‘Enhancing efficiency of nature leads to loss of species’

The Director of Health of Mother Earth Foundation (HOMEF), Nnimmo Bassey, has said efforts in the past at enhancing the efficiency of nature through Green Revolution led to the loss of species because of focus on enhanced production per unit of land area.

“The new green revolution seeks to further narrow down what is left and intentionally drive the extinction of others. The Green Revolution was based largely on monocultures which affected not just crops or animals, but also human minds,” he said.

Speaking at the opening of the School of Ecology with the theme‘Emerging Technologies and Their Implications for Africa’ in Abuja on Monday, the environmental right activist said technology has also been developed to entrench certain industrial and socio-economic pathways that generated catastrophic outcomes including climate change.

“Such anthropogenic interventions spiked in the dawn of the industrial revolution with the atmospheric carbon budget quickly gobbled up through the burning of fossil fuels, land conversion, chemical/energy-intensive agriculture, manufacturing and others,”Bassey said.

He further said, “rather than retrace their steps since realizing the wrongheadedness of such actions, humans strive to offset such socio-ecological misbehaviours through technological or engineering means.”

While noting that easily weaponized technologies are being promoted by vested interests in the military and philanthropic-capitalist circles, he said, “these risky and largely unregulated technologies are set to be unleashed in the world’s favourite laboratory, Africa, where we are all considered expendable guinea pigs.”

“Bioterrorism is a real threat, especially in regions best seen as storehouses of raw materials for global technological production,” he added

“We have to ponder on why it is so difficult to invest in nature-based solutions rather than fighting against nature. To be sure, these nature-based solutions can indeed be technological, but they simply have to be techniques that are pro-people and planet and not disruptive of our rights to thrive within the cycles of nature, as part of the intricate webs of life,”Bassey stated.