In her seminal 1962 book, Silent Spring, Rachel Carson drew ground-breaking links between the industrialised use of pesticides, declining biodiversity and a range of human health problems. It helped kick-start the modern environmental movement and although her ideas are now widely accepted as scientific fact, destruction of our planetary ecosystems has only accelerated in the intervening decades.

From my own home in Uganda, it has been shocking to witness some of the last vestiges of this country’s once famed wilderness disappearing before my eyes. Within the last year I’ve seen huge roads driven into one of Uganda’s few significant wildlife sanctuaries at Murchison to facilitate oil exploration. Where until as recently as the 1980s leopards and other large cats were still commonplace close to the centre of Kampala, the city now sprawls endlessly into the surrounding countryside and the big mammals are gone. The hundreds of species of fish that could be found in Lake Victoria up until the 1960s have been reduced to just two. Meanwhile, air quality in ever-growing Kampala is reported to be reaching levels normally only found in India’s big cities.

…