Ben Fogle: We still have time to rescue the world from human damage Never has the world faced so many threats from man. We strip the forests for her wood and replace it […]

Never has the world faced so many threats from man. We strip the forests for her wood and replace it with crops and cattle, we drill and frack into the Earth’s core for her precious minerals and we pump chemicals and toxins into the atmosphere with inevitable consequences.

We pick off our magnificent wildlife for “sport”, and for mere convenience we are drowning our world in a sea of plastics. In short we are doing a pretty good job of destroying the Earth.

The wilderness of course is a broad word, it encompasses mountains, deserts, jungles, forests and oceans – those areas of land uncultivated and uninhabited by man – only now make up 23 per cent of the planet, according to a 2016 study published by the journal Current Biology.

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No wilderness left in less than century

We have lost one-tenth of the world’s wilderness in the last 20 years (1.2 million square miles). According to the study, if we continue at the current rate of destruction, there will be no wilderness left in less than a century.

There is an old Navajo proverb: “We do not inherit the Earth from our ancestors, we borrow it from our children.”

Add to this some terrifying statistics like the fact that we have already polluted the oceans with 150 million tonnes of plastic and that scientists estimate that by 2050, plastic in the oceans will outweigh fish.

We seem to show little respect for our flora and fauna. Each year, 30,000 elephants are killed, one every 15 minutes. We kill an estimated 100 million sharks a year, not to forget the impact of animal agriculture, responsible for nearly 20 percent of our greenhouse gases.

The world is increasingly polarised on the impact we are having on our planet. Like a referendum, you either believe or deny climate change, or as I’d prefer to call it, man’s impact on the planet.

With the most powerful man in Western culture, Donald Trump, threatening to pull out of the Paris agreement, denying any human role in climate change and even cutting funding to America’s beloved national monuments and parks, never has wilderness needed our help more.

Environmental lethargy is creeping across society

Despite or perhaps because of these worrying trends and statistics, environmental lethargy is creeping across society. The combination of political, economic, terror and social problems across the globe has camouflaged the environmental crisis.

But I can tell you this much from 25 years of extensive travel to some of the remotest corners of the globe. The mountains are increasingly denuded of snow cover, the glaciers have receded, the forests have been stripped and rivers have run dry. I have visited 200 countries and territories – and people comment on the climatic changes that have affected their lives. Too much rain, drought, fire, landslides, pollution, disappearing flora and fauna.

Each year, 30,000 elephants are killed, one every 15 minutes

I was 18 when I first saw the mighty Amazon basin in South America. Blown away by its beauty and majesty, never since have I felt so insignificant in the context of the dizzying scale of the planet. With young childhood hope and optimism, I can remember deciding then that I wanted to make a difference.

I have been privileged to explore some of the planet’s great wildernesses. I have climbed the dizzying peaks of the Andes where condors soar, trekked through virgin rainforest and slept in hammocks while jaguars brushed my back as they walked underneath.

I have dived unprotected with wild Nile crocodiles in Botswana and relocated Asian rhino in Nepal. I have been lifted out of the water by a southern right whale as it scratched its back on the underside of my tiny rowing boat when I rowed across the Atlantic Ocean. I have walked the lonely plateaus of Antarctica as well as hundreds of miles across the eye-wateringly beautiful Empty Quarter desert of the Arabian peninsular.

The wilderness is our planet’s living lungs. We once thought it so vast and, well, wild, that it would simply look after itself, but 7.4 billion people require a lot of natural resource.

I may now be a slightly more cynical 43-year-old, but I remain confident, optimistic: we have time to turn back the environmental clock. We can make a difference. We can wean ourselves off our addiction to single-use plastics.

‘We do not inherit the Earth from our ancestors, we borrow it from our children’

We can reduce our consumption of meats and fish, our dependence on fossil fuels. Walk more, drive less. Wear more clothes rather than put on the heating. We could address “planned obsolescence”, and make do and mend. We could plant more and cut less. Stop commoditising so much and appreciate that riches do not come in the form of money and wealth but in health and wellbeing.

Being in the wilderness and immersing the mind in nature has incredible restorative powers. It relaxes the mind and helps to focus the brain, improving cognition and lifting the soul.

The wilderness is rooted in Scandinavian culture, while in Japan, Shinrin-yoku or “forest bathing” in which you simply lie on the forest floor below the tree canopy, has become a cultural phenomenon with practitioners listing reduced stress, mood improvement, better sleep, reduced blood pressure and better immunity among the benefits.

The American writer and ecologist Henry David Thoreau wrote, “in wilderness is the preservation of the world”. Let us treat it as a temple: respect and revere rather than ravage and exploit, conquer and tame. Not a case of man versus wild but man and wild, a symbiotic relationship. Once our home it is now the key to this planet’s future. Our lives depend on it.

There is an old Navajo proverb: “We do not inherit the Earth from our ancestors, we borrow it from our children.” We still have a chance to return it in one piece.

Ben Fogle is the United Nations’ new patron of the wilderness

@BenFogle