A life on our planet Worksheet + assignment Ingevuld PDF

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Ingevulde worksheet voor mondelinge taak rond de film 'A life on our planet'. Deze taak was voor de studies Marketingcommunicatie....

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1 Listening: A life on our planet Please read the questions first. Then watch the documentary A life on our planet by David Attenborough. You can do that on Netflix (switch on English subtitles) or Toledo. Make notes, answer the questions and make sure you understand what the film is about. On the exam, you are able to give knowledgeable responses to quotes from the film.

Introduction: Chernobyl Part 1 How did the world change in one lifetime? 1937 -

World population: 2.3 billion Carbon in atmosphere: 280 parts per million Remaining wilderness: 66%

Since the last mass extinction, the temperature on earth has remained very stable – it has not wavered up or down by one degree Celsius, thanks to what? The rich and thriving living world around us has been key to sustaining this ability. Phytoplankton at the ocean’s surface and immense forests straddling the north have helped to balance the atmosphere by locking away carbon. Huge herds on the plains have kept the grasslands rich and productive by fertilizing the soils. Mangroves and coral reefs along thousands of miles of coasts have harbored nurseries of fish species that, when mature, then range into open waters. A think belt of jungles around the equator has piled plant on plant to capture as much of the sun’s energy as possible adding moisture and oxygen to the global air currents. An the extent of the polar ice has been critical reflecting sunlight back off its white surface, cooling the whole earth. The biodiversity of the Holocene helped to bring stability, and the entire living world settled into a gentle, reliable rhythm. The seasons. On the tropical plains, the dry and rainy seasons would switch every year like clockwork. In Asia, the winds would create the monsoon on cue. In the northern regions, the temperatures would lift in March, triggering spring and stay high until they dipped in October and brought about autumn. The Holocene was our Garden of Eden. Its rhythm of seasons was so reliable, that it gave our own species a unique opportunity. We invented farming.

This stable climate made for reliable seasons that gave us farming, and thus reliable food. Our intelligence developed (ideas) and human civilisation followed.

1954 -

World population: 2.7 billion Carbon in atmosphere: 310 parts per million Remaining wilderness: 64%

How would you describe this era?

Everywhere there was wilderness. The wilderness was still untouched. People have never seen different species on tv before. The second world war was over, technology wad making lives easier. The pace of change was getting faster and faster. It felt that nothing would limit the progress. The future was going to be exciting. It was going to be everything we have ever dreamt of. This was before anyone was aware that there were problems. 1960 -

World population: 3.0 billion Carbon in atmosphere: 315 parts per million Remaining wilderness: 62%

How did we become aware of the fact that the wild is finite, that it needs protecting? They discovered that the Serengeti herds required an enormous area of healthy grassland to function. That without such an immense space, the herds would diminish and the entire ecosystem would come crashing down. The point was: the wild is far from unlimited. It’s finite. It needs protecting. A few years later, that idea became obvious to everyone. After launching Apollo into space, it was the first time that any human had moved away far enough from earth, to see the whole planet. Everyone saw that our planet is vulnerable and isolated. One of the extraordinary things about it was that the world could actually watch it as it happened. It was extraordinary that you could see what a man out in space could see as he saw it at the same time. On the first shot, you saw a blue marble, a blue sphere in the blackness, and you realized that that was the earth. And in that one shot , there was a whole of humanity with nothing else except of the person that was in the spacecraft taking that picture. And that completely changed the mindset of the population. The human population of the world. Our home was not limited. The was an edge to our existence. It was a rediscovery of a fundamental truth. We’re ultimately bound by and reliant upon the finite natural world about us. This truth defined the life we led in our pre-history. The time before farming and civilization. Even as some of us were setting foot of the moon, others were still leading such a life in the most remote parts of the planet. In what way are traditional tribes an example for sustainable living? The people were hunt gatherers, as all humankind had been before farming. They lived in small numbers and didn’t take too much. They are meat rarely. The resources they used naturally renewed themselves. Working with their traditional technology, they were living sustainably, a lifestyle could continue effectively forever. It was a contrast to our world. A world that demanded more every day.

