OP-ED...I'm glad I'll be dead!

   Let's face it!  Nature is losing!  The wild places of the world are disappearing and will continue to disappear, until they are no more.

   I'm glad I'll be dead before its all gone.  Data from the Audubon exposes that every bird population we care about is in dramatic decline.

   While we have brought a few species back from the brink of extinction--and onto the slightly more stable plateau of extinction--most of the species on the endangered list will disappear forever; along with many that aren't on the list, and in a relatively short time.

  The remaining trees and plants will be just those we like or can't get rid of and some of the animals will be those we have spent billions to save.  However, most of them will be those we eat or our friends.

   Others who survive will be those that can survive being around us, like cockroaches and rats!

   But is this really such a bad thing? Do Hippos really add anything to the world besides being cool to watch?

   And most people on Earth don't care very much, especially those 4 billion just looking for a meal and clean water to drink.

   So why is this happening? Destruction of habitat!  While we all understand destruction by direct pollution from things like oil spills, coal mining and toxic waste discharges, the worst culprit is simply expansion of human habitat.

   Housing developments, agriculture, roads, deforestation, an increasing energy footprint, industrial expansion, fires, overfishing and acidification of the oceans, and desertification.

   Did I mention agriculture? Keeping 7 billion people alive takes a lot of space and resources and we don't have a lot to spare for the luxury of keeping nature. Soon, we will be 10 billion!!

   We're burning billions of acres of pristine Indonesian rainforests in order to plant Palm Oil trees. Palm oil is now the world's cooking oil of choice. since its one of the healthiest oils available, with a low price tag and a long shelf life.

  But the price tag doesn't cover destroying one of the two key rainforests on Earth.   The Amazon is being destroyed for soybeans, sugar, coffee, cattle, hydroelectric and wood.

   Even mangrove swamps are being destroyed for shrimp farms.  You might not know that mangrove swamps are a critical piece in the global ecosphere, cycling gases between ocean and atmosphere in a unique manner.

   I'm not saying that life will disappear and Earth will be a dead planet. It will just become more like our back yards; some nice and manicured and others dumpy with weeds. A few nicely kept parks. But definitely not natural.

  However, some of us are looking over our shoulder. There is a danger lurking in this 'Disney' version of Earthland.  Humans actually need a certain amount of wildness for our own survival.

    There is a reason why oxygen is in the air. It doesn't just come out of the ground.  The real problem is that people are so divorced from nature that they don't know what's happening, what's gone before or what awaits us.

   These global changes occur so slowly, even the huge changes, that its hard for us to notice.

   No one remembers the passenger pigeon, (or the huge numbers of geese) but when my grandfather was born, the passenger pigeon was the most abundant bird in North America and possibly the world.

  People would gaze in wonder at a single flock of 10 million pigeons would block out the sun with a deafening roar that would last an hour as they passed overhead.

   The only real reason there are some geese now (in the 50's you would see giant V after giant V of geese headed north or south) is because the hunting groups own habitat for them to hunt.

   Due to hunting the last passenger pigeon died in 1914 in the Cincinnati Zoo. Hunted to extinction, out of existence due to the fallacy that no amount of human exploitation could endanger a creature so abundant.

   We are infected by that same fantasy today- that the Earth is so large and the oceans so deep, the atmosphere so vast - that nothing we do can really harm it.

   Of course, this way of thinking is totally wrong. Humans have the numbers and the technologies, to pretty much destroy the surface of the planet. Or remake it in some dumbed-down fashion of a specimen garden.

   For over 150,000 years, the Earth had only 10 million people on it at any one time. But our astounding cerebral cortex gave rise to a few key developments, like fire, the wheel and agriculture and an astonishing frontal lobe allowed us to use them effectively.

   The population began to grow just before the beginning of the Common Era (CE) rising to 300 million during the middle ages and to a billion by the beginning of the industrial age.

   Then 2 billion in 1927, 3 billion in 1960, 4 billion by 1974, 6 billion in 1999 and 7 billion in 2011.

   This exponential rise is textbook for a bacterial colony in a petri dish just before it dies from outpacing its food sources and generating too much waste.

   It's also eerily analogous for us on this petri dish we call Earth.

   Humans now comprise the largest mass of vertebrate matter on land.  The rest is almost all our food and friends, mainly the animals we domesticated, plus a bunch of xenobiotics we've transported far from their habitats.   Hardly any vertebrate mass left on land is wild or natural.

  Let that sink in for a minute!  Most of what people see on National Geographic or the Discovery Channel or in movies about animals, is almost all gone.

   Humans have dammed a third of the world's rivers, have covered, and destroyed or altered half of the world's land surface.

   We use up most of the fresh water faster than it can be replenished. And we extinct about 30,000 species a year.

   And this is all continuing apace; globally there is no slowing of these trends.

   From the original equilibrium of 10 million humans, Nature just can't handle this density of humans.

   I hate to be optimistic, but there is still time to prevent the complete loss of wild Nature. We may be beyond the limits to growth, but the system is still resilient enough to respond to even a reasonable attempt at conservation and rehabilitation.

   The population will begin to fall backwards toward the end of this century. The birth rates are already changing in that direction.

   But it will take decades for that to translate into population reduction and we have to figure out how we can keep us all alive without completely trashing the place.

   That's where energy comes in. The best birth control in history has been access to energy. At least 3000 kWhs per person per year.

   Energy trends with many aspects of society, the most commonly being discussed being fertility rates - a ten fold increase in energy consumption results in a 3 fold decrease in fertility rates and a 3 fold decrease in unwanted pregnancies.

   Access to family planning and contraception increases with access to energy which leads to improved productivity and higher family incomes, increased savings and investment, overall reduced healthcare costs, especially for women, and greatly improved education, less infant mortality rates, greater lifespan and general quality of life.

  This is why we need to increase all forms of energy worldwide, as quickly as we can. And the most dense forms, like nuclear, are the best.

   Using large tracts of land for biofuels, wind farms and solar arrays, cut into the very land we need to protect.

   And fossil fuels can't seem to reign in their environmental impacts. To provide 10 billion people with at least 3000 kWhs  per person per year using an all-of-the-above mix will require about $35 trillion of which about $15 trillion US would be direct investment in a future in which we would want to live.

  James Conca, author and contributor to Forbes, Magazine