Climate change is only half the problem. We’re destroying the Earth’s layer of life
Along with the climate crisis, the disappearance of non-human life is our most pressing problem. To fully understand how big the problem is, we need to think of this loss in terms of biomass instead of the number of species.
We cannot live on a dead planet. But it’s unknown how much non-human life we really need for Homo sapiens to survive. If people can manage in martian base camps with tanks of tilapia and a few green plants, a great deal more can be destroyed before our planet becomes truly unliveable.
But is that a life still worth living?