the UK government quietly published its own (delayed) report on ‘Global Diversity Loss, Ecosystem Collapse and National Security’. The contents are so shocking the government tried to bury it. The climate crisis is a national security risk.
The crisis of the natural world frequently gets overlooked in the wider debate about climate breakdown. Of course, the two are inseparable, but if we want to begin to reverse hundreds of years of extraction, pollution and contamination of our soil and land and air, we will need all of the above and more. Restoration and recovery will take a long time and will require disparate parts of Scottish society to come together to fight landed power.
We also need to be aware of the problem of shifting baseline syndrome – whereby you end of ‘defending’ something that is already degraded beyond measure. That’s why the idea of ‘restoration’ is essential.