Humanity is a cuckoo in the planetary nest

It has fallen to our generation to take responsibility for the planet and here is how to do it

The Gouda wind power facility in South Africa. A report on delivering a net zero economy, published by the Energy Transitions Commission last September, lays out a plausible passage to net zero emissions by 2050. PHOTO: BLOOMBERG
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(FINANCIAL TIMES) - Today, human beings and the livestock we rear for food make up 96 per cent of the mass of all the mammals on the planet. Moreover, 70 per cent of all the birds now alive are poultry - mostly the chickens we eat. Extinction rates are also thought to be 100 to 1,000 times higher than their background rate over the past tens of millions of years.

All this is a small part of our overall impact on the planet's biosphere, the sum of all its ecosystems.

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