Nature is resilient. Naturally man’s rapacious capacity can overwhelm nature’s ability to repair itself because destruction is more facile and swifter than rebuilding as that takes time. A recent program by National Geographic on the exclusion zone around Chernobyl has shown that small animals and birds are now thriving in this once desolate wasteland. Even though it is not yet fit for human habitation, nature has inexorably commenced the reclamation process.

Even the catastrophic destruction of portion of the Alaskan littoral when the oil tanker, the Exxon Valdez ran aground creating calamitous destruction of the pristine coastline is now largely not visible. Nature did not apply a band aid but rather regenerated the vegetation and the habitat.

The extinction of the dinosaurs some 65 million years ago while cataclysmic in itself for the dinosaurs, liberated its tiny cousins, the shrews, to fulfill its true potential and it sought to dominate its environment.

This in no measure mitigates culpability or liability but merely underscores the hardiness of nature.  Paradigmatic in this regard is the leviathan of the oceans, the whale. Given sufficient protection, animal populations such as the orca can rebound of their own volition. But these noble sentiments will require the requisite levels of political will, money and enforcement both by governments and NGOs such as Greenpeace.