I became fascinated with biological diversity when I was 14 and that automatically led me to be concerned about conservation. At the time I turned my hand to environment and conservation, the number of endangered species worldwide was modest. To be sure, there were the first signs of more pervasive problems heralded in Rachel Carson’s “Silent Spring,” but they seemed amenable to straightforward and simple fixes.
G. Evelyn Hutchinson, the founder of modern ecology, and my Ph.D. advisor at Yale, was concerned that the loss of biodiversity—the loss of life forms produced over 4 billion years of natural selection—would constrain the ability of all the life sciences to grow. This is not an ethereal concept. Consider the polymerase chain reaction which most people (if they are even vaguely aware) know as “PCR.” Its ability to replicate genetic material very rapidly has revolutionized forensic and diagnostic medicine, enabled an enormous amount of research, and made the entire human genome project possible. But without the heat-resistant enzyme from a bacterium in a Yellowstone hot spring, Thermus aquaticus, there would be no chain reaction. The diversity of life on Earth represents an enormous living library on which the life sciences can build. Humanity should value biological diversity like all societies value libraries. But, as E. O. Wilson has said, ours is a time of great irony: as evolution finally reaches a point where it can understand itself, we’re busy destroying the evidence.
The proportion of endangered species that are naturally endangered is trivial compared to the total, so the odds are that the endangerment of a species is human-driven. There are probably good arguments for protecting those that are naturally headed toward extinction because they are unique end points at 3.5 billion years of evolution. People say, "Dinosaurs went extinct. Would we have wanted to save the dinosaurs too?" Well, the truth is, anybody who had a live dinosaur (today) would be in a grand position. I believe we should try to save all species. They are all important in practical ways we still only dimly understand. And there is an ethical responsibility to other forms of life. In reality, the way we allocate insufficient resources leads to choices being made about what survives and what does not.
I have been engaged for decades to conserve the Amazon rainforest and manage it as a system. I initiated the Forest Fragments Project (first known as The Minimum Critical Size of Ecosystems Project, later as the Biological Dynamics of Forest Fragments project) together with Brazilian colleagues because there was a great controversy about how big protected areas should be — which is better, a single large or several small reserves? The "SLOSS" debate in one sense was about the applicability of island biogeographic theory to reserve design, and it flourished as a controversy because there was so little direct data. Consequently I designed the project to do that.
More recently I am pursuing the idea of planetary scale ecosystem restoration to manage forest, grasslands and agricultural ecosystems to both enhance the future of biodiversity and also reduce climate change by pulling greenhouse gases out of the atmosphere and lowering the amount of potential climate change. One of the most interesting things about [climate change] — and this is a question that some colleagues of mine and I have been looking at — is whether you can use biological diversity to define what is an acceptable level of greenhouse gas concentration [in the atmosphere]. But I think my single biggest project is to try to get government etc., the public at large, to realize we actually need to manage the planet, not just as a physical system, but as a coupled physical and biological system, and that if we actually did some net-scale, proactive ecosystem restoration, we could literally take out a half a degree of the climate change that otherwise would happen. It doesn’t sound like a big number, but two degrees is actually too much for most ecosystems, so if you could keep it to one and a half degrees, it would make all the difference.
All too often we seem to speak in too-negative terms. We say “don’t,” and “stop,” and the like, when we can actually transform a problem into an opportunity for a creative solution. Fundamentally, ours is a positive agenda, a dream of a glorious coexistence with a planet teeming with life. Consider that throughout close to four decades, the Brazilian Amazon, despite all the deforestation and burning, has gone from two national forests to what—when certain commitments are completed— will amount to more than 40% receiving some form of protection.
Humans are just one species of wildlife and we are inevitably connected to the rest of life on earth--whether it’s through ecosystem services, or whether it’s through some direct product that we are taking from nature, whether it’s a beautiful tropical wood to build a table, or it’s some molecule that we are buying at the pharmacy but had its origin in nature. We spend our daily existence really depending on nature although we are usually just blissfully unaware.
Looking ahead, we not only have to deal with these planetary scale problems but also find ways to feed and produce a decent quality of life for at least two more billion than the seven billion people already here. We need to do this without destroying more ecosystems and losing more biological diversity.
