David Attenborough

Since the 1950s, on average, wild animal populations have more than halved. When I look back at my earlier films now, I realise that, although I felt I was out there in the wild, wandering through a pristine natural world, that was an illusion. Those forests and plains and seas were already emptying. Many of the larger animals were already rare. A shifting baseline has distorted our perception of all life on Earth. We have forgotten that there were once temperate forest that would days to traverse, herds of bison that would take four hours to pass, and flocks of birds so vast and dense that they darkened the skies. Those things were normal only a few lifetimes ago. Not any more. We have become accustomed to an impoverished planet.

The danger with pricing nature purely on the amount of carbon it captures and stores is that carbon becomes the only thing that matters to us. It oversimplifies nature's value to us, but, worse, it may lead us to imagine that fast-growing eucalyptus plantations are as valuable as biodiverse forest. We may chose to use the farmland no longer required for food production purely for monocultures of bioenergy crops rather than restoring woodlands. Carbon capture and storage is extremely important, but it isn't everything. It won't stop the sixth mass extinction. To create a stable and healthy world, it is bioversity that we ought to be cherishing.