Nature has a new Noah’s Ark moment at the biodiversity summit (commentary)

Delegates from most of the world’s governments are assembling this week in Yerevan, Armenia for the latest summit of the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD COP17), whose aim is to prevent the extinction of our fellow creatures, and promote sustainable and just land use. There could be no more fitting location: in the Bible, Mount Ararat is where Noah’s Ark found dry land after the great flood – and where the animals he had rescued, two by two – finally disembarked: “But God remembered Noah and all the wild animals and the livestock that were with him in the ark, and he sent a wind over the earth, and the waters receded. Then God said to Noah, ‘Bring out every kind of living creature that is with you — the birds, the animals, and all the creatures that move along the ground — so they can multiply on the earth and be fruitful and increase in number on it.’” (Genesis 8). Thousands of years later, our fellow creatures need another rescue in the shadow of Mount Ararat, via this summit. That is fitting, because, as a lifelong environmentalist, I have personally never seen a time where politicians around the world seem to care less about nature than they do right now. A wreathed hornbill, found across South and Southeast Asia. Image by Nick Volpe via iNaturalist (CC BY-NC 4.0). A leading edge of this political assault on nature is the U.S. Government, even though America was in many ways the…This article was originally published on Mongabay