Nature Loss and Business Resilience: Why Biodiversity Can No Longer Be Ignored

With its long history and enormous global influence, the financial-industrial complex is not much bothered about climate change, poverty, SMEs or Malaysia. It is concerned solely about wealth preservation for the elites. Since leaving the gold standard and with digitisation, money is simply debt created for free in digital form by government and banks, with the majority of us scrambling to work within the system. Currently, the creation of artificial intelligence is holding everyone, including businesses, spellbound.

We must beware of falling into the fatally common error of supposing that what we see is all there is to see. Charles Webster Leadbeater, 1895.

In the big picture, digitization and AI are just two paradigms in human society, albeit two of the biggest to date. Both are tools, not goals or objectives. Along with all life-forms, we humans require carbon-based nutrition and multiple chemical elements and biochemical molecules in order to survive and reproduce. This is fact. Not opinion. Those limiting resources – formerly known as “nature”, now as “biodiversity” - are being squandered and mismanaged in the onslaught of digitization and the imminent risk of surrendering control to non carbon-based intelligence. Misapplication of these tools represents the most dangerous trend in the history of Homo sapiens.

At one extreme, saying that the world will collapse if biodiversity is not preserved is clearly an exaggeration, as large cities thrive on a few tens of biological products as food, and those products have been produced for many generations on farms, not in forests. But, equally, framing 'biodiversity' as 'nice to have' lists, lovely images, an ESG obligation, annual reporting and box-ticking is madness. Whatever climate change we face, whatever horrors competing nation states impose upon us, we are biological and always will be. This reality must at least underlie and ideally frame our business thinking.

Reality cannot be ignored except at a price; and the longer the ignorance is persisted in, the higher and more terrible becomes the price that must be paid. Aldous Huxley, 1943.

So, please business owners and managers, go ahead and take whatever advantage you can from digitization and AI. You probably have to do that to stay in business. But always recall that, at heart, we are carbon-based beings that depend on real, natural carbon-based processes. In other words, on nature and biodiversity.  

Truth is ever to be found in simplicity, and not in the multiplicity and confusion of things. Isaac Newton, 1690.