For some, it is easy to treat stories about cascading losses in global biodiversity as other people’s worries. Rainforest destruction in the Amazon, savage poaching and plummeting large mammal populations in Africa — those problems can seem so far away.

Last week, however, headlines about biodiversity loss pierced hearts in America. Just as Rachel Carson feared more than half a century ago in her book Silent Spring, we are losing our birds. New research published in the journal Science shows that, since 1970, wild bird populations in the US and Canada have dropped by almost 30 per cent, a loss of nearly 3bn breeding birds. The numbers read like Black Monday in the stock market: a 53 per cent loss among our grassland birds, a billion birds lost from our forests, 862m sparrows and 618m warblers and 440m blackbirds — all gone.

A report for the G7 prepared in May by the OECD offered a grim synopsis of all the varied measures of ecosystem loss across our planet. Overall, more than half of all the vertebrates in the world have disappeared since 1970, and today’s rate of species extinction is 1,000 times higher than prehuman times. The report also calculated the global economic costs of biodiversity loss to be on the scale of $10tn-$31tn a year.