1978 -

World population: 4.3 billion Carbon in atmosphere: 335 parts per million Remaining wilderness: 55%

Species, as well as whole habitats were disappearing. Which examples can you jot down? The mountain gorillas were hard to find. In 1978, there were only 300 left in a remote jungle in Central Africa. Baby gorillas were at a premium, and poachers would kill a dozen adults to get one. Gorillas were used to people. The only way to keep them alive was for rangers to be with them every day. We are responsible for the extinction of the mountain gorillas. Once a species became our target, there was now nowhere on earth that they could hide. Whales were being slaughtered by fleets of industrial whaling ships in the 1970s. The largest whales, the blues, numbered only a few thousand by then. They were virtually impossible to find. We found humpbacks off Hawaii only by listening out for their calls. Humpbacks living in the same area learn their songs from each other. And the songs have distinct themes and variations which evolve over time. Their mournful songs were the key to transforming people’s opinions about them. Animals have been viewed as little more than a source of oil and meat became personalities. We have pursued animals to extinction many times in our history, but now that it was visible, it was no longer acceptable. The killing of whales turned from a harvest to a crime. A powerful shared conscience had suddenly appeared. Nobody wanted animals to become extinct. People were coming to care for the natural world as they were made aware of the natural world. And we now had the means to make people across the world aware. The red orangutang has to teach their youngs which fruits are worth eating and dropping of the seeds to reproduce, because around the small strip of forest, there are fields full of palm trees for palm oil. There is a double incentive to cut down forests. People benefit from the timber and then benefit again from farming the land that’s left behind. Three million trees across the world has been cut down. Half of the worlds rainforest has been cleared. What we’re seeing now is just the latest chapter in a global process spanning millennia. The deforestation of Borneo has reduced the population of orangutan y two-thirds in 60 years’ time. We can’t cut down rainforests forever and what you can’t do forever is by definition unsustainable. If we do things that are unsustainable, the damage accumulates ultimately to a point where the whole system collapses.

1997 -

World population: 5.9 billion Carbon in atmosphere: 360 parts per million Remaining wilderness: 46 %

If we do something that is unsustainable, the damage accumulates ultimately to a point where the system collapses. -

No ecosystem is secure: what is happening to the ocean and why is that? The ocean is mostly empty, but there are hotspots with a lot of nutrition where fish come together. The problem is that our fishing fleets are just as good at finding those hot spots as are the fish. When they do, they’re able to gather the concentrated shoals with ease. It was only in the 50s that large fleets first ventured out into international waters to reap the open

ocean harvest across the globe. Yet, they’ve removed 90% of the large fish in the sea. At first, they caught plenty of fish in their nets. But within only a few years, the nets across the globe were coming in empty. The fishing quickly became so poor, that countries began to subsidize the fleets to maintain the industry. Without large fish and other marine predators, the oceanic nutrient cycle stutters. The predators help to keep nutrients in the ocean’s sunlit waters, recycling them so that they can be used again and again by plankton. Without predators, nutrients are lost for centuries to the depths and the hot spots start to diminish. The ocean starts to die. Ocean life was also unravelling in the shallows. In 1998, a blue planet film crew stumbled on an event little known at the time. Coral reefs were turning white. The white color is caused by corals expelling algae that lives symbiotically within their body. It looks beautiful, but it’s tragic because you’re looking at its skeleton. Skeletons of dead creatures. The white corals are ultimately smothered by seaweed and the reef turns from wonderland to wasteland. At first, the cause of the bleaching was a mystery. But scientists started to discover that in many cases where bleaching occurred, the ocean was warming. For some time, climate scientists had warned that the planet would get warmer as we burned fossil fuels and released carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere. A marked change in atmospheric carbon has always been incompatible with a stable earth. It was a feature of all five mass extinctions. In precious events, it had taken volcanic activity up to one million years to dredge up enough carbon from within the earth to trigger a catastrophe. By burning millions of years’ worth of living organisms all at once as coal and oil, we had managed to do so in less than 200. -

Till the 90s, the temperature had been relatively stable, but the ocean had taken up most of its worth, masking the impact. The world was starting to lose its balance.

