Globally, 1.2 million species of organisms have been scientifically identified. Scientists have deduced the diversity of under-researched groups from the number of species and higher-level taxonomic categories in extensively studied groups, such as birds. On average, wild populations monitored by biologists over the past 50 years lost 69 percent of their members, according to the Living Planet Index. Our immediate biodiversity crisis isn’t one of species loss; it’s the lost abundance of wild things. The problem has become prevalent and systemic in recent decades.

Many experts and policy makers accept the incidental damage as a cost of doing business on this planet. That’s because their economic scorecards count what’s measurably good for human beings. Something that’s good for two people is twice as good as something that’s good for one person.【T1】From this point of view, a world drained of wildlife with a lot of people making increasing amounts of money is heading in the right direction. The losses of joy, wonder, and ethical interspecific relations are real, but, in contrast to our material gains, resist measurement.

Economics is nicknamed the “dismal science,” but many of its practitioners are far more optimistic than biologists about our species’ future.【T2】They propose that economic growth can continue forever on a planet that is staying the same size, because scarcity is not the sad opposite of abundance, but the mother of invention. When goods become scarce, substitutes become valuable. If ready substitutes aren’t available, people innovate and tame scarcity. Over and over. Substitution is seen as a remedy both for the shortage of production’s inputs and, nowadays, for the menacing excess of its emissions. But substitution won’t save us indefinitely, and typically leads to another round of unforeseen damage.

It’s not too late for an abundant Earth.【T3】Recovery starts with making wild abundance an explicit objective and letting our economic and social lives center around it. The most important thing people can do for wild populations is to give them space, starting with the spaces that aren’t yet fragmented. Twenty percent of Earth’s forests, for instance, are still big and unfragmented, “intact forest landscapes”.【T4】Securing these forests now is a bargain compared with the cost of removing roads and industry to regrow them later.

We also need laws that go beyond sustaining scarcity and regrow biological plenty. Rather than attempting to codify abundance on a species-by-species basis, as the Endangered Species Act does for extinction risk,【T5】such laws must consider life at the ecosystem level and reduce the causes of wildlife depletion without knowing precisely how much natural abundance will return. Let’s nurture the Earth so that people once again can know they are part of a wild world disposed— and able—to host abundant life.

【T4】