Protection is our privilege not a burden - Wildlife in our changing world

OUR relationship with the natural world around us is never seamless, it is always complex and more often than not exploitative. 

It is always agenda driven and usually self serving. Our stewardship of nature’s gifts is shaped by contradictory ambitions and obligations. Our awareness of our obligations, much less our understanding and acceptance that we do have obligations, is shaped ever more by television’s celebrity naturalists and huge commercial interests. Our understanding, and our essential empathy, is now almost exclusively virtual rather than natural. If we choose to become involved in even the most peripheral way we are far more likely to “adopt” a Himalayan snow leopard via television rather than make an effort to preserve a barn owl’s local nesting site.

As our world becomes ever more urbanised and populous, that trend will accelerate and probably dominate decision making around wildlife and wildlife habitats in the longer term. It is unfortunate too that a profound ignorance driven by an unshakeable indifference has facilitated the kind of exploitation that should make us blush with shame. The worst excesses of international and often unregulated commercial fishing fall into this category, excesses that destroyed once abundant populations of species that sustained sea life and mankind since the dawn of time.