video material from a Tönnies supplier in North Rhine-Westphalia and reported the conditions there.
The public prosecutor’s office then took up the investigation and Tönnies, the group that slaughters around 20 million pigs annually and thus makes over six billion euros in sales, was forced to react.
Now we have again proof of the terrible way pigs suffer and die for the Tönnies Group.
We now have terrifying images from the largest pig fattening in Lower Saxony. The video recordings show how densely packed animals have to stand in their own droppings.
Many of the animals show some very serious injuries that did not occur overnight.
Untreated, bloody injuries, huge tumors, and abscesses can be seen. Most of the animals can only hobble.
Dead pigs can also be seen among the live ones. A statutory sickbay cannot be seen on the recordings.
Obviously, the farm operator is not fulfilling his duty of care and simply making the pigs suffer.
Particularly frightening: During the two documented nights, the drinking water was consciously turned off by the operator.
Continue reading “Germany’s factory farming: animal suffering as the rule”
World’s top banks must stop funding factory farming to prevent future pandemics, say campaigners
Jane Goodall and nearly 100 other experts call on IMF and other financial giants to halt lending hundreds of billions of pounds to industrial agriculture businesses
Nearly 100 environmentalists, including the (UK) prime minister’s father, are calling on banks and the International Monetary Fund to stop investing in factory farming to cut the risk of future pandemics.
In a letter to 22 leading financial institutions worldwide, the signatories, who include Jane Goodall, warn that industrial livestock production increases the potential for further disease outbreaks, and contributes to dangerous antibiotic resistance.
Industrial farming also undermines food security, and contributes to climate change, biodiversity loss, including the loss of pollinators, deforestation and water pollution, the letter says.
It was sent to banking giants including JP Morgan Chase, Standard Chartered, HSBC, Lloyds, Santander and NatWest, as well as the World Bank, the European Investment Bank and the European Bank of Reconstruction and Development.
The 94 signatories also include television cook Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, Tim Lang, professor of food policy at City University London, actor Joanna Lumley and environmentalist Stanley Johnson.
Experts from both the UN and the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) have pinpointed animals or food of animal origin as a starting point for emerging diseases.
Eco activists have long argued that global financiers should not bankroll livestock corporations that risk environmental damage.
In the past five years, meat and dairy companies worldwide received at least $478bn (£370bn) in backing from more than 2,500 investment firms, banks, and pension funds, according to a report this year by Feedback, a UK group lobbying for changes to the food system.
High street banks provide billions in loans to the firms behind US chlorinated chicken, it said.
And over the past decade, the World Bank’s private investment arm has channelled more than $1.8bn into major livestock and factory farming operations around the world, according to research by Mongabay and the Bureau of Investigative Journalism.
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about:blank about:blank javascript:void(0) Urging them to end their support for or funding of industrial livestock systems, the new letter says: “As the world seeks to ‘build back better’ after Covid-19, it is widely recognised that we need to rethink our relationship with the natural world and to treat it, and the creatures within it, with more respect. This will involve reshaping the way in which we feed ourselves.”
The document highlights studies showing that the crowded, stressful conditions of industrial livestock production “contribute to the emergence, spread and amplification of pathogens, some of which are zoonotic”
Sean Gifford, of Compassion in World Farming, which coordinated the letter, said: “It’s vital that global financial institutions stop funding industrial livestock production and instead support regenerative forms of agriculture that are not only better for human health but also kinder to animals and the planet.
“We are at a turning point in history and we need major financial institutions and intergovernmental organisations to act now. The need has never been more pressing.”
A spokeswoman for UK Finance, which represents banks and the finance industry, said: “The banking and finance industry can play a central role in delivering a post-Covid economic recovery that is aligned not only to the government’s net-zero target but also to be approached in a fair, just and inclusive way.
“Banking and finance firms already play an important part in supporting local networks comprising of corporates, SMEs, local authorities, universities and other sources of expertise including agriculture. Lenders take their agricultural policies very seriously and regularly assess clients on their commitment to sustainable business practices.”
