Biodiversity Week

“The words still hover, like a seagull battling the wind”
-Michael Viney

On last Saturday’s The Irish Times (May 11th, 2024), Sylvia Thompson informed us that after 7 years she will no longer be writing the weekly Saturday’s Nature Diary. Sylvia has been spreading the good news in the Times for much longer than that.

We are all genetically related to the magpie. Perhaps some of us more closely related than others! Co-incidentally or accidentally just 2 weeks ago when attempting to de-clutter I came across an 8 page Times supplement, dated Tuesday May 27th 2007, entitled ‘Biodiversity Watch’. It was a special supplement issued by The Irish Times for the very first Biodiversity Week in Ireland in 2007. The late Michael Viney on the covering page quotes:

‘Biodiversity loss matters. It matters for ethical, emotional, environmental and economic reasons. Ethically we have a responsibility to future generations to maintain the diversity of life on earth…’

Michael goes on to say that these ‘stirring, speechwriter’s thoughts were tapped into a word-processor in the Department of the Environment for an EU gathering in Ireland back in the Republic’s presidential year, 2004. The words still hover, like a seagull battling the winds’.

It is no harm to ask if these words are still hovering today? Sylvia Thompson, in her farewell article, says that she has become more aware of the decimation of wildlife and at the same time public interest in the natural world has blossomed. She notes the positive actions and initiatives taking place for the enhancement of biodiversity. However, the themes and concerns in the 2007 supplement are no different from today’s concerns. They include the erosion of wetlands; forestry policies; water pollution; climate change, species loss of insects, birds, animals; invasive species; change in farming practices; monocultures etc. One can also pick up that the tone of the articles was as alarming then as it is today. Michael Viney points out that after the Rio de Janeiro Earth Summit 1992 and the European Convention on Biological Diversity, Europe’s loss of plants, animals, birds and insects was to be halted by 2010.

In summary, doesn’t it leave us with some questions, some wonderings? We also await what this weekend’s Times supplement will have to say for this 2024 Biodiversity Week, seventeen years later!