“The biodiversity crisis is a crisis because it won’t just kill the plants and animals it is killing, it will kill us too,” Sir James is expected to say. He will set out the link between a thriving natural environment and the clean water, good soil, flood management and carbon storage fundamental to human survival. “If that doesn’t make you angry, you haven’t been paying attention,” Sir James will say.
Among the mammals, birds, butterflies and moths designated as priority species, numbers have plunged by 61% over the same period.Ī quarter of England’s mammals are facing extinction, the research found. It found 41% of native fauna and flora species have decreased in abundance since 1970, with 15% facing extinction. Sir James Bevan, the head of the Environment Agency (Image: PA Wire/PA Images) “Since we humans and everything we cherish depends on nature, we have the strongest possible interest in avoiding that outcome.” The speech will mark the launch of a new report by the Environment Agency setting out the scale of the threat faced by England’s wildlife. Quoting the opening lines of Silent Spring, Sir James will say: “On the mornings that had once throbbed with the dawn chorus of robins, doves, jays, wrens, and scores of other bird voices there was now no sound only silence lay over the fields and woods and marsh.” He will add: “Sixty years on we are closer than ever to that silent spring happening. The work is credited with sparking the present-day green movement, leading to a US-wide ban on the use of DDT and precipitating the founding of the US’s Environmental Protection Agency.
Sir James is expected to reference Rachel Carson’s 1962 book Silent Spring, which catalogued the destruction of whole ecosystems in the US through indiscriminate spraying of synthetic pesticides. In a speech to environmental think tank Green Alliance in London on Tuesday, the agency’s chief executive, Sir James Bevan, will say the biodiversity crisis poses an existential threat to human survival. Humanity is closer than ever to irreversible climate breakdown 60 years on from the birth of the modern environmental movement, the head of the Environment Agency will warn.
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