Regards Mark
WAV Comment – Below you will find an article written just a few days ago by David Attenborough.
We have a saying that goes – ‘you can please some of the people some of the time, but you cant please all of the people all of the time’.
We don’t all agree 100% with the thousands of comments made by everyone about everything; there has to be and you have to accept a certain amount of flexibility with regard what some say and their own personal views. We did not make the programme which was shown by David Attenborough recently: https://worldanimalsvoice.com/2020/09/17/england-extinction-watch-the-full-video-here-a-must-watch/ and if we were the producers of it then we would not have definitely included some of the comments made by some scientists. But on the campaign front you have to look at the whole programme and the positives or negatives it portrayed – and in our opinion; there were more positives than negatives.
Sure; as Vegans we would have not shown a scientist who supported ‘moderation’ in the consumption of meat and dairy – but then we also know that there are some who will always eat meat and drink dairy regardless of what they are given as evidence to the contrary. The entire world will not stop eating meat and drinking dairy because we want it; and so in that context; by asking those continuing meat eaters to reduce and moderate their meat consumption could be viewed as an approach to further inform and educate. Education of the damage being done to the environment and the worlds animals are the most important factors; and if the programme educates (the uninformed ?) about the damage being done by meat production and dairy production around the world; then we support the education rather than an attack on just one scientist in a programme because he talks of ‘moderation’.
Sadly, animals will probably always be farmed to some degree for meat and dairy. That is a simple fact. Through education we hope; as per our approach with this site; we can show the facts of the meat / dairy industries and educate people to turn away from them. I personally write from England; and can honestly say that over the last year or two, there has been a massive if not astronomical change in British people who wish to support going meat free and dairy free. As a whole; people here in UK care about the environment, and especially animals and their welfare; so we have to continue to educate, inform and provide the evidence when necessary. We would love to in the business of putting ourselves out of business; because then all ‘our’ issues and problems would be solved. But it aint quite that easy.
People are massively / globally changing their attitudes to meat and dairy consumption because of what they are being shown and told – they are being educated about the damage to the environment farming animals for meat and for example, what happens to ‘by product’ male dairy calves which are of no use to the industry.
People now are saying ‘No’ to the animal abuses of the meat and dairy industries. It is up to us and thousands of other campaigners to continue to provide the facts and show the footage that we as campaigners don’t want to see. We abhor the footage of the fur farms and the fur industry; but hey; look at the humungous changes which are happening there – cruelty is gradually not being accepted – people power wins.
But we have to fight on and be the animals voice – that’s why we are winning in so many ways !
Regards Mark
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By SIR DAVID ATTENBOROUGH FOR THE DAILY MAIL
Published 19 September 2020
Our planet is facing an unprecedented challenge. As I warned last week, we are living in the shadow of a disaster – and it is one of our own making.
Just like the people who lived by the doomed nuclear reactor at Chernobyl, we are on the verge of destruction.
By regarding the Earth as our planet, run by humankind for humankind, we have already wrought untold damage.
We are polluting our air, draining our rivers, warming the oceans and making them more acidic. We have depleted the ozone layer and brought about potentially disastrous climate change.
Humankind, in other words, has set a course for a devastating future, not just for the natural world but for itself. And if we continue, we will, like the people who once lived in the shadow of Chernobyl, risk sleepwalking into global catastrophe.
What faces us today is nothing less than the collapse of the living world. Yet there is still time to change course, to find a better way of living.
We can, and must, begin to put things right. And at the heart of this global effort must lie respect for biodiversity – the very thing we are destroying.
It is no accident that the stability of our planet’s climate is wavering at the very moment the extraordinary richness of life on our fragile planet is in sharp decline. The two things are bound together.
Restoring biodiversity on Earth is the only way out of the crisis we have created. And that, in turn, means ‘rewilding’ the world, re-establishing the balance between the human world and the rest of nature, step by step, as I set out below.
I don’t pretend it will be easy, yet this blueprint for survival is not merely possible but essential if we are to have any hope of saving our civilisation.
