I WROTE some weeks ago during National Marine Week about just how bad was the situation as far as the world’s oceans are concerned. I quoted a special report released by the World Wildlife Fund (WWF)* that said that half of the world’s animal species, including fish had disappeared in the last 40 years or so. Well, it’s time to go back to that report and look at the situation on land.
It looked at 10 380 populations of 3 038 species across the globe, including mammals, birds, reptiles, amphibians and fish, and found that all had declined on average by 52 percent since 1970. It said that virtually all these dramatic wildlife losses could be laid firmly at the door of humankind, through habitat destructions, deforestation, climate change, overfishing and hunting.
The situation is worst in low-income countries, where wildlife populations have declined by 58 percent on average, worst is Latin America with 83 percent of wildlife species having disappeared over the past 40 years. The report pointed out that human activity was outstripping the Earth’s resources, overfelling forests, overfishing and putting out more carbon dioxide than the planet can absorb, leading to climate change.
The Living Planet report said the damage to the environment was not inevitable, but a consequence of the way we choose to live. The situation was critical, but there was still hope, protecting nature needed focused conservation action, political will and support from business.
And now a change of subject. I first visited St Lucia on the Zululand coast over 50 years ago. There was a barely negotiable sandy track from Mtubatuba down to the St Lucia estuary, and once one had arrived there were perhaps a dozen fishermen’s huts scattered around the coastal forest (I’m tempted to call it jungle) behind the beach and along the estuary. That was it, nothing else, if you hadn’t brought it with you, you did without it.
For over half a century St Lucia became our home away from home in Zululand and we watched it grow and change. Well, we were back there just a while ago and I must report that we were pleasantly surprised. St Lucia does not appear to have fallen victim to the dreadful overdevelopment that has ruined so much of the North Coast of KZN, there’s been plenty of development to be sure, but it seems to have been controlled.
We found some of our old haunts still as natural as they had always been, and facilities that we have used over the years remarkably unchanged (from a fish’n’chip shop that’s been there for decades we bought some takeaway line fish cooked in lemon-garlic butter for lunch and ate it sitting on a boardwalk down at the estuary with a plastic cup of something appropriate – it beat any lunch we’d ever had on the Mediterranean or the Aegean). We didn’t go further north to our old haunts up there – First Rocks, Mission Rocks, Cape Vidal and so on, perhaps we keep that for another time. Good, though, to take a pleasant step back in time. Cheers!
*Daily Telegraph, London.
