Understanding ecology level one... Biodiversity

Or rather, Biodiversity Destruction.

"The worst thing that can happen - will happen [in the 1980s] - is not energy depletion, economic collapse, limited nuclear war, or conquest by a totalitarian government. As terrible as these catastrophes would be for us, they can be repaired within a few generations. The one process ongoing in the 1980s that will take millions of years to correct is the loss of genetic and species diversity by the destruction of natural habitats. This is the folly our descendants are least likely to forgive us."
- E.O. Wilson, Harvard Magazine, January-February 1980

Biodiversity is the technical term for having lots of different kinds of life forms. It is the big picture term. It is the term most people choose not to use for a simple reason. Biodiversity is not important to the majority of people. Humans are more important to the majority of people than other life forms. People know what the implications of the simple term are. It's a term that's been used now for several decades. Biodiversity first came into vogue as a sort of buzzword back in the early seventies. Sure, you hear the term, but the environment, the human environment, is what is important to humans. That's why for every one time you hear biodiversity you'll hear environment at least twenty times. It's rather unbecoming to not like life forms. After all one does want to be a sensitive, caring human being, does one not? But it's even more unbecoming to be thought of as a misanthropist.

We considered giving a sanitized academic definition of biodiversity. But what the heck. We decided to just tell it like it is. The cause of biodiversity loss is Homo sapiens. Many have heard something about a vague thing called a kankyou mondia, an environmental problem. But few equate the kankyou mondai with species extinctions.

So when the cost benefit ratios are applied and they always are when an unlucky species gets caught directly in the path of the human juggernaut, as John Mellenkamp says, "Authority always wins."

And Buddycom would concur, " Authority always wins, each time the judgement is made." Most SANI index values are becoming microscopic. Tens of millions have become tens of thousands. Millions have become thousands. Hundreds of thousands have become hundreds. Many species are too close to their MVP. Between 100 and 150 species are pushed into extinction every day. That doesn't seem like much. So what if tomorrow 135 species became extinct? You can handle that, can't you? Sure you can. And you can handle, say, 135 species extinctions per day for the next 365 days, too, can't you? Heck, that's only about fifty thousand or so. We'll just bet that you could handle 135 species extinctions per day for this past decade. Can you multiply fifty thousand by ten? Sure you can.

Biodiversity and Ecosystem Functioning:
INTRODUCTION One of the most striking features of the earth’s biota is its extraordinary diversity, estimated to include about 10 million different species. One of the most conspicuous aspects of contemporary global change is the rapid decline of this diversity in many ecosystems. The decline is not limited to increased rates of species extinction, but includes losses in genetic and functional diversity across population, community, ecosystem, landscape, and global scales. The term "biodiversity" refers collectively to all these aspects of biotic diversity. The wide-ranging decline in biodiversity results largely from habitat modifications and destruction, increased rates of invasions by deliberately or accidentally introduced non-native species, over-exploitation and other human-caused impacts. On a global scale, even at the lowest estimated current extinction rate, about half of all species could be extinct within 100 years. Such an event would be similar in magnitude to the five mass extinction events in the 3.5 billion year history of life on earth. On local and regional scales, biodiversity declines are already pronounced in many areas, especially where natural ecosystems have been converted to croplands, timber plantations, aquaculture and other managed ecosystems. The diversity of these managed ecosystems is often low, and species composition very different, compared with those of the natural systems they have replaced. "

See the estimates of the Ecological Society of America, an organization of the top 7,500 registered professional ecologists. The Ecological Society of America (ESA) is a non-partisan, nonprofit organization of scientists founded in 1915. 1707 H St., NW, Suite 400, Washington, DC 20006, Tel:202-833-8773, Fax:202-833-8775

Please visit them......
http://esa.sdsc.edu/issues4.htm
http://esa.sdsc.edu/issues4.pdf
How to Order Copies of Issues in Ecology are available for: $3.00 for single copies $2.00 for bulk copies of 50 or more.

Visit.....

Hundreds of images of your favorite animals.
Biodiversity Glossary

Bears.
Get the rest of the story about them and how they fit into the big picture of biodiversity.
Bears.