Prioritise people and the planet over profit
What has brought us to this moment of desperation? I believe it is our hunger for perpetual economic growth.
This one goal has dominated social, economic and political institutions for the past 70 years. And the result is that we are enslaved to crude measurements of our gross domestic product (GDP).
Yet the price paid by the living world is not accounted for.
There are those who hope for a future in which humankind focuses upon a new, sustainable measure of success.
The Happy Planet Index, created by the New Economics Foundation, attempts to do just that, combining a nation’s ecological footprint with elements of human wellbeing, such as life expectancy, average levels of happiness and a measure of equality.
In 2019, New Zealand made the bold step of formally dropping GDP as its primary measure of economic success and created its own index based upon its most pressing national concerns.
In this single act, Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern shifted the priorities of her whole country away from pure growth and towards something that better reflects the aspirations many of us have.
Ditch oil and embrace renewable energy
In 2019, fossil fuels provided 85 per cent of our global energy, but the carbon they release into the atmosphere warms the Earth and increases the acidity of the oceans, with disastrous consequences.
Now we need to make the transition to renewable energy at lightning speed.
A carbon tax penalising all emitters would radically speed up the process. The Swedish government introduced such a tax in the 1990s and it worked.
As the new, clean, carbon-free world comes online, people everywhere will start to feel the benefits. Life will be less noisy. Our air and water will be cleaner, with fewer premature deaths from poor air quality.
At least three nations – Iceland, Albania and Paraguay – already generate all their electricity without fossil fuels. A further eight use coal, oil and gas for less than ten per cent of their electricity. Of these nations, five are African and three are in Latin America.
Profound change can happen in a short period of time. This is starting to happen with fossil fuels.
We may yet pull off a miracle and move to a clean energy world by the middle of this century.
Rewild the Oceans with huge no-fishing zones
The ocean covers two-thirds of the surface of the planet, which means there is a special role for it in our revolution to rewild the world.
By helping the marine world to recover, we can simultaneously capture carbon, raise biodiversity and supply more food.
It starts with the industry that is causing most damage to the ocean – fishing. Ninety per cent of fish populations are either over-fished or fished to capacity.
But this can be fixed with a global effort to create a network of no-fishing zones throughout coastal waters where fish can grow older and produce more offspring. They then repopulate neighbouring waters.
We need no-fishing zones to encompass at least a third of our ocean to enable fish stocks to recover.
International waters – the high seas – are owned by no one, so all states are free to fish as much as they wish. The worst-offending nations pay billions of dollars in subsidies to keep their fleets fishing, even when there are too few fish left for it to be profitable.
But if all international waters were designated a no-fishing zone, we would transform the open ocean from a place exhausted by our relentless pursuit to a flourishing wilderness that would seed our coastal waters with more fish and help us all in our efforts to capture carbon.
The high seas would become the world’s greatest wildlife reserve.
Commercial fish farming, which often pollutes the seas, must be made moresustainable.
More radically, we can reforest the ocean. Kelp is the fastest-growing seaweed, forming vast submerged forests that boast remarkable levels of biodiversity. But even this wonder plant needs healthy seas. The forests are prone to attacks from sea urchins and, where we have eliminated animals such as sea otters that eat the urchins, entire kelp forests have been devoured.
Learn to get more food from less land
The conversion of wild habitat to farmland has been the single greatest direct cause of biodiversity loss during our time on Earth.
In 1700, we farmed about one billion hectares. Today, our farms cover just under five billion hectares, more than half of all the habitable land on the planet. +
If we are to farm less land, we must eat much less meat, especially red meat, and especially beef, which, when including the grain fed to cows, consumes 60 per cent of our farmland
To gain those extra four billion hectares, we have torn down seasonal forests, rainforests, woodland and scrub, drained wetlands and fenced in grasslands, destroying biodiversity and releasing carbon stored in their plants and soils. Removing the wild has cost us dearly.
How can we cease the expansion of industrial farmland while feeding our growing populations?
In short, can we get more food from less land – as we must do?
There are some inspiring farmers in the Netherlands who have turned away from fertilisers, machinery, pesticides and herbicides and erected wind turbines.
