What We Can Do When We Try

Necessity being the mother of invention and the stakes not much more significant than the viability of the species, it was only a matter of time before a viable solution was found for the climate crisis. After only a decade's work, seventeen per cent of terrestrial ecosystems and a full eight per cent of marine areas have been brought under the formal rubric of "protected areas." It is true that many such areas lack anything so crass and materialistic as actual protection, and that anything more ambitious is likely remain politically impracticable because of the potential inconvenience to the politicians and their paymasters. Nevertheless, the perpetrators and abettors of the Anthropocene Extinction Event certainly deserve credit for having the imagination to set themselves at least one target so paltry that they could almost more or less manage to achieve it.