Recently Alloporus lamented in an incredulous post the fake news that is too often a part of the conservation story about the return of an extinct species. An obvious impossibility, but spin it fast enough and the whine turns into a noise you want to hear.

Well, there is a recent counterpoint to this story that talks about the real numbers behind the sorry state of the Earth’s species.

The Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) has recently published a major assessment on the health of the world’s species that comes from over 120 cooperating countries. It’s not good folks for pretty much everything is in decline.

The specific numbers can be cherry-picked based on your own interest but from elephants to soils everything is falling in quality and quantity as risks rise. The real headline is that these trends are recorded in double-digit percentages. We are not talking about a little bit of loss at the margins, this is one in four (25%) or three in five (60%) type effects.

Quotes like

25,821 plant and animal species of 91,523 assessed for the 2017 “Red List” update were classified as “threatened”

means that 28% of the assessed species on the Red List are threatened with extinction, pretty darn close to a third.

And it’s not all about rapid human population growth in the developing world when you see

Soil erosion has affected 25 percent of agricultural land in the European Union

So even where we can apply the technological and supply chain efficiencies of mature economies we are still degrading the place… a lot, a quarter in this example.

Just think now about the Bush stone curlew fake news. It is meaningless in the light of the reality. Even the faint hope it might bring if it were true, the saving of one species is only a brief ‘feel good’ in the bigger picture.

It is time to be rational. We need to fess up to the reality that not only has the horse bolted, but the barn doors are off their hinges.

Fortunately, there is still some habitat to save through smarter resource and land use decisions. Much more habitat and soil to rehabilitate with more sensible land management practices. And maybe even a few species to save.

But the reality is that this has to be done whilst at the same time feeding and raising the living standards of 7.5 billion souls growing at 250,000 a day. Because if this fundamental need is ignored in favour of a conservation ideal, the resources will be taken anyway. It has to be about all values with the humans ones up front.

This is an unpleasant reality but even a limited understanding of human psychology and history tells us that people come first as individuals and then as tribes. It’s what gave us our numerical success and is as unstoppable as the tide. This basic biology has only one outcome.

The real numbers are only going to get worse. This is the truth.

The hope we have is that it should be possible to feed, clothe and house (and put online) all the people currently here (and those about to arrive) whilst still retaining some of the Earth’s innate heritage through smart choices. But there is a big if. Reversing declines and saving some of the best bits will happen, if, and only if, we accept that this is multi-value problem with no one value able to preclude all others.

Crudely this means that production cannot exist without some conservation values and, critically, vice versa. We have to get multiple values from the remaining natural resource base or the real numbers will get an awful lot worse.