Biodiversity - why should we care?

Ludi

"You can understand why the destruction of such a large number of unique living things that inhabit this world with us should be a matter of serious concern, but as a matter of practical concern we can make the point very easily in Madagascar. The rosy periwinkle is now a common backyard plant, but it is native only to Madagascar. In 1971 the Eli Lilly Company put on the market vinblastine and vincristine, which are two alkaloids derived from that plant. Vinblastine is one of the most effective drugs used to treat Hodgkins disease, and vincristine, when used in combination with other drugs, has raised the chance of surviving childhood leukemia from about one chance in twenty to about nineteen chances in twenty. But just ask yourself how many species like rosy periwinkle are going to survive and for how long in these grossly altered ecological communities? And how are we possibly, with our very limited state of knowledge about global biodiversity, going to have the slightest hope of finding out about them unless we begin to take species extinctions seriously and do something about it while there is still some time?... Just to remind you before we talk about remedies, let me give you just a sampling of the economic reasons for worrying about biodiversity. Cacao, the major ingredient in chocolate, is a reminder that plants in commerce go throughout the entire world and that much of what we use to support ourselves one way or another, comes from the tropics.

Although the U.S. is agriculturally the most productive nation on earth, all but a very few of our cultivated plants were brought into cultivation somewhere else in the world. So when we look for genetic material to enrich our crop plants we have to go somewhere else to find that genetic material. The only plant crop species that I know of that were domesticated within the borders of the U.S. and where we can hope to find genetic material here to improve them, at least by conventional breeding methods, are pecans, sunflowers, cranberries, blueberries and maybe some squashes. Everything else that makes up the bulk of the human food supply -- wheat, potatoes, soybeans, squashes, corn, rice, beans, oats, you name it -- was domesticated and has its reservoir of genetic material somewhere else in the world.

Zea diploperennis -- a wild relative of corn -- was discovered on a mountain range near Guadalajara, Mexico, in 1978 by scientists from the University of Guadalajara and the University of Wisconsin. Unlike corn, Zea diploperennis has just one row of kernels and also unlike corn, it keeps coming back from the same root, that is, it is perennial. Zea diploperennis is interfertile with corn and, also unlike corn, it has in it genes that confer resistance to seven of the nine major viral diseases that are the major factors lowering the yield in corn throughout the world. So it is economically a very important plant to have discovered. But this plant’s entire native range is now just one rambling pasture. This unique perennial corn with all its highly desirable genetic attributes, could easily have gone extinct without ever having been seen.

Two thirds of the people in the world depend directly on plants as their source of medicine; only a third of us use prescription drugs as the main source of medicine. For those of us who do depend on prescription drugs, the dependency is nevertheless direct. Tubocurarine is a modified derivative of curare, which is a muscle relaxant used by certain natives of the Amazon in their hunting. And without this derivative of curare, open heart surgery would not be possible. No surgery requiring diaphragm muscle relaxation would be possible without this drug. We would not know about this drug if we had not had the example of people actually using it.

Most of the twenty biggest-selling prescription drugs in the U.S. are either derived from a natural product, modified from one -- as are cortisone, birth control pills, or other steroids -- or synthesized based on a natural product model. A good example of the latter is acetylsalicylic acid -- our common aspirin -- which is manufactured now from non-botanical sources, but which is modelled on compounds originally found in willows and other plants.

Another example of this latter category is a plant that we at the Missouri Botanical Garden found in Cameroon in West Africa. It is a species of Ancistrocladus which we collected under a contract from the National Cancer Institute to get samples for pharmaceutical screening. A compound from this plant -- Michelamine B -- proved to be active against all major types of human AIDS viruses. In the process of animal testing it turned out that this compound is a neurotoxin, probably too strong to use in human beings. But here is the key point: The compound attacks the AIDS virus in a completely different way from that of all the other compounds currently used to treat AIDS. So by the discovery of this compound, people who are working on that horrible disease are able to gain special insights on how the virus works and are able to make strides towards controlling it. This process of testing, refining and modifying characterizes the research on most natural products.

We have looked at only a tiny fraction of the plants and marine animals and other organisms who use these compounds in their own defenses against predators, fungi, and other diseases, and which have generated incredible metabolic diversity in the course of their evolution. We have only looked at a tiny fraction of those to see what they might be able to produce."

http://www.well.com/user/davidu/ravendenton.html
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Cynus · Intermediate Crude Joined: Aug 13, 2004 Posts: 585

That's a nice post, but I prefer to emphasize the moral argument for biodiversity rather than appealing to self-interest. If the above argument were applied to say, slavery, it would ammount to saying slavery is wrong because it decreases the paying jobs and wagees for us free people. The moral argument would argue that slavery should be abolished even if it didn't have economic benefites, it should be abolished even if it was economically disadvantageous. Likewise, biodiversity should be protected for moral reasons despite its benefit or detriment to economic prosperity.

lardlad

Biodiversity is important not simply because of all the benefits that accrue to mankind from the life forms with which we share this planet, but because we have no idea what cascades of extinction could start of we continue knocking over keystone species (certain species are critically important to the balance of particular ecosystems). The very stuff that supports our lives could be endangered.

Over the next 40 years, conservative estimates predict an average of 100 species per day will become extinct largely from habitat loss.

More
http://biology.usgs.gov/s+t/noframe/a309.htm

Ludi

I agree biodiversity should be preserved for its own sake, but this thread is in response to Dezakin saying he knew of no reason why humans should care about biodiversity.

