AND WHY DOES IT MATTER?
BY S.E. BURT
Recently, there has been a lot of talk about the natural world and the effect humans have on it. Global Warming, deforestation, biodiversity, greenwashing, carbon footprint, are all familiar terms – but what do they actually mean? Biodiversity for example, means the variety and abundance of life on Earth, but in reality, it is a system that is fragile as it is complex.
Imagine you have a 10,000 piece jigsaw. A gust of wind blows 200 pieces out the window, gone forever. The jigsaw is full of gaps, destabilised with missing pieces of information. Biodiversity is similar. Now imagine you have a jigsaw of around 1 trillion pieces. It is wrapped around Earth and made up of plants and animals, from bacteria to blue whales.
If every individual piece in the global jigsaw represents a species, its unique genes set it apart from every other organism. All the genes from all the species add up to make a ‘gene pool’, a range of genes available to evolve and adapt, like a living jigsaw piece that can change shape slightly if it needs to. Each species occupies a separate ‘niche’, a lifestyle which makes it different to everything else. Its own place in the jigsaw. No other piece will fit that exact space, and each interconnects with other pieces around it perfectly.
Within the jigsaw, there are recognisable areas, the corners, top edges, middle bits etc. These are like ‘habitats’, particular areas within the jigsaw where groups of pieces belong, and each species has evolved to fit the habitat and niche it occupies. Left to balance itself, planet Earth produces a healthy ecosystem, the jigsaw of life.
But, something has gone wrong. Humans.
No species, in the history of the planet has ever been so successful – or so stupid. Today, the balance has been tipped by the careless and greedy activities of man. Since the Industrial Revolution 250 years ago, between 200-2,000 species have been lost EVERY YEAR.
Deforestation, habitat loss, meat and food production, waste, overfishing, pollution, and rising global temperatures due to the burning of fossil fuels are causing too much change all at once. In 2021 we are in the midst of a mass extinction, caused directly by every single person on the planet. The irony? Humans are now on the extinction list too.
What does it matter if something becomes extinct? Well, if one thing dies out, others that rely on it become more likely to die out too. Take a tiny fig wasp that lives in the Amazon jungle, 5,000 miles away. It crawls inside a fig to pollinate it. No other insect can do this, it has evolved to be a specialist. One day all the fig wasps die out, there’s none left, anywhere.
The figs can’t produce new fruit so all the monkeys, fruit bats and birds that feed on the figs go hungry. On the ground, beetles and other insects that fed on the dropped fruit also die out. Snakes and lizards that ate the beetles and insects starve. Birds and other mammals that ate the lizards and snakes don’t have enough food to feed their young, and no new generations come along. The seeds of the tree are not dispersed, and many trees are cut down to make office and garden furniture. The forest shrinks. Carbon dioxide levels rise. The soil where tree roots held it in place, is washed away by rising flood waters.
The water has risen because the burning of fossil fuels by humans has changed the weather patterns. The waters in the oceans become warmer and more acidic because of the use of petrol, electricity and gas, which kills small creatures larger ones eat. Glaciers melt in the higher temperatures, preventing the usual flow of oceanwide currents, which bring food to millions of creatures around the world…Fortunately, Fig wasps have not died out – yet, but many other organisms have. The chain reaction has already started.
The good news? The Earth has the capacity to provide us with everything we need, if we do so sustainably.