She's certainly not wrong about that.
One statistic that stunned me is that since the year I was born, over 60 percent of the population of wild animals has died out.
So there's 60 percent less wild animals in the first 4 decades of my life.
This leads me to ponder, what's going to happen in the next 4 decades of my life, to the remaining animals? I'm not sure I want to contemplate the answer.
:(
Not to mention:
We're essentially vastly increasing desert and dust bowl like conditions of our planet since then as well. So deserts and dusty bowls are winning out, while diverse jungles and wild animals are rapidly dying out.
There was some optimism recently that the amount of green space has increased, thanks to China/India replanting trees.
But I can tell you one thing: replanted tree "forests" are NOTHING like the original forest or jungle, in terms of diversity.
I've walked through many replanted forests in my time, and it's kinda sad. I mean ya, I'm glad there's more trees in that space, but it clearly isn't a real thriving forest with diverse minor plants and diverse animals anymore, in most cases.
SO YES... that's the very bad news, and that's why the situation is indeed very clearly becoming a crisis.
And that's why many of our youth today (rightly so) are becoming alarmed, and losing faith and confidence in the older generation.
BUT... very interestingly: there is hope in a couple of fields.
FIRSTLY:
If the new generation of youth can increasingly take more control and come to power soon enough, then perhaps they can begin the long journey of reversing the damage in time.
Because let's face, my grandmother's generation, and Donald Trump's generation, doesn't give a flying f'ck if they leave us a waste land of a planet with dead seas... a huge number of them are ultimately just a bunch of old, grouchy, dismissive, selfish bastards in the end stages of their life!
So we've got no choice anymore, but to place our hope in the youth.
But let's just hope the youth naturally come to power in time to save things... it's cutting it very close.
SECONDLY:
There are some fields of science and engineering that are making HUGE leaps now, which could very well change the course of things, and here's the interesting part:
Those fields would ALSO allow us to not only continue on our current course of capitalistic style expansion and consumption, but also even INCREASE our expansion and consumption and consumerism, all while simultaneously saving the planet, and reversing the damages!
So basically, we can have our cake, and eat it too! Maybe.
Sounds too good to be true? Maybe.
ESSENTIALLY... this second option of salvation all boils down to CHEAP access to outer space.
That's the key to our survival as a species at this critical point.
There are currently 3 companies that are very close to achieving that, including:
1) SpaceX,
2) Blue Origin,
3) and Rocket Lab.
Out of those 3...
Blue Origin to be honest... is taking it's lazy time (like really slow and lazy) with it's new rocket designs, and there's been some rising tensions with management style at the company--go figure a Jeff Bezos company having tensions with it's employees?! Surely not?!
And as for Rocket Lab, they've focused on starting small, making tiny rockets for now... Those tiny rockets are ULTRA advanced, powerful, and impressive little puppies! But they're too small to do what it takes to save humanity.
That leaves SPACE-X...
And SpaceX is certainly by far the closest to achieving this goal.
SpaceX is getting very close. In fact they've already achieved it to a good extent with their new self landing Falcon-9 rockets.
But as utterly amazingly impressive as those new rockets are, they still don't pack enough punch for us to be able to lift heavy industrial machinery into space, in large bulk quantities.
But SpaceX's new upcoming Starship will be capable of doing just that!
SpaceX is currently rapidly prototyping this spaceship and rocket, in South Texas right now, incredibly and astonishingly rapidly I must say!
So... what does this all mean, in terms of saving the planet?
Well, with a rocket like Starship, we could very "easily" launch all the machinery and equipment, and steel structures into low-Earth orbit, that we wanted.
Effectively: we could launch industrial production into outerspace, leaving Earth as a vast-national-park preserve.
Earth could simply become a place of recovering wild-life refuges, homes, and business districts, while industrial activity and other forms of production (including even food production) would happen in low Earth orbit...
Low earth orbit: where it's always brightly sunny in the day, each and every day, which would be great for food production.
Not to mention the potential to install cheap vast-solar-panel-arrays in orbit.
FURTHER with starship, we could also put up a "sun-shade" in space, to reduce the amount of sunlight reaching Earth, and completely negate and offset the pace of global warming... but I don't know: putting up sunshades sounds a bit too manipulative of the natural cycle of things... but it's something to consider.
As for timelines when we can begin doing this...
Starship will be easily ready for large scale production and flights within 2 to 3 years... 5 years at most. (They're already well ahead of schedule!)
So we could begin doing this as quickly as about 5 years from now!
I can't emphasize enough how much the Starship design will DRAMATICALLY drop the cost to access space. Eventually it will effectively become the mere price to fuel the rocket with metholox (methane + liquid oxygen in separate tanks), which is extremely cheap.
Starship will also be capable of bringing humans and colonial materials to Mars for next to nothing in cost, able to launch upwards of 50 to 100 humans for each Mars trip launch!
On a side note: the funny thing about the Starship design, is that once it is flying, it would be cheaper in delta-V fuel for it to go to all the way Mars, as opposed to the moon!
That's because it will utilize aerobraking in Mars' atmosphere for slowing down... where as a moon landing requires burning fuel the whole way down.
Anyways, if you want to follow the exciting progress that's being made on the development of a cheap ride to Mars, I would encourage you to check out:
and
It's members includes a huge whack of engineers, including actual SpaceX engineers that debate and follow the progress closely.
FINALLY...
The irony of this is that a lot of strong environmentalists are critical of SpaceX and critical of "rich people" spending money on something like designing Starship.
Which is unfortunate, because they're completely missing out on the potential of how much the invention of Starship has to help save our planet.