Our impact is truly global. -

We have overfished 30% of fish stocks to critical levels. We cut down over 15 billion trees each year. By damming, polluting and over-extracting rivers and likes, we reduce the size of freshwater populations by over 80%. We’re replacing the wild with the tame. o Half of the fertile land on earth is now farmland. o 70% of the mass of birds on this planet are domestic birds, the vast majority, chickens. o We account for over one-third of weight of mammals on earth. A further 60% are the animals we raise to eat. The rest, from mice to whales, make up just 4%.

Our planet is run by human kind, for humankind. We have destroyed the wild.

That was the damage in David Atteborough’s lifetime. That damage will be eclipsed by the damage to come in the next life time.

Part 2: how will the world change in a next lifetime? 2020 -

World population: 7.8 billion Carbon in atmosphere: 415 parts per million Remaining wilderness: 35 %

What happens to -

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the Amazon Rainforest? The Amazon rainforest, cut down until it can no longer produce enough moisture, degrades into a dry savannah, bringing catastrophic species loss and altering the global water cycle. the Arctic? The Artic becomes ice-free in the summer. Without the white ice cap, less of the sun’s energy is reflected back out to space. And the speed of global warming increases. the frozen soils of the north? Throughout the north, frozen souls thaw, releasing methane, a greenhouse gas many times more potent than carbon dioxide, accelerating the rate of climate change dramatically. the heating ocean? As the ocean continues to heat and becomes more acidic, coral reefs around the world die. Fish populations crash. farmland and pollinating insects? Global food production enters a crisis as soils become exhausted by overuse. Pollinating insects disappear. the weather? And the weather is more and more unpredictable.

2100s : our planet becomes four degrees C warmer. Large parts of the earth are uninhabitable: millions of people are rendered homeless. A sixth mass extinction event is well underway.

Part three: what must we do? To restore stability, we must restore its … We must rewild the world. How do we do it? To restore stability to our planet, we must restore its biodiversity. The very thing that we’ve removed. It’s the only way out of this crisis we have created. We must rewild the world. Rewilding the world is easier than people think. It will benefit ourselves and the generations that follow. A century from now, our planet could be a wild place again. Every other species on Earth reaches a maximum population after a time. The number that can be sustained on the natural resources available. - We raise the standard of living. Why? With nothing to restrict us, our population has been growing dramatically throughout David Attenborough’s lifetime. On current projections, there will be 11 billion people on Earth by 2100. But it’s possible to slow, even to stop population growth well before it reaches that point. Japan’s standard of living climbed rapidly in the latter half of the 20 th century. As healthcare and education improved, people’s expectations and opportunities grew, and the birth rate fell. In 1950, a Japanese family was likely to have three or more children. By 1975, the average was two. The result is that the population has now stabilized and has hardly changed since the millennium. There are signs that this has started to happen across the globe. As nations develop everywhere, people choose to have fewer children. The number of children being worldwide every year is about to level off. A key reason the population is still growing is because many of us are living longer. At some point in the future, the human population will peak for the very first time. The sooner it happens, the easier it makes everything else we have to do. By working hard to raise people out of poverty, giving all access to healthcare and enabling girls in particular to stay in school as long as possible, we can make it peak sooner and at lower level. The trick is to raise the standards of living without increasing our impact on that world. - We generate energy with renewables. How and why? The living world is essentially solar-powered. The earth’s plants capture three trillion kilowatthours of solar energy each day. That’s almost 20 times the energy we need, just from sunlight. Imagine if we phase our fossil fuels and run our world on the eternal energies of nature too. Sunlight, wind, water and geothermal. At the turn of the century, Morocco relied on imported oil and gas for almost all of its energy. Today, it generates 40% if its needs at home from a network of renewable power plants including the world’s largest solar farm. Sitting on the edge of the Sahara, and cabled directly into southern Europe, Morocco could be an exporter of solar energy by 2050. Within 20 years, renewables are predicted to be the world’s main source of power. But we can make them the only source. It’s crazy that our banks and our pensions are investing in fossil fuel when these are the very things that are jeopardizing the future that we are saving for. A renewable future will be full of benefits. Energy everywhere will be more affordable. Our cities will be cleaner and quieter and renewable energy will never run out. - We restrict fishing practices + create no-fish zones over a third of our seas. Why? The living world can’t operate without a healthy ocean and neither can we. The ocean is a critical ally in our battle to reduce carbon in the atmosphere. The more diverse it is, the better it does that job. And, of course, the ocean is important to all of us as a source of food. Fishing is the world’s greatest wild harvest and if we do it right, it can continue because there’s a winwin at play. The healthier the marine habitat, the more fish there will be and the more there will be to eat. Palau is a Pacific Island nation reliant on its coral reefs for fish and tourism. When fish stocks began to reduce, the Palauans responded by restricting fishing practices and banning fishing entirely from many areas. Protected fish populations soon became so healthy, they spilt over into the areas open to fishing. As a result, the “no fish” zones have increased

