Quotes from Fred Pearce

Conservationists who want to cosset nature like a delicate flower, to protect it from the threat of alien species, are the ethnic cleansers of nature, neutralizing the forces that they should be promoting.

Conservationists, it seems, are dedicated to protecting the weak and vulnerable, the endangered and the abused. Nature generally promotes the strong and the wily, the resilient and versatile.

If, as I believe, natural regrowth has to be the basis for the renaissance of the world's trees, then the custodians of that process must be the people who live in, among and from them.

By elevating the conservation status of supposedly pristine parts of nature, and disregarding the rest – the new wild – conservationists end up complicit in forest destruction and biodiversity loss. *

What can it mean, 150 years after Darwin, to say that some species or communities are good and some are bad?

In general, the well-off have the money to outsource their deforesting as they buy food and other commodities grown by clearing land in other countries. As we have seen, they don't stop deforesting, they just do it somewhere far from home.

Tim Lenton from the University of East Anglia told the Cambridge meeting: "We are close to being committed to a collapse of the Greenland ice sheet, but we don't think we have passed the tipping point yet." How long have we got? Maybe less than a decade.