Special place. The Sierra de Manantlán Biosphere Reserve skyline. (© 1998 Fred Powledge.)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Deforestation.  Logging on Costa Rica's Pacific coast. (© 1998 Fred Powledge.) 

A continuing urgency

                         About biodiversity

A decade ago, in 1988, the esteemed Harvard entomologist E.O. Wilson wrote of an “unprecedented urgency” surrounding the loss of biodiversity. The urgency, he said, exists because a growing world population is causing rapid environmental degradation; because science is discovering “new uses for biological diversity in ways that can relieve both human suffering and environmental destruction,” and because the destruction of natural habitats is causing irreversible, permanent loss of species. 

  His comments were part of a report on the first U.S. national forum on biodiversity, held in 1986 by the National Research Council and the Smithsonian Institution, and they reflected the fears, hopes, and findings of dozens of other scientists at the meeting.

  In 1997, when Wilson participated in a follow-up forum, the urgency had not abated. In fact, according to the great majority of the four dozen who spoke, things had gotten worse. Habitat destruction was continuing. Population was still growing (although at a lower rate than had previously been predicted). 

  Significantly, there was a term used at the more recent meeting that had not seen much use in 1988: extinction. Biodiversity — which Wilson once defined as “variation in the entirety of life on the planet” — is being destroyed at such a rate, said many speakers, that Earth is on the brink of its sixth great wave of extinction, one whose intensity could rank alongside the disappearance of the dinosaurs.

  There is no lack of scientific concern about the global loss of biodiversity. At academic centers, private research institutions, and non-governmental organizations in both developed and developing worlds, North and South, temperate and tropical, men and women of all disciplines are trying to solve the biodiversity predicament.

Everywhere and anywhere. The work is not confined to the better-known sources of biological diversity — the rain forest rightly comes first to many people’s minds — but as the scientific knowledge broadens, it becomes increasingly apparent that biodiversity is everywhere and anywhere, and that the only reasonable way to look at it is as an ecological system, the elements of which, no matter how tiny or seemingly insignificant, are all interdependent.

  The search to understand biodiversity before it disappears reaches now into places that, in 1988, were not high on the researchers’ priority lists: to the depths of the oceans and the shallows of the coastal estuaries; to the relationships between the sequestration of carbon in the soil and global warming; to the unseen, and until now widely ignored, microbes that live in that soil; to the not-so-obvious residents of the northern temperate forests, such as lichen; to the vast and vital richnesses of agricultural biodiversity; to understanding units of nature that once were overlooked, such as watersheds.

  Perhaps most important, the study of biodiversity now pays homage to the unavoidable role that humans play, both in the destruction and salvation of biological resources.

Major issues.  The obstacles that stand in the way of preserving Earth's biodiversity are numerous and formidable. The more science learns about species diversity, the more apparent becomes its lack of knowledge. There is a serious need for taxonomists — the people who classify plants, animals, insects, microorganisms — for science realizes that before it can make recommendations on how to save diversity, it must know what it has to save.

  There is a serious need for a multidisciplinary approach to biodiversity issues. Collaboration among disciplines has been discussed and prescribed for decades, but it is more often talked about than done. The relatively new field of conservation biology hopes to make such cooperation the norm in efforts to understand biodiversity.

  Widespread agreement exists, too, that the environmental values of biodiversity should be given proper standing in economic decision-making. Costs and benefits must be seen as encompassing more than dollars and cents.

  There is, finally, a terrible need for public appreciation of the crisis facing biological diversity. But neither the public at large nor policy- and decision-makers are yet sufficiently aware of the issues. 

  There is nothing like a crisis, of course, to sharpen public and official attention and turn rhetoric into action. The problem with biodiversity, however, is that when the crisis gets bad enough, when too many species have become extinct, it will be too late to rescue the richness of the Earth.