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WHAT IS BIODIVERSITY?
Biodiversity can be defined as the variety of life in all its
forms, levels, combinations and processes, including the
varieties of ecosystems, species and their genetic differences.
The Earth is a place rich with the numbers and types of
plants and animals. But today it isn't as rich as yesterday.
I quote from the
The Union of Concerned Scientists :
"Scientists have become increasingly concerned over the
rapid decline of the earth's biodiversity -- the erosion of our
natural wealth. Extinction is a natural process, but biologists
estimate that human activities have increased the rate of
extinction on earth one hundred times or more. Both species and
natural habitats are threatened by habitat destruction, such as
clearcutting, and by pollution, invasive species,
overexploitation, and climate change."
WHY IS BIODIVERSITY SO IMPORTANT?
Biodiversity has two important roles:
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as a benefit to Mankind in terms of
an economic and practical
resource. The richness our planet's biodiversity endows Man
with an incalculable wealth of potential solutions to his
problems. So far we have only scratched the surface of
that potential. We cannot even begin to guess what
hitherto undiscovered disease cures lie within the
tropical rainforests. If we continue to destroy them at
our current rate we may forever loose a critical remedy
for AIDS, Cancer, etc. without ever suspecting that it
existed. |
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it is an essential condition for the survival of the
community of living things on the earth. If we think simply in
terms of food chains and the relationships therein we begin to
see that the chains are actually extremely complex webs which
ultimately link together most, if not all, of the species of
an ecosystem and that there are links between the webs of
diverse ecosystems. An external pressure applied to one
species will affect the populations of its food and its
predators and the ripples will spread out through many other
species. Take a species out of the web and the effect can be
dramatic; remove several species and the entire ecosystem may
be endangered. |
THE MORALITY OF SPECIES EXTINCTION
The first question that must be asked is this: What moral right
does man have, as a single species, to eradicate any one
other species on the face of our planet? If you like we can
equate this question with the moral intra-species question: What
right does any single human being have to take the life of
another human being? I believe that most right-thinking people
with moral scruples would answer: "None!", perhaps
with the proviso "unless, to do so would safeguard many
other human lives." (Consider the proposition of taking out
Hitler in the mid-1930s.)
OK, so how many species have been terminated by man in order
to safeguard the world? Answer: None that I know of. How many
species have become extinct simply as a byproduct of Man's
activities? Answer: All of the species whose extinction has been
caused by Man.
For the most part, Mankind seems to have an egocentric viewpoint with
regard to the World around him. As a species we seem to imagine
that the whole of evolution has simply been a precursor to our
own existence, that we are the ultimate creation and that the
sum product of four billion years of miraculous development of
life on our planet is insignificant when compared to our own
importance. From that incredibly arrogant position we stand
poised to decimate the biodiversity of our planet. Why?
Well, one thing that I have seen plastered throughout the
Internet on the subject of biodiversity is "what is the
Dollar value of a single species?" Don't you just love
those cuddly economists and their "dollar views"? I
wonder what their dollar view is of their own particular lives?
I believe it was Lawrence Summers, the Chief Economist in the
World Bank in 1991, who put forward the view in an internal
memorandum that "dirty" (dangerous and polluting)
industries should be "exported" to countries where the
value of human life was cheap. He wrote "I think the
economic logic behind dumping a load of toxic waste in
the lowest wage country is impeccable and we should face
up to that." i.e. a poor man's life is less
valuable than a rich man's. What a nice man!
It is a sad fact that our World is run by people like Lawrence
Summers. People whose only raison d'être
for Man's existence, let alone any other species existence, is the
Dollar.
LATEST BIODIVERSITY NEWS
New Scientist 14 June 2002 - The
struggle for paradise
New Scientist 02 May 2002 - Human Sprawl Covering the Planet
New Scientist 18 Feb 2002 -
Half of Amazon Forest being
"Profoundly" Damaged
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