Biodiversity - why should we care?

Liamj

But what if the invasive exotics provide products or landscape functions at a fraction of the total cost of other/current alternatives?

eg. bamboo provides good-to-fabulous structural material (depending on spp.). Is seeing it spread thru the landscape a bad thing, if believe that the distant suppliers of fired bricks, steel & concrete are going to dwindle?

Better to reduce the impact of human consumption by encouraging exotics to meet needs locally than to continue the 1000mile salad while trying to recreate what may no longer be viable anyway.

I'm not for a minute trying to say biodiversity doesn't matter or that its erosion via accelerating extinctions isn't stupidity of time-boggling scale. But conservation ecology as it is allowed to function now is desperately in need of triage (along with many 1st world 'industries' such as entertainment, law, finance).

crapattack

Dezakin has no clue that the food he eats only exists because of bees and other pollenators who are quite sensitive to climatic instability. Take one vital element away and everything else could crash. As an apex predator he should be appreciating the entire web because it sustains him. It is an open system of vast intricacy and we are arrogant to assume we can in any way replicate it. We have not been careful and the ramifications of our tinkering have yet be fully played out.
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List of Civilian Nuclear Accidents

katkinkate

Ludi

crapattack

Ludi wrote:

Ludi

mermaid · Tar Sands Joined: Sep 12, 2005 Posts: 77 Location: belgium

Biodiversity is life. just life. Mankind is selfdestructive in everyway, mankind is only thinking of himself, me, i.

Biologically it is nescessary that there is diversity, it is important to leave nature in balance. Nature always finds balance. There is a limit to the balance when there is no more biomass anymore to keep balance.

It is also clear that there are tooo many people around the world, that is also a problem to the diversity, because we are taking place from animals and plants and those will extinct. Mankind himself is tooooooo succesful and destroying the diversity. We do care, but not inside our bedroom....

Ludi

Mankind isn't the problem, our culture is the problem. There have been plenty of cultures who lived without significantly damaging the biodiversity of their ecosystems.

Try not to lump everybody into the category "evil stupid mankind" when we should be looking critically at our own culture and comparing it to those who live differently.
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Ludi

The damage done by "invasive species" is probably far less than that done by widescale "totalitarian" agriculture.
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basil_hayden

Ludi -

While I completely agree with the title and subject matter of this thread, I completely disagree with your statement thaat it is not mankind that is the problem, merely our (Western?) culture.

It's mankind. Different cultures just destroy nature different ways (i.e., Mayans, Incas, Aztecs, Easter Island, whomever killed all the wooly mammoths in paleo North America, Mesopotamians, etc, etc).

As long as "human" life has a higher value than "any old" life, things won't change.

How much ecology we set aside to be virgin should be proportional to our knowledge of the ecosystem. Right now, most of it should be conserved, because we don't know much. Of course we have 6 billion people on the planet, I'm not sure how many species there are on Earth, but it would be nice to assign each person a species to study and report back to humanity as to why it's important. 6 billion researchers, no central scrutinizer.

Ludi

oowolf

We were very successful as hunter-gatherers. Individual lives were short, but humanity survived for aeons thanks to accumulated wisdom. Humanity now is essentially a catastrophe in progress.

I try to tend over 90 species of plants on my 4 acres.

Ludi

I think we can have the best of both worlds as permaculturists, perhaps being able to keep the best of civilization (germ theory, writing, the scientific method, a few other things) and non-civilized cultures. But that's just me being optimistic. Smile

Sounds like you're doing a good job there with diversity, oowolf. I wish I could visit your place.
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Dezakin · Light Sweet Crude Joined: Feb 09, 2005 Posts: 1354

So, many arguments for in-situ biodiversity, but how about some arguments for how biodiversity loss is actually a threat to civilization? I just don't see it.

mermaid · Tar Sands Joined: Sep 12, 2005 Posts: 77 Location: belgium

Loss of biodiversity is a great threat to civilization, think of medicines not discovered yet but maybe important for the future, extinct before proofed useful.
It has also a great danger due to our manipulation in agricultural way. We manipulate plants and animals by breeding or dna manipulation, it is also loss of diversity and maybe it can cause disease or other weaknesses and for sure our manipulation with "life" will have it's price.

When there is no "material" in the wild anymore, things can get lost forever. Mentioning some old agricultural animalraces who are so heavely damaged by breeding and so weak that it is an ethic issue to keep these animals for production anylonger.

Answers for our failures we only can find in nature to cure.