Showing posts with label species extinction. Show all posts
Showing posts with label species extinction. Show all posts

Friday, August 13, 2021

Devastating the Concept of Biodiversity

"Biodiversity Is Dead", wrote the researcher R. A. Lautenschlager in 1997. Luckily though, the succession has not been suspended. So: "Long Live Biodiversity"! It is certainly royalty among essential functioning eco-biology concepts.

Lautenschlager is mentioned in "The Case Against the Concept of Biodiversity", an August 2021 article by Clare Fieseler in Vox magazine:  https://www.vox.com/22584103/biodiversity-species-conservation-debate. 

Also profiled are the ideas of R. Alexander Pyron, who says biodiversity has been oversold because species extinction is a natural part of evolution. The problem with that is that the recent rate of extinctions is governed by actions of humanity, not of nature.

Extinction takes place in a context of changing habitat and landscape (or seascape) -- the very things which human activity on the planet has been overwhelming and devastating. The word "devastation" is related to "vast" and "waste", and means emptying. Habitat destruction empties landscapes of life. How is this "natural"?

 Fieseler's Vox article is not only attacking biodiversity as science however; it's attacking science itself for not being sufficiently "inclusive and just". We don't seem to be able to leave woke-ish digressions about "race and marginalization" out of anything these days. (Do editors require them as a condition of acceptance for publication?) 

Fieseler complains that the original 1986 National Forum on BioDiversity at the Smithsonian Institution consisted of a core of nine "white male scientists". Why need that have been a problem? She could also have mentioned many leading female scientists in the field, such as Rachel Carson (whose classic book Silent Spring started the whole biodiversity thing), Jane Goodall, Lynn Margulis, Suzanne Simard, and the black female tree defender Wangari Maathai, among a host of others.

The issues of extinction and habitat loss are of course entangled with the issue of "invasive species". Changes in climate cause changes to landscape and the ranges of animal and plant species. They migrate to other zones, and if we want to let "nature" be in charge of what thrives and what goes extinct, we have to recognize that if something thrives in a new environment to which it migrated, then that's where nature wants it to be -- and today, global warming is causing it to be.

In the part of the world from which I'm writing (southern Vancouver Island, Canada) much angst is expressed about "invasive species" and much public money spent on eradication programs. Maybe it would be better to let nature and biodiversity take their own course. Let humans stop paving everything, logging Earth's lungs and overfishing her seas -- and let them start controlling their own numbers.










Friday, July 3, 2009

When Did Brown Become the New Green?

Could the owners of this garden receive tax relief as an incentive to continue their contribution to keeping Greater Victoria beautiful?

On CBC someone representing the development community was heard this week supporting tax breaks for developers whose buildings are deemed "green" -- i.e. having a percentage of heating by alternative methods, having wastewater re-use, low energy lightbulbs, etc. But what we are forgetting here is that buildings are by definition not green; only nature is green. Retaining the natural landscape is green.

In England they call it brownspace wherever natural vegetation is paved over and the kingdom of concrete expanded at the expense of Earth's biological citizenry: i.e. all those species that keep nature alive, the foodweb fuelled, the climate stable, the air clean and wastes and decay recycled into new soil and new growth.

The tax breaks should be reserved for those who retain trees and large gardens where this business of life can have space to carry on for the health and benefit of all of us, and to stem the tide of plant and bird extinctions happening in our midst. Such residential landowners could be rewarded for not subdividing. It's not about turning off the lightbulbs, it's about turning off the chainsaws.