Actually Voltaire's Dr Pangloss may have been quite correct. We may live in the best of all possible worlds. The great thing about it is that we may have had an estimated three to four million species before we started our habitat destruction binge of the last two centuries. The definitive word here is "estimate" and "centuries." We've extincted no more than about ten percent in this current decade, but we can stand around and argue about that estimate today, and ignore the patterns of extinctions of the last few centuries, while another 135 species goes exticnt. The numbers and rates of extinctions are estimates and therefore mere philosophic abstractions. And in fact there is something not quite right about focusing on extinctions. Extinctions represent an identifiable point of finality. For that they are useful. But focusing on extinctions is a convenient way of diverting attention away from the pervasive process of "SANItization." Whether Buddycom likes it or not the earth is being "SANItized." SANI stands for Species Absolute Numbers Index, a value which has fallen for every species on the planet with very rare exeptions, (see SANI page). And we haven't even named most of the species which disappear. That's a very fortunate fact for those willing to pooh pooh species extinctions and biodiversity loss, which in the final analysis includes about 95% of humans. After say, fifty percent of the earth's species biodiversity is gone, a point in time, which in terms of evolutionary time is only nanoseconds away, what will be the point of crying over spilled milk, especially when you can't even see the milk? Was the milk there in the first place? Additionally, you can't quantify a real human need for many species. You can't eat mountain gorillas, can you? Well, maybe but, why complain if the natives eat them and the chimps as well. After they're gone evolutionists will have a harder time talking about our evolutionary relationship to the primates. Yes, if after all we can just maintain a stiff Tate Mae attitude, what the British like to call a stiff upper lip, the destruction will run its course, the big ruckus about biodiversity will subside, the world can become totally anthropocentric, the book of genesis will make much more sense and we will live in the best of all possible worlds.

Biodiversity decay equation.

www.biodiversity.nl
Biodiversity Web Netherlands, a very good biodiversity source.

You see, it always comes down to jobs versus some puny little squashable bug, or some scampering little ugly lizard, or some furry little gap-toothed rodent, or some slimy little squirming salamander, or some wiggly little darting fish, or some goofy looking bug-eyed owl, or some tiny little microscopic zooplankton; you get the idea, right? (Note how the authors have so cleverly side stepped the use of any scientific species names.)

Washington Post Tuesday, April 21, 1998 Page A-4
"A majority of the nation's biologists are convinced that a "mass extinction" of plants and animals is underway that poses a major threat to humans in the next century, yet most Americans are only dimly aware of the problem, a poll says. The rapid disappearance of species was ranked as one of the planet's gravest environmental worries, surpassing pollution, global warming and the thinning of the ozone layer, according to the survey of 400 scientists commissioned by New York's American Museum of Natural History."
"Among non-scientists, meanwhile, the subject appears to have made relatively little impression. Sixty percent of the laymen polled professed little or no familiarity with the concept of biological diversity, and barely half ranked species loss as a "major threat."
"The scientists interviewed in the Louis Harris poll were members of the Washington-based American Institute of Biological Sciences, a professional society of more than 5,000 scientists."
For dozens of quality links to information about the ongoing mass extictionwell.com/user/davidu/extinction.html

George is sticking to his position that there's, "No problem."

What can one say with a high degree of certainty? The legalistic wrangling will continue. Technological development will increase. Human populations will increase both their numbers and the living area they expropriate.

There will be more and more

Not good news for biodiversity.

That's why after the "earth day" show in Rio, Mr. Bush wanted to reiterate clearly the official United States policy stance regarding other life forms, lest there be any doubt. He was standing on the tarmac behind a hastlily arranged podium when he made a very short statement and then turned around and got on the plane. He said, " Sure, we have to clean up the environment. But, if the United States has to stand alone in opposing this treaty on biodiversity, then, so be it." That's a verbatim quote too, jelly bean. Mr Bush is a smart fellow. He knows what is important and what is not, doesn't he?

Before you dip your pen in the poison jar, we must say that we admire President Bush. It's just that his impromptu remarks in this instance are more revealing of the national concensus than perhaps environmental myopics might wish to admit.

