International Year of Biodiversity
- January 8, 2010 3:40 PM |
- By Quirks
By Bob McDonald, host of the CBC science radio program Quirks & Quarks
Bob McDonald
Following on the International Year of Astronomy, the United Nations is continuing its scientific theme this year with a salute to the hugely important, but often misunderstood, concept of biodiversity.
This term, also known as natural diversity, species richness, or natural heritage, is generally defined as the "totality of genes, species, and ecosystems of a region."
It’s a holistic concept that goes beyond the usual poster children for the environmental movement: polar bears, penguins, snowy owls or eagles. While protecting them is important, they only represent a small part of the food chain. What’s really important are all the other creatures needed to support them: the sea urchins, bacteria, tree fungus, rodents, bugs, the forms of life that don’t look so great blown up to poster size. It’s that entire web of life, the foundation, which is seriously crumbling because of the human tendency to prefer monoculture.
Biodiversity is nature’s backup program. By providing a diverse variety of life in any one environment, the system will be strong enough to withstand stress. If a species is wiped out, whether by hurricane, disease or even climate change, another form of life will fill in the gap. If there is only one form of life, such as a field of corn, the whole thing can be wiped out at once by a single parasite. So, for biodiversity to work, there has to be a huge stock of diverse species to begin with.
Humans, on the other hand, like to focus on one or a few varieties of life and cultivate them. We like yellow corn and golden wheat stretching uniformly all the way to the horizon. We like our apples red and bananas yellow. We cut down the rich diversity of the forest and replace it with green grass, pastures or pavement. We like our food to be consistent wherever we go, lawns free of weeds; in fact, even areas that have been protected from development and designated as parks are often stripped down to the bare minimum of mature trees and grass, so we can spread out our picnic blankets and barbecues.
At the same time, these monoculture landscapes are costing us billions every year in pesticides and herbicides because they’re so vulnerable to attack.
Scientists refer to the current time period as the Holocene Extinction because humans are causing species to disappear worldwide at a rate that hasn’t been seen since a big asteroid hit the planet, 65 million years ago.
Scientist E.O. Wilson calls it HIPPO: Habitat Destruction, Invasive species, Pollution, over-Population, Over-harvesting.
This week on Quirks, Dr. Nancy Shackell describes the impact overfishing has had on the food web in the Atlantic, but also points to more environmentally sensitive fishing practices that would ease the stress on the system.
Preserving biodiversity involves more than saving rainforests from clear cutting. It means including ourselves as one of the species in the mix. Yes, we are the source of the problem, but we also have the unique ability to be a big part of the solution. Farmers have learned the lesson of inter-cropping, animal corridors allow migration, gene banks are attempting to preserve species before they disappear. Many new communities incorporate wetlands to filter runoff water. Solutions come in many forms.
By the most pessimistic estimates, if the current rate of extinction continues, we could wipe the planet clean in the next hundred years. And since we depend on other life for food and medicine, I guess that scenario involves wiping ourselves out as well. But even if that happens, (I think we’re smarter than that) it doesn’t mean we’ve destroyed the planet. The Earth has been sterilized by extinction events many times in the past. Life always renews itself. But what returns is different than what went before, as nature continues to endlessly experiment - with diversity. There’s an irony to that.
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Comments (11)
Thanks for bringing up the issue of monocrops and how our agricultural methods can actually be destructive. This has resulted in a large loss of biodiversity, as well as damage to the soil.
Lierre Keith has a new book called "The Vegetarian Myth" that goes into a lot of detail on the science involved in this. I wonder if you might consider having her as a guest on a future episode of Quirks & Quarks. It would probably make a great segment in the Year of Biodiversity.
Thanks.
Bob McDonald, except for your very wrong, untrue information in regards to a big asteroid hitting the planet.
I truly think you have done a marvelous bit of writing here!
What utter nonsense.
Why is it the same people who scoff at the religions and pooh pooh any criticism of the theory of evolution are the first ones to scream how every thing will become extinct because they can't adapt?
Bizarre.
Everything is connected to everything. The butterfly's wing does not just cause the storm on the other side of the world, but affects all the events that occur along the way. And each one of those events impinges upon other events in a domino effect.
The old nursery rhyme about the Kingdom being lost for the want of a horseshoe nail is still true today. But now the world will be lost because we do not make the proper connections between seemingly irrelevant ideas and occurrences.
