Stop Economic Growth - Embrace Sustainable Bioeconomy: One million species threatened by extinction, and the number one culprit is: our ever intensified agriculture

To biologists, it comes as no surprise. Nature is in distress. One million species (and this is not including bacteria and fungi!), an estimated one eighth of all species existing, are threatened by extinction, in just a few decades. This is the alarming conclusion of a global report on biodiversity presented today by the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) of the United Nations. When I was a student, I was involved in teaching a class in plant physiology. Prof. Eigen - not a famous scientist but an enthusiastic teacher! - explained to us why the students (he actually called us “Kommilitonen” because, he said, we are studying and learning together - we liked that!) had to perform a simple bacterial growth experiment - yielding a typical growth curve with lag phase, exponential growth phase, stationary phase, and death. Full stop. ‘Every biologist needs to understand’, he said, ‘that continuous growth leads into catastrophy’. It is as simple as that. But politicians, backed by economists, still talk about the need for growth growth growth. And where does it lead us? Living nature is basically one enormous network, a web connecting all living species. A net is strong, much stronger than a rope. If you cut a simple rope, connection breaks. If you cut a rope in a net, the net will still hold. You can cut another rope, and yet another one, and it will still hold. You may not even notice a difference. But all of a sudden, with a single cut, the whole net ruptures. We are at this point, the experts say. And global land use change because of ever intensifying agriculture over the past few decades has brought us there. There are other culprits, such as climate change and pollution, and we need to act at all levels. But as plant biologists, supporting transformative change in agriculture is our most pressing need, our most noble goal. Agriculture yields food, fibre, and fuel. Nature will survive without agriculture, humans will not.