"Even without species extinctions, ecosystems may lose their ability to support life when local populations of key organisms disappear. Biologist Jennifer Hughes and her colleagues at Stanford University estimate that every year 16 million local plant and animal populations--or 1,800 populations every hour--disappear from the world's tropical forests. Because of this, biologists argue that focusing only on whether a species is extinct is too narrow a view. A species preserved in a zoo or botanical garden, for example, would technically be saved from extinction, but if local populations vanish from the wild, the ecological damage is done." From: USnews.comhttp://www.usnews.com/usnews/issue/971027/27bio.htm

Call it what you will, a positive feed back loop ( the more A, the more B, the more B, the more A, etc.), a viscious cycle, an inevitable destiny. The larger the human populations, the less important biodiversity becomes. For those with incorrigible myopia, or those whose blinders are set in a very narrow position, or those for whom vacuous platitudes serve as a substitute for reality, isolated park areas are what biodiversity in the earth's biosphere is all about and drive through zoos are the modern equivalent self sustaining ecosystems. (Oops ... there we go again. Why can't we just mouth platitudes like everybody else?)

Most individuals could agree that the cause of species extinctions is humans. Why not make that simple admission? After all, we've heard that mantra for decades. But those same individuals say that common sense tells us two things:
1) Either there's no such thing as overpopulation. Or
2) There's nothing which can be done about it, if indeed we are overpopulated.
In either case two standard deviations from the mean, that is to say 95% of the human population, would believe that the solution is technology.

We might say, "Oh, really?" Here's our contribution to habitat restoration.

In fact if technology were to solve all the problems of level two and level three, humans would expand their expropriation of habitat, and degrade more habitat and degrade habitat at a faster rate.

Any way you slice it, slash it, or burn it, biodiversity will be the biggest environmental loser of the 20th century after all the numbers are tallied up. And in the next millenium, (even if people wanted to try to avoid a world population of eight or ten billion, which apparently they don't), with our accelerating rates of habitat destruction, biodiversity will be an even bigger loser.

That's a sure bet but we don't know any bookmakers giving odds on it, do you?

What can one say with a high degree of certainty? The legalistic wrangling will continue. Technological development will increase. Human populations will increase both their numbers and the living area they expropriate.

There will be more and more

Not good news for biodiversity.

There are interesting articles on biodiversity in the National Geographic Magazine. Rocket scientists have always liked the magazine therefore we were less shocked than usual when we viewed their discussion forums. In one of the discussion forums in particular, we noticed three of five responses unabashedly stating that until the overpopulation problem is addressed, nothing substantive or lasting will be accomplished regarding the earth's loss in biodiversity. That discussion took place in the tenth month of the last year of the twentieth century, more than three decades after the founding of the ZPG organization and somewhat less than three decades after the publishing of Dr Paul Ehrlich's book, "The Population Bomb."

Here's a quote from the feature article about the earth day show in Rio at
http://www.panda.org/news/features/story.cfm?id=235
"Gland, Switzerland: As conservationists, we can say with certainty that more than 31,000 of the world's plant and animal species are currently threatened with extinction. What we cannot be so sure about is the much greater number of species which have either not been scientifically recorded or whose status we simply do not know. Many of these species are relatively inconspicuous insects or other arthropods, with a restricted distribution range in tropical forests. Their disappearance from the planet is an inevitable consequence of the continued loss of tropical forests and according to The World Resources Institute one fifth of all such forests was lost between 1960 to 1990." But that, of course, is not the full story of destruction. Other biomes rich in species have been affected badly, with as much as 10 per cent of the world's coral reefs degraded beyond recovery and 50 per cent of the coastal mangroves destroyed during the past 30 years or so.

"Are those shining condos on the hill a science-fiction utopia or an arrogant disaster? Is that pretty wilderness calendar an ecological statement, or romantic escapism? The way we plunder the natural world reveals more than environmental blindness. The scars we leave on the land betray a wider addiction to conquest and domination; a constant, casual recourse to hypocrisy and denial. We benefit from the machinery of plunder, but are ultimately trapped by it. No wonder that in the end even our own captive, domesticated landscape reproaches us.... "
~ David Stock, 1997

Rate of species extinctions, 136/day from: Reid, W.V. and N.R. Miller (1989) World Resources Institute, Washington, DC.

Rate of species extinctions, 136/day from published estimates of 50% species extinctions expected in the 21st century as a Minimum current rate, extrapolated. Increases in population would of course increase extinction rates. Ecological Society of America, esa.org