The loss of habitat has the greatest impact on wildlife, including both animals and plants. This can be seen in the expansion of human populations around the world. Urbanization, deforestation, resource extraction, industrial pollution, and agriculture all cause the degradation of existing ecologies and environments and, year on year, they extend further and further into what is left of the wilderness.

First world countries concern themselves with piecemeal answers, such as recycling, carbon emissions, green technologies, and electric cars. The positive impact of these strategies are negligible to say the least, and the production of batteries for electric vehicles actually has a negative impact on the environment. The truth is that to have any serious benefit with regards to the that environment western civilisation would have to undertake a major change in its lifestyle aims and aspirations, something that the majority of us are not willing to contemplate.

We live in a society dominated by a consumer economy. It makes some people very rich. It inspires other people to dream of being very rich. It also creates scarcity of various resources, which can cause wars, and they also make some people very rich. A move to an economy based on resource management would probably end consumerism, certainly in regards to the current scale. In its turn this might see the wealth of the top 1% decline also and the average person might also notice a similar reduction in their living standards, but it would also actually help save the natural world.

I do not believe that people in general are willing to consider such a change in their lives, however. Those of us living in the richest countries are reluctant to surrender the current way of living and those in poorer countries are desperately striving to achieve it. Only a very sudden and dramatic change would make us stop and consider an alternative way of living. Homo sapiens are very adaptable animals, we have proven that in our brief 300,000 year history; that is brief when compared to the geological history of the planet itself, which is some 4.543 billion years. We have a good chance of surviving such a cataclysmic event as a species if not as individuals. As we appear to be motivated more by greed, egotism, hate, jealousy, and avarice then the initiation of an almost apocalyptic event that will end western civilisation seems the most likely change that we will experience, until then we will blithely continue believing that recycling paper will save the world and everything it contains, but it will not. If you were genuinely tasked with saving the natural world would you be willing to actually make the sacrifice? Most people would probably answer ‘yes’, but do so without considering the full extent of that sacrifice. Once the enormity of the act is understood the majority of people would rather believe that the piecemeal efforts are all that is required.