They have dug geothermal wells to heat their greenhouses with renewable energy, collected rainwater from their own greenhouse roofs and planted their crops not in soil but in gutters filled with nutrient-rich water to minimise input and loss. They use home-grown bee colonies to pollinate crops. These innovative farms are now among the highest-yielding and lowest-impact food producers on Earth.
For smaller-scale and subsistence farmers, there is an inexpensive low-tech approach: regenerative farming. Herbicide and pesticide use are reduced, crops are rotated to rest soils, and organic matter rich in carbon is brought back into the topsoil, storing carbon.
But these improvements will only get us so far. If we are to farm less land, we must eat much less meat, especially red meat, and especially beef, which, when including the grain fed to cows, consumes 60 per cent of our farmland.
Instead, we must change to a diet that is largely plant-based, which will reduce the space we need for farming and reduce greenhouse gases.
Estimates suggest that by changing our habits, humankind could feed itself on just half of the land that we currently farm.
Save our forests and rewild the Land
Much of the developed world cut down its forests long ago, putting most of the current deforestation pressure on the poorer parts of the world, especially in the tropics.
There the rich tree cover is still being destroyed to provide the beef, palm oil and hardwood that wealthier nations consume.
And it is the deepest, darkest and wildest forests of all – the tropical rainforests – that are disappearing. If this continues, the loss of carbon to the air, and species to the history books, would be catastrophic for the whole world. We must halt all deforestation now.
By directing our trade and investment, we can support those nations to reap the benefits of these resources without losing them.
We must find ways to make wilderness valuable to those who own and live in it, without reducing its biodiversity or its ability to capture carbon.
Reduce family size and slow population growth
When I was born, there were fewer than two billion people on the planet. Today there are almost four times that number.
When I was born, there were fewer than two billion people on the planet. Today there are almost four times that number
The world’s population is continuing to grow, albeit at a slower pace than at any time since 1950.
At current UN projections, there will be between 9.4 and 12.7 billion people by 2100. Largely due to the demand from wealthy countries, our consumption is exceeding the Earth’s capacity to regenerate its resources.
We want everyone on Earth to have a fair share, and that means we need to both lower consumption and find ways to stabilise our population growth.
The fairest way to stabilise the global population is to help poorer nations to develop. When this happens, diet and healthcare improve, child mortality decreases and families have fewer children.
It is also true that wherever women have the vote, wherever girls stay in school for longer and wherever women are free to follow their aspirations, the birth rate falls.
Raising people out of poverty and empowering women is the fairest way to bring this period of rapid population growth to an end.
Live sustainably to revive the natural world
Before farming began, a few million humans across the globe were living as hunter-gatherers, working in balance with the natural world. With the advent of farming, our relationship with nature changed.
We came to regard the wild world as something to tame, to subdue and use. We moved from being a part of nature to being apart from nature.
All these years later, we need to reverse that transition.
But there are now billions of us. We can’t possibly return to our hunter-gatherer ways. Nor would we want to. But there is plenty that we can and must do.
We must halt and reverse the conversion of wild spaces to farmland, plantations and other developments. We must end our overuse of fertilisers. We must reduce our use of freshwater. We must immediately halt and preferably start to reverse climate change by reducing greenhouse gas emissions.
If we do all those things, biodiversity loss will begin to slow to a halt, and then start itself to reverse.
Our greatest opportunity is now
We humans have come as far as we have because we are the cleverest creatures to have ever lived on Earth.
But if we are to continue to exist, we will require more than intelligence. We will require wisdom.
Homo sapiens, the wise human being, must now learn from its mistakes and live up to its name. We who are alive today have the formidable task of making sure that our species does so. We must not give up hope.
We can yet make amends, change direction and once again become a species in harmony with nature. All we require is the will.
The next few decades represent a final chance to build a stable home for ourselves and restore the rich, healthy and wonderful world that we inherited from our distant ancestors. Our future on the planet is at stake.
© David Attenborough, 2020
World Animals Voice 