Human ingenuity should be up to the challenge. But it has to recognize the problem and address it with immediacy and at scale.
G. Evelyn Hutchinson, the founder of modern ecology, and my Ph.D. advisor at Yale, was concerned that the loss of biodiversity—the loss of life forms produced over 4 billion years of natural selection—would constrain the ability of all the life sciences to grow. This is not an ethereal concept. Consider the polymerase chain reaction which most people (if they are even vaguely aware) know as “PCR.” Its ability to replicate genetic material very rapidly has revolutionized forensic and diagnostic medicine, enabled an enormous amount of research, and made the entire human genome project possible. But without the heat-resistant enzyme from a bacterium in a Yellowstone hot spring, Thermus aquaticus, there would be no chain reaction. The diversity of life on Earth represents an enormous living library on which the life sciences can build. Humanity should value biological diversity like all societies value libraries. But, as E. O. Wilson has said, ours is a time of great irony: as evolution finally reaches a point where it can understand itself, we’re busy destroying the evidence.
The proportion of endangered species that are naturally endangered is trivial compared to the total, so the odds are that the endangerment of a species is human-driven. There are probably good arguments for protecting those that are naturally headed toward extinction because they are unique end points at 3.5 billion years of evolution. People say, "Dinosaurs went extinct. Would we have wanted to save the dinosaurs too?" Well, the truth is, anybody who had a live dinosaur (today) would be in a grand position. I believe we should try to save all species. They are all important in practical ways we still only dimly understand. And there is an ethical responsibility to other forms of life. In reality, the way we allocate insufficient resources leads to choices being made about what survives and what does not.
I have been engaged for decades to conserve the Amazon rainforest and manage it as a system. I initiated the Forest Fragments Project (first known as The Minimum Critical Size of Ecosystems Project, later as the Biological Dynamics of Forest Fragments project) together with Brazilian colleagues because there was a great controversy about how big protected areas should be — which is better, a single large or several small reserves? The "SLOSS" debate in one sense was about the applicability of island biogeographic theory to reserve design, and it flourished as a controversy because there was so little direct data. Consequently I designed the project to do that.
More recently I am pursuing the idea of planetary scale ecosystem restoration to manage forest, grasslands and agricultural ecosystems to both enhance the future of biodiversity and also reduce climate change by pulling greenhouse gases out of the atmosphere and lowering the amount of potential climate change. One of the most interesting things about [climate change] — and this is a question that some colleagues of mine and I have been looking at — is whether you can use biological diversity to define what is an acceptable level of greenhouse gas concentration [in the atmosphere]. But I think my single biggest project is to try to get government etc., the public at large, to realize we actually need to manage the planet, not just as a physical system, but as a coupled physical and biological system, and that if we actually did some net-scale, proactive ecosystem restoration, we could literally take out a half a degree of the climate change that otherwise would happen. It doesn’t sound like a big number, but two degrees is actually too much for most ecosystems, so if you could keep it to one and a half degrees, it would make all the difference.
All too often we seem to speak in too-negative terms. We say “don’t,” and “stop,” and the like, when we can actually transform a problem into an opportunity for a creative solution. Fundamentally, ours is a positive agenda, a dream of a glorious coexistence with a planet teeming with life. Consider that throughout close to four decades, the Brazilian Amazon, despite all the deforestation and burning, has gone from two national forests to what—when certain commitments are completed— will amount to more than 40% receiving some form of protection.
Humans are just one species of wildlife and we are inevitably connected to the rest of life on earth--whether it’s through ecosystem services, or whether it’s through some direct product that we are taking from nature, whether it’s a beautiful tropical wood to build a table, or it’s some molecule that we are buying at the pharmacy but had its origin in nature. We spend our daily existence really depending on nature although we are usually just blissfully unaware.
Looking ahead, we not only have to deal with these planetary scale problems but also find ways to feed and produce a decent quality of life for at least two more billion than the seven billion people already here. We need to do this without destroying more ecosystems and losing more biological diversity.
Human ingenuity should be up to the challenge. But it has to recognize the problem and address it with immediacy and at scale.