The importance of biodiversity

• We are eliminating populations and species faster than we can discover new ones.

• We cut down thousands of acres of virgin forest before we have had time to document or study what was there.

• We replace our naturally diverse vegetation with artificial monocultures.

• We are polluting our environment and changing background environmental conditions faster than nature can respond.

• We worry about the loss of species usually once it is too late to economically and effectively do anything about it.

Biodiversity and extinctions

• Extinction occurs when there are no longer any living individuals of a species left.

• There have been five periods of mass extinction's on earth 440m, 370m, 250m, 210m and 65m years ago.

• Scientists estimate that currently, living organisms represent only 1% of all the species that have ever been (i.e. 99% have been and gone)

• We are in a sixth period caused not by meteorites or deep ice ages, but by human resource uses - this process is super fast in contrast to all past experiences.

Views on biodiversity

• Anthropocentric point of view for preserving biodiversity - some of these species might have economic, medical, aesthetic, recreational, scientific or ecological value at some future point.

• Earth-first point of view for preserving biodiversity - each species, as a unique product of millions of years of adaptation, has an inherent right to not be eliminated by human beings.

Food for thought…..

• Some 90% of all our current foodstuffs were domesticated and cross-bred from wild stock found by trial and error by experimenting farmers & we principally use about 30/70,000 edible species.

• Insects are often despised by people, but many are very important ecologically not only as pollinators of important plants and as bases of the food webs, but as predators of destructive pests and for maintaining soil fertility.

A bitter pill to swallow…..

• About 40% of the drugs and other pharmaceuticals on which our modern medicine relies were developed in some way from the genetic resources of wild plants and animals (often from weeds or things that are poisonous to us) - including the top 20 best selling prescription drugs in the US today (Raven et al p353) e.g. aspirin.

Don’t know what we’ve got till…

• As many as 50-200 species are lost to this planet every day - 20,000 to 70,000 per year.

• It takes between 2,000-100,000 generations for higher species to evolve

• We lack knowledge about species in the most biodiverse and at-risk areas.

• We can only imagine how many species there are and what their functions and values are (we know of about 1.75 million of possibly 13-14 million)

….it’s gone!

• More than 90% of the plants we know about have never been chemically evaluated.

• The need of wild species for undisturbed living space conflicts with our own needs and desires for the resources this space represents including the land itself.

• The fastest growing sector in many developing countries is ecotourism which relies upon the continued presence of pristine habitat.

It’s all in the genes...

• The fastest growing sectors of modern agriculture and modern medicine are those involving genetic engineering – without a sufficient gene pool (genetic diversity), there will be inadequate raw materials to work from.

• The more genetically diverse a species (i.e. the greater the variation in DNA characteristics from individual to individual), the more robust it will be in withstanding the environmental changes created by humans.

The rivet poppers…..

• Paul Ehrlich of Stanford University compares our permitting of biodiversity loss to continue as being equal to passengers waiting for a plane.

• We contentedly watch through the departure lounge window as an engineer starts taking the rivets one by one out of the fuselage.

• When finally a few of us start to get worried and ask the check in agent if the plane will be OK, she says - “Oh sure, don’t worry, the plane still has plenty more”.

• Should we go back to our seats and keep on watching the airport TV while the engineer continues his work?

• (From the Ehrlich essay – The Rivet Poppers)