The planet’s wildernesses are shrinking so fast that they could vanish within a century, a report has warned. According to the study, 1.3 million square miles of once pristine landscape have been tarnished by large-scale human activity in the last 25 years – about a tenth of the total worldwide. Almost a third of that was in the Amazon, despite deforestation in Brazil having slowed in recent years. Central Africa, home to thousands of endangered species including forest elephants and chimpanzees, accounted for a further 14%. Although around 20% of the world’s land – equivalent to around 11.5 million square miles – is still classed as wilderness, the report warns that any further reductions could be catastrophic. As well as losing many animal and plant species, the consequences for climate change would be devastating, since so much carbon is stored in forests. “Without any policies to protect these areas, they are falling victim to widespread development,” said Dr James Watson of the University of Queensland. “We probably have one or two decades to turn this around.”

In this context the pros and cons of tourism are a conundrum. One can argue that tourism helps pay to keep the wild places of the world wild. It helps pay for the soldiers who now have to guard the rhinos and elephants in Botswana and Namibia, for instance. Indeed, the tourist income is so important that protection of wildlife is a national priority. On the other hand, if my sister and her husband had not been to Namibia years ago, I would have known nothing about it. In general, I am in good company. So when my wife and I had a (spectacular) visit to Namibia this summer I was surprised to see so many people. The number of visitors climbs every year, as do the number of game lodges. I took a photos of what looked like an army climbing single file up one of the famous giant sand dunes. My point? How long can Namibia, for instance, maintain its wonderful deserts and its wild life? I am part of the problem; maybe you are too?

A while ago I bought fresh roses from Colombia from a firm called Global Rose. Two days after they arrived ads for Global Rose started to appear on the screen whenever I used Google. Targeted advertising, care of Google. It was harmless, but it was the speed with which it happened that startled me.

The power of Google and Facebook lies in user-generated data that lets them make huge amounts of money from companies wanting to target their advertising. They sell to a host of entities – public and private – hungry for the knowledge that can be harvested from massive data sets. Probably neither Google nor Facebook fully understand the value of the information they sell, amd most users have no idea how their searches and comments are used. This has led some to worry that there is very little holding these companies to account.

Facebook is thought to have increased voter turnout in the 2010 US congressional elections by at least 340,000 by providing an “I Voted” button to 61 million users, essentially peer-pressuring their friends to do the same. In 2013 44 per cent of US adults accessed news on Facebook, rather than newspapers or TV, up from 31 per cent. Since its news feed algorithms control which stories people see, there are concerns that the company has the potential to shape public opinion by curating the news.

Google slso causes concern. It could, for instance, start charging insurance firms to access group insights from its massive user base, which could mean individual customers’ premiums go up. Or it could close down services that millions of people find useful because they don’t bring in the right kind of saleable data or adverts.

The UK’s National Health Service recently handed over to Google’s artificial intelligence arm, DeepMind, millions of retinal scans, on the assumption that DeepMind will reduce the burden of eye disease. And they did it for free. There was no discussion about the deal beforehand, and no privacy safeguards put in place as far as we know.

“My prediction is that we’ll look back in 10, 15 years on this period as a remarkably naive and irresponsible time,” says Julia Powles, a researcher in law and computer science at the University of Cambridge.

This sounds as if we are all collectively being very naive and very unwise. I don’t like monopolies at the best of times. Let’s assume that the current owners and managers of Facebook and Gogle are well-meaning and honest. What happens if more greedy people take over their management in the future?

Conventional wisdom in the West has it that national leaders should step down after one or two terms. But the African democracies that are currently thriving – such as Zambia, Malawi, Tanzania, Ghana, Kenya and Senegal – all started out with presidents who ruled for at least 18 years. These long-serving leaders bequeathed “peaceful transitions” leading to stable democracies. But those African countries with leaders who did “the right thing” and transferred power within a few years to a democratically elected government, often met with disaster. Former Ugandan president Yusuf Lule, for example, was voted out in 1979, and the result was a series of military coups and civil war. Sierra Leone, Somalia and Liberia had similar experiences. Traumatised by colonialism, African nations seem to need the stability of a single ruler before multi-party democracy can take root. Long-serving leaders and democracy “are not mutually contradictory – one seems to lay a foundation for the other”. (Andrew M. Mwenda, The Independent, Kampala)

The reason the post-independence rulers ruled for so long was that they were regarded as “fathers of their countries”, and this gave them the status to overide powerful tribal interests. African commentators still go on about the trauma of colonialism, but “winner take all” tribalism is much worse, and chronically corrupt as well. Despite the colonial trick of favouring small tribes in government, colonial power did offer a peaceful interlude, with some economic development, before the country resumed its tribal bickering with the colonialists gone. The effectiveness of the “fathers of the country” was a blip in the history of the continent. Corruption and coups are its natural state.

“They who are of the opinion that money will do everything may very well be suspected to do everything for money”. (English statesman George Savile, quoted in The Boston Globe)