Fight for them. Biodiversity is as crucial as climate.
Photo by David Clode on Unsplash
Our relatives are dying. Every year now, dozens of species are declared extinct, meaning no one will ever see them alive again. Scientists say the current rate of extinction is 100 to 1000 times the normal rate, which had been 1–5 species per year. Thousands more are at the brink of extinction or live only in captivity. Do we mourn their loss?
Indigenous people do grieve the murdered animals and plants, but do the rest of us? Have we even noticed the 80% drop in insect populations worldwide, or the sharp declines in birds, and fish, as well as mammals and amphibian populations?
Without their animal friends, 69% of flowering plants are at risk of extinction, according to Andrea Thompson, writing in Scientific American. Plants need animals to move their seeds around by eating them and shitting them out, or by flying pollen from one plant to another.
Insects aren’t just delightful to watch, like fireflies and butterflies. They help reproduce the plants that we eat. They also feed birds and small mammals with their bodies. The small birds and mammals feed the larger ones, and they all fertilize the soil. It’s the same in the water with fish.
That’s what is called an ecosystem, lots of diverse species feeding each other and enriching the ground for those who come after them.
Rich ecosystems like old growth forests, grasslands, or wetlands may have thousands of species, and nearly all have vital roles to fulfill. When one species dies off, others are threatened, as with the plants suffering from the loss of seed-eating mammals.
The variety of species is called biodiversity, God’s greatest gift, Nature’s greatest creation. According to National Geographic, “Scientists have estimated that there are around 8.7 million species of plants and animals in existence. Only 1.2 million have been identified and named, and scientists are racing to find and catalog the rest before they become extinct.”
All these living things are our relatives. I’m not speaking poetically or spiritually. This is fact. If you go back far enough, you and I, and a fish, or a cow, or a turtle, have a common ancestor. You might have to go back 100 million years or so, but you and that bird over there are millionth cousins, a million times removed.
It might be a little different with invertebrates and plants, but somewhere back there we were part of the same evolutionary line. Micro-organism such as bacteria and fungi are too. Trillions of bacteria share our bodies with us and help us digest food. They are our relatives. We should love, admire, and protect them.
I say admire, because every species does some amazing things. We don’t usually notice them, but wildlife educators can tell you. Name a creature and you can find a video about it on YouTube. Watch some, and you’ll be amazed and delighted.
If you can get people away from their work and their devices, most feel relaxed, invigorated, and happy after spending some time around nonhumans. As a city dweller, I treasure each and every interaction with animals and plants.
Too many people have no contact with nature and have no idea what they’re missing. Corporations have no awareness of life at all, except as sources of potential profit. Think about that; the institutions that run our world do not know nature exists. To them, reality is in their circuitry, and a forest isn’t worth anything until it’s cut down. That is why our relatives are disappearing.
All creatures are necessary for what is called “ecosystem services,” cleaning toxins, preventing floods, and storing carbon. But even if they were freeloading (a physical impossibility), they would still be wondrous and worthy of a place in our world.
In the 21st century, the whole world is faced with famines, fires, droughts and floods, and we need our relatives’ ecosystem services to survive. Biodiversity, as much as climate, is critical to sustaining life, because conditions constantly change, and a variety of plants are needed to cope with different conditions.
In the same field of wheat, one variety may grow better on one side and another across the way, depending on slope, sun, and soil. That’s why “green revolution” industrial single-crop farming has been so destructive.
Though ordinary people can see that killing nature means killing ourselves, capitalists can’t see it. They will preserve a species if they can make money from it; otherwise kill them and take their stuff. We have to stop them.
Maximizing biodiversity
Our leaders have known and had meetings about biodiversity (BD) since at least 1992. Since then, the United Nations has held global BD meetings every two years, just as they have for climate change. Not much has been done in either case, but at least climate gets some publicity.
The BD conferences have made plans. Nations are asked to conserve 30% of their land for nature by the year 2030. That plan has become official policy in many districts, including California. I see no evidence of actual progress, though.
Another very good idea the BD conferences acknowledge is to empower Indigenous Peoples, who make up about 5 % of the Earth’s population, but whose land is home to 80% of the world’s species. There’s a reason for that.
Like indigenous people, women in general have a closer relationship to the land — the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) says women are 60–80% of the world’s small farmers — and women are having their own biodiversity conferences, as India’s Vandana Shiva reports here. They’re saving diverse seeds to at least increase the BD of food plants.
Proposals to stop government subsidies to industries such as fossil fuels, have been made but not passed at several conferences. The International Monetary Fund (IMF) reported that fossil fuel subsidies have reached over $7 trillion a year, paying to bake our planet. [Remember that the next time you hear a fiscal conservative screaming about subsidies to solar power.]
Wars, with their destructive shelling, as in the Ukraine, are debilitating to biodiversity as well as adding to climate change. BD conferences discussed peace, but there have been few warmongers there to listen.
Unfortunately, many leaders oppose all these ideas. In the USA, the Republicans for 30 years have prevented any of these changes from being enacted into law. They don’t endorse the US joining the BD treaties at all. They claim that it would infringe on American sovereignty, put commercial interests at risk, and cost too much money.
The more powerful nations of the global North have not been willing to support the global South’s efforts to protect biodiversity. The rich countries want to keep looting their former colonies of their resources. They really don’t want poor countries to conserve species, if it costs them anything. So, the economic policies of developed nations have blocked cooperation in maintaining BD.
Your Biodiversity footprint
As with carbon footprints and climate change, individual choices have little impact on BD loss, but there are small things people can do. We can plant native plants. We can stop using toxic environmental chemicals in our homes and refuse to buy products made with them.
Since habitat destruction is the main cause of extinction, we should stop buying products, such as palm oil, grown on destroyed forest land. Stop driving. Don’t live in new developments that have displaced creatures. Buy local. Free the land from concrete and asphalt (called depaving.)
When you’re out and about, take time to appreciate and love the trees, birds, and bugs you see. When you’re inside, appreciate and love the micro-organisms that live inside you and keep you healthy. As much as possible, eat organic food from regenerative farms. If you’re physically able, you might participate in restoring wetlands or forests.
We can certainly write and call our representatives to tell them biodiversity is a priority. Support the Endangered Species Act (ESA) and demand stronger enforcement. ESA has rescued many species, and sometimes whole ecosystems from extinction in America
Scream against war and our insane military budget. In just the last year, the Department of Defense has bulldozed rainforests on several Pacific islands and nations, and plans to do more, in preparation for their planned war with China. I hope that war never comes, but the rainforest species will already be dead.
Maybe focus on BD would help people let go of old ways. A major advance is a pact known as the Post-2020 Global Biodiversity Framework, signed by every country in the world in 2022. It calls for each country to transform social and economic systems, bringing a halt to biodiversity loss, stabilizing a new environment by 2030 and showing a net biodiversity gain by 2050. Even the US signed it, but did not ratify it because of Republican opposition.
Of the two giant environmental crises, it could be that biodiversity is a better focus than climate change. Polls show much more public support for BD than for climate, at least among conservatives. Focus on climate leads to technological fixes and endless arguments about greenhouse gases, with the major goal being to keep things the same, which is to say, totally fucked. Focus on BD means focusing on our relations, transforming the way we see the world in a loving way, saving lives. It might be more motivating.
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