Biodiversity First!

Biodiversity First!

"America First" is a slogan that led Donald Trump to his second victory as President of the United States. Surprising since USA are the world's leading oil producer in 2024, with 18.9% of global production compared to 9.6% in 2012, which makes its economy competitive with this cheap energy. Surprising also because USA are ahead of other nations in finance, digital, cultural and sports industries, and in military spending with 916 billion dollars in 2023, more than the cumulative spending of the next nine nations...

"China First" proclaim Chinese leaders, promising to surpass the United States in everything, from semiconductors to space, and in the military where investments in long-range nuclear-tipped missiles and in the navy illustrate a Chinese supremacist project for 2049, the 100th anniversary of the proclamation of the People's Republic of China.

"India First" announce Indian leaders who base on the multi-millennial history and the extraordinary cultural diversity of India, the legitimacy to engage in uncontrollable military dynamics.And a Russia, Turkey, Algeria, manipulating for years a supposed "national wound" to justify bellicose speeches and military aggressions.

But, above supremacist speeches and wars, human origin global warming and the "extremization" of natural phenomena it creates, hurricanes, floods, droughts, fires, remind us that there is a more noble and concrete goal: safeguard what the study published on May 4, 2020 in PNAS calls "The Future of the human climate niche".

Far from human arrogance, biodiversity, and more specifically wild animal species, because they are at the top of the food chain and require a vast geographical area to live, represent the key to verifying any approach to safeguarding the environment and, ultimately, safeguarding the "human climate niche".

In 1962, the American #RachelCarson triggered the birth of the environmental movement with her book, "A silent spring", denouncing pesticides and insecticides that kill insects and birds, which should normally fill spring with the sounds of life. Bill McKibben with the book "The End of Nature" warned in 1989 about human responsibility for global warming. With "The Sixth Extinction" in 2014, Elizabeth Kolbert included global warming and the collapse of biodiversity that Mankind produces in the succession of "mass extinctions" that the Earth has seen for hundreds of millions of years. Erle Ellis with "Anthropocene" in 2018 offers a short introduction to this globalizing concept. My book "Towards a controlled and benevolent Anthropocene", July 2019, fights the "ecological catastrophism" and "anti-technologism" which is popular among the Western spoiled youth, and proposes ways to increase "human sovereignty" in the face of a Nature which is neither good nor predictable.

Faced with the deadly clashes between Civilizations, Empires, Memories, Humanity must draw inspiration from this strategic slogan: "Biodiversity first!"