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the catch of the local fishermen, while at the same time allowing the reefs to recover. Imagine if we committed to a similar approach across the world. Estimates suggest that “no fish” zones over a third of our coastal seas would be sufficient to provide us with all the fish we will ever need. In international waters, the UN is attempting to create the biggest “no fish” zone of all. In one act, this would transform the open ocean from a place exhausted by subsidized fishing fleets to a wilderness that will help us all in our efforts to combat climate change. The world’s greatest wildlife reserve. We reduce our use of farm land. How? The quickest and most effective way to reduce farm land and make it wilderness again is for us to change our diet. Large carnivores are rare in nature because it takes a lot of prey to support each of them. For every single predator on the Serengeti, there are more than 100 prey animals. Whenever we choose a piece of meat, we too are unwittingly demanding a huge expanse of space. The planet can’t support billions of large meat-eaters. There just isn’t enough space. If we all had a largely plant-based diet, we would need only half the land we use at the moment. And because we would be then dedicated to raising plants, we could increase the yield of this land substantially. The Netherlands is one of the world’s most denselypopulated countries. It’s covered with small family-run farms with no room for expansion. So, Dutch farmers have become expert at getting the most out of every hectare. Increasingly, they’re doing so sustainably. Raising yields tenfold in two generations while at the same time using less water, fewer pesticides, less fertilizer and emitting less carbon. Despite its size, the Netherlands is now the world’s second largest exporter of food. It’s entirely possible for us to apply both low-tech and hi-tech solutions to produce much more food from much less land. We can start to produce food in new spaces. Indoors, within cities. Even in places where there’s no land at all. As we improve our approach to farming, we’ll start to reverse the landgrab that we’ve been pursuing ever since we began to farm, which is essential because we have an urgent need for all that free land. We halt deforestation and offer grants to replant trees. Forests are a fundamental component of our planet’s recovery. They are the best technology nature has for locking away carbon. And there are centers of biodiversity. Again, the two features work together. The wilder and more diverse forests are, the more effective they are at absorbing carbon from the atmosphere. We must immediately halt deforestation everywhere and grow crops like oil palm and soya only on land that was deforested long ago. After all, there is plenty of it. But we can do better than that. A century ago, more than three quarters of Costa Rica was covered with forest. By the 1980s, uncontrolled logging had reduced this to just one quarter. The government decided to act, offering grants to land owners to replant native trees. In just 25 years, the forest has returned to cover half of Costa Rica once again. Just imagine if we achieve this on a global scale. The return of the trees would absorb as much as two thirds of the carbon emissions that have been pumped into the atmosphere by our activities to date.

We need to this in accordance with one overriding principle: Nature is our biggest ally and our greatest inspiration. We just have to do wha...