Who Cares About Environmental Conservation?

Written by Shaun Swartz

Without a doubt, time spent outdoors as a child shaped my life and brought me to where I am today – working to protect the wildlife and wild spaces that inspired my dreams of exploration and adventure for as long as I can remember. With the passing of time, however, I quickly realized that these sacred places in which I had started to define my life were changing. I can vividly recall a point in my life in which I could no longer continue to ignore the growing environmental threats that were largely right under my nose, and I found myself wondering how these issues had suddenly become so real without my noticing.

So why is conservation important? Recently, the World Wildlife Fund released their 2016 Living Planet Report, in which data suggests that fully two thirds of the wildlife on our planet could disappear within the next 50 years. For the sake of clarity, the report is talking about the size of wildlife populations, not the actual number of species facing extinction, which, in itself, is an equally alarming discussion. In light of WWF’s report, the Huffington Post raised an interesting point that somewhere down the line, people will (potentially) reach a threshold for concern about the environment and act accordingly. While I tend toward an optimistic school of thought, to assume that people will arbitrarily begin to care about the decline of wildlife populations seems a bit optimistic, even for me. So I began thinking: Where does that threshold of concern lie within us? What are we willing to do once that threshold has been reached? Is there still time to act?