Arctic icemelt is accelerating because we drive the car a block to the store. Sounds too dumb to be true. But those connections are there and can be traced. We just have to realize that other connections also arise and spread out from the various intersections like the ripples in a pond. And they sometimes turn into a tsunami.
Life always renews itself? Well if we continue to heat up the planet we may inadvertantly melt the methane hydrates in the ocean. Extreme global heating. This would take us right back to the start position. I have no idea what life forms could exist in a methane environment but it would be very little. See killerinourmidst.com for the exiting details. I hope and pray that I am wrong but if not it will be much worse than anyone can conceve.
Yeah, BioD!
There are several important things to remember when discussing bio diversity. First scientific agronomy has made so that less land is required for agriculture, because of this marginal farmland is reverting back to nature while other marginal land has gone from crop production to pasture for animal husbandry. To expand bio diversity it is important to allow land owners the freedom and resources to manage farms more effectively. This includes allowing the use of genetic modification which can replicate evolution much faster, and the use of chemical inoculants and fertilizers which allow for greatly increased production with less land. The same is true of forrestry, modern forrestry practices keep wildfires in check and use wood more effectively, houses are larger and more sturdy than they were 50 years ago but use less wood, this is why the amount of forrest has increased since 1920. By Contrast France, bans on GMO corn and certain inoculants mean that farmland is increasing rather than decreasing. Private ownership encourages responsible use of resources such as land and could be applied to fisheries or to water management. PERC a Montana based environmental think tank has proposed the use of markets for both of these issues. If fisheries were placed under private ownership Fishermen would be encouraged to preserve the fish they wish to sell, but also the supplies of food for those fish such as smaller fish varieties and plant life, they would also manage their own fish populations allowing for less overfishing and better management of the fisheries. The same is true with water if water rights were up for sale rather than the first use rule and was not heavily subsidized by government water would cost more making it better conserved by agriculture through new uses such as drip irrigation instead of sprinklers or by cities purchasing water than reselling selling water used by their inhabitants which contains treated sewage (fecal material, food wastes which go through a good chopper) which serves as a source of fertilizer.
The second thing is that as countries become more wealthy they become more environmentally conscious. That is why we are seeing countries like India and many South American countries become concerned with protecting their rainforrests and as a result have seen a net increase in the acres of rainforrest. It is important that policies which preserve and enhance prosperity like free trade, free markets, property rights, stable democratic governance, etc. are expanded.
The third point on biodiversity is that insects, bacteria, and the simplest animals easily become extinct but are also easily replaced. This change based on changes in the environment is the basis of the theory of evolution. It occurs without human influence and is not damaging when it happens as the result of human activity.
Whoever (?) coined the phrase 'man AND nature' gave us a skewed fundamental view of life on the planet right from the get-go.
In the English language there seems to be an understood value when sequencing nouns, man and nature, mother and child, Jack and Jill, Mr. and Mrs., whereby the first named holds some capacity as nurturer, maybe even is the most important, or perhaps the one in control of what follows. When this thought is applied sub-consciously to the connection of Man AND Nature, it implies a sense of control, one of the other, perhaps even a sense of separation, outside of it, or worse yet, not actually a functioning equal part of it at all.
It's time we got off of our high horse and see ourselves as mere mortals tangled in the planetary tapestry of biodiversity. Sorry folks, the control and 'manipulating' has, like all meddling, come to no good in the bigger picture. We need to re-think man AND nature to, human WITH nature.
Those who deal with delicate machines like cameras and such, learned long ago that a tripod was the real deal, not the single prong stuck into the ground. Sometimes I think the single prong humanity has stuck in the ground is its head!
Nicely put Bob MacDonald. I have not read before such an apropos and concise statement about why biodiversity is important.
Some of us are doing something about it:
http://www.silverplains.ca/index.htm
An interesting proposal for anyone concerned about the effects of overfishing.
http://www.perc.org/pdf/ps19.pdf
I hear the worrywarts continually quoting huge numbers of extinctions year over year but never do we see a list of what in fact has gone extinct.Maybe Qs and Qs will run a special on this, as yet, unsubstantiated alarmism.
Apparently a subspecies of teetsee fly went extinct in 2009. So what. Anything else, anybody? Now if the two or three varieties of mosquito carrying malaria went extinct that would be great news. A little more DDT please and damn the alarmists.
We can in fact increase biodiversity at will by GM foods research and application but that might lead to the extinction of the worrywarts, or so they claim. But then everything else alive would be just fine.
It's quite a conundrum.