"Because we enjoy living" is a good reason for me, but he doesn't seem to see the necessity for functioning biosystems to human life.
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"...powerdown so soft and fluffy you'll think you're living in a pillow..." - jboogy

crapattack

Somehow in our arrogance we think we are somehow removed from the biological systems of this planet. We think that our technology makes us immune from natural processes and whatever limits nature places on us can be overcome. We crap in drinking water, and pour gallons of toxic sludge and sewage into our oceans, and think that whatever may come of this our technology will save us. When we've eaten or destroyed every other species, farmed out and toxified this planet, we think, by then we'll be ready to colonize some other one, and the cycle of human destruction will begin anew.

We are completely out of touch with our inter-dependency on living organisms on this earth. We absolutely depend on the complexity and abundancy of diverse organisms for resource purification and regeneration, biomass and nutrient base. Our terran systems are completely dependent on one another to function properly, and although the planet can withstand large scale changes, there are critical ecological tipping points from which systems fail. We are entering these stages now with global warming and biodiversity. Large-scale collapse is envitable past these tipping-points because the web of interconnectedness has been broken so that the individual strands within the web are not supported and will die. Meaning lions, white tigers, and thousands of years of biologicial richness will disappear from history, and this may include ourselves. We have should have learned that nature is not just for our 'use', but that we are part of it, and it will be precisely because we have removed ourselves from nature that this catastophe came about. It is hubris of the most profound kind to think we are not subject to the laws that govern every other organism in this world.
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List of Civilian Nuclear Accidents

Raxozanne

Ibon · Last edited by Ibon on Sat Jan 21, 2006 1:21 am; edited 1 time in total

Arguments for preserving biodiversity to not lose the future medicine chest that it contains is a valid anthropocentric reason for preserving our natural resources especially when you consider the historical relationship between botany and the medicines we use today. It's like evolution provided hundreds of Pfizer and Merck laboratories for free. These are the best arguments for people of an anthropocentric orientation that believe we can disregard biodiversity for man's benefit. When this becomes the sole reason however there is a negative feedback mechanism being that all the lives you save through the medicine chest that our biodiversity provides just adds additional stress on this biodiversity through an increased human footprint. If we had a sustainable population then of course all of the botanical drug benefits we get from preserving biodiversity would indeed inhance the quality of our lives without necessarrily increasing the quantity of humans.
The irony is that if we had a sustainable population we probably wouldn't be putting so many life forms in danger in the first place. Kind of a what comes first, the chicken or the egg. We will need as a species to come to terms with our human footprint on the planet not just from an anthropocentric point of view but from a deeper ethical ecological question. The cruel reality of the unsustainability of our excess population will compell even the most agnostic Dezakins of the world to embrace principles that today he would claim to be in the domain of eco-religion.

lardlad

coyote

backstop

Ludi -

Good question - The obvious answers - our survival, other species' rights, the profits to be made, God's crreation, etc,
don't come as near for me as your "Joy of lving"

Ibon -

while of course there are benefits for the anthropocentric to accrue via conservation, I suspect that there are, at any stage of the degradation,
higher returns on investment to be had via continued degradation rather than via conservation -
particularly if one's competitors will hamstring themselves with conservation measures.

Therefore I personally would doubt the efficacy of appeals to self interest as compared to that of the moral arguements to customer and producer alike -
of both inter-generational and inter-special equity, backed by the rule of law.

This will require of course a profound cultural shift away from the Isolation of Anthro-Supremacy -
and towards the Integration of humanity within the codes and capacities of Nature.

Given that it is ideology, not numbers, that drives our present terracidal folly, -
which can clearly be seen by the fact that 2 Bn of us living at current US rates would do no less than the present level of harm -
it seems to me that we need above all to develop global agreements that explicitly embody the renasence of our culture.

And as for population, how much faith can we have in the projections of further boom being fulfilled, given the intensifying impacts of climate and oil-market destabilization ?

And if Dezakin cares to dismiss this as mere eco-religion, he's welcome to come and help me fell trees, skin sheep and hunt squirrels
and see if that will convince him otherwise !

regards,

Backstop
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"The best of conservation . . . is written not with a pen but with an axe."
(from "A Sand County Almanac" by Aldo Leopold, 1948.

Ibon

Ibon

Ludi

Modeling a different way for people to live, one which fosters diversity, is also helpful I think, especially if it can be presented in an appealing way. I see permaculture as one such model, so that's the one I'm implementing in my own life.
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"...powerdown so soft and fluffy you'll think you're living in a pillow..." - jboogy

Liamj

I love the fact of biodiversity and conciously try to support it, but have problems with how it is enacted as a priority in conservation.

WAY too many resources go into saving 'special species', when if fact those species are walking dodo's, organisms maintained outside their habitats at great effort and to no good purpose. We pretend breeding spotted owls makes up for woodchipping. We plant native flowers on the borders of our acres of concrete. Many of the fragile species we regard as heroic survivors of our industrialisation and population explosion are in fact already evolutionary toast, their gene pools vanished, their habitats nonexistant, their future laughable in the face of ever more 'progress'. I still swerve for roo's, but donate to save the greater stuffed mantle pigeon? i don't think so. Its whole habitats or nothing.

edit - on seeing your latest post, Ludi, beware the contradiction: many of the plants popular in permaculture are notifiable weeds (bamboo, lemna, duck weed, wormwood...) to biodiversity conservation professionals, at least where i am. But thats fundamentalists for ya Rolling Eyes

Ludi

Care needs to be taken to not introduce invasive exotics, of course. Of course. Of course.

*slaps head*
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"...powerdown so soft and fluffy you'll think you're living in a pillow..." - jboogy