Saturday, November 7, 2009

Chapter 6: Biodiversity

What did you discover about the importance of biodiversity by reading Hot, Flat, and Crowded? Why do the efforts of groups such as Conservation International receive less attention than climate-change studies, though Friedman asserts that they are equally crucial?

10 comments:

  1. Biodiversity provides humanity with precious knowledge of how different species interact. If more species are lost in the web of interactions, then the web can be totally wrecked which may result in the failure of many ecosystems. Biodiversity gives us ecosystem services that humans need to survive as we learned earlier. Humans depend upon biodiversity which its loss will be irreversible will be part of our sad demise. With CI estimating that one species goes extinct every twenty minutes, 1000x faster than when humans didn't exist, we have to do as much as we can to slow down this rate before we regret. With the forces of globalization working at hands and the need to expand, the interests of businesses and corporations overpower the interests of NGOs like the Conservation International. People around the world are not well informed on how grave this issue is and tend to pay attention to how their country is being developed or how much money they will get into their pockets. Everyone needs to know what exactly is natural for mother nature and what is not before they regret.

    K.

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  2. Like Kevin said, humans depend more on biodiversity than we may wish to see and believe. With his opening example of the final pair of Yangtze giant soft-shell turtles, Friedman explains our responsibility as users to amend the problems that we have createed. In order to do this, we must actually "act like Noah." By keeping at least a single pair of dying species alive, as has been done with the Yangtze turtles, we can hopefully salvage the most important animals as they reach the edges of extinction.

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  3. I think that Kevin had it right in his response when he talked about how people's only concern is about how they are doing or how their country is expanding. We often over look the effects that we have on other species of animals, and biodiversity as a whole. For example we talked about how companies would get oil by blowing the tops of mountains and then when they were done just leave the mess they made. Ever thing that we do to the environment has an effect and I think that is it time for us to realize that. The Yangtze turtles prove that all we can save animals that face extinction, but why not prevent it in the first place.

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  4. One sentence of Friedman's that I really liked was "We are the only species... that no animal or plant in nature depends on for its survival - yet we depend of this whole web of life for our survival." Friedman makes clear how important the ecosystem services that the environment performs for us are - especially important to poorer people in developing countries.. And yet CI notes that every 20 minutes 1200 acres of forests are cleared for development. The human impact on biodiversity is the manifestation of the tragedy of the commons. I also really liked the quote of Edward O. Wilson saying that "destroying a tropical rain forest and other species rich ecosystems is like burning all the paintings of the lourve to cook dinner." Friedman goes into a discussion that not only are we losing ecosystem services, we're also losing natural beauty. It made think of what it would be like to lose a place like the eel river or yosemite because land was needed to build a mall. I think that this is one of Friedmans most convincing chapters.

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  5. Just as is discussed in the idea of environmental unity, Friedman talked about how everything in our environment is interconnected. We depend on so many species of plants and animals, and yet we also move to destroy their homes and drive them to extinction. Just as can be seen with the Yangtze river turtle, we can prevent these dying animals from going extinct. With all the technology that we as humans possess we should be working to prevent the destruction of our earth and its animals. And yet large corporations monetary interests too often out way the interests of those who move to protect our earth and its biodiversity. To save our environment as we know it, humans need to put the environment at the top of our list of priorities and start to try to make amends to the damage which we have already done.

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  6. As Friedman points out, "no animal or plant in nature depends on" us for survival, yet we depend on the entire food web. I never thought about how much other organisms depend on us, but this is true. What I learned from this chapter is that we are destroying the very tools we will need to fight off the changes we are creating in our climate -- medicine, food, and the natural protection and aid we receive from nature. At a ridiculous rate. Friedman says that we are the sixth mass extinction. And honestly, in the face of that I feel like... what can I possibly do? Friedman seems to think the only solution is for governments to prevent destruction of biodiverstiy -- tragedy of the commons, of course. But as he points out, governments can misunderstand the consequences of their actions, as when the EU decided to depend more heavily on biofuel, leading to the destruction of rainforests and ultimately causing more environmental harm than it can prevent. And the saddest part, I think, is that poor people who depend almost exclusively on natural ecosystems have an enormous role in destroying them. This is for the same reason, I think, that people can't seem to stop destroying rainforests for money. It's not just tragedy of the commons, it's also that people in developing countries, which seem to be exploiting their resources with the most disastrous consequences, need to do so in order to survive. And yet by surviving, they are destroying their chance of survival in the future.

    I also realized that just having nature around us is far, far more important than I think most people realize. Just having trees and grass around wherever I go, even if I'm walking on concrete and spending most of my time indoors, makes life tolerable. On sunny days, everyone wants to go outside -- it doesn't matter what political party they're part of, how rich or poor, nothing. Everybody needs nature. If the only outside left in the world were made of concrete -- everyone would go insane and kill themselves. In linguistics today Mr. Wilson said that in some linguistics studies done with kids from inner cities who had never had a chance to travel out of their neighborhoods, these kids only had one word for trees. They didn't distinguish at all between types of trees -- any tree, to them, was just a tree. And I think that's becoming more and more true for people -- I know a few types of trees, but for the most part I don't know the difference between any of the trees I see. Yet I need them. For most of my life, even though I've always lived in the city, there have been trees lining the blocks I walk on and grassy fields nearby. When I don't see trees regularly, I get really depressed.

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  7. Two of the most striking quotations Friedman used in this chapter are by E.O. Wilson; the first being "Destroying tropical rain forest and other species rich ecosystems for profit is like burning all the paintings of the Louvre to cook dinner" and the second, "Without the biosphere that made us what we are, in which we evolved, we are not fully human". Having read 'The Sacred Balance' by David Suzuki, the idea of living in a complex web of biodiversity we we depend on is not foreign. We need Mother Nature to manage all of the natural processes and life on Earth, so we can continue living the way we do. Just as species depend on other species for security (like the birds and wasps example), we depend on the biodiversity Earth has to offer for management of natural systems, but also for science and medicine. We do not know what we are losing with all of the loss of life that has come form the destruction of our natural environments. We cannot just live in these concrete and industrial worlds that we reside in and hope that everything outside of our bubbles will be okay. The idea that Friedman addresses of dealing with biodiversity "later" is extremely relevant to our everyday lives. Because we cannot see for ourselves the destruction and loss that is happening and because we do not personally experience it, we think we have more time to deal with it. We see and experience the effects of the loss of biodiversity even less so than climate change and pollution. It is because of this that groups like Conservation International receive less attention. For some reason, we might hear about climate change and pollution every day, be it in a negative or positive light, it's still out there. That is not the case for biodiversity. I think that if what is happening is brought to the attention of the larger public in a stronger way, biodiversity will gain equal importance. I think that part of the problem is that climate change is viewed just as global warming and is viewed in a very linear light. In reality, global climate change is a matrix of problems and feedback loops that are interconnected with each other, giving the loss of biodiversity an equal impact as pollution or climate change. It is just wrong that we treat our world so poorly when it has given us so much, when it has let us evolve to the place at which we are now.

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  8. Again, sorry this is late, my internet hates me.
    Friedman's assertion that decline of biodiversity is equally could be just as damning as global warming seems to be accurate. Whether we realize it or not our continued existence as a human species is highly contingent on the existence of healthy well stocked ecosystems. These ecosystems are all closely knit webs of interdependence between plants, animals, and a host of other organisms. The loss of a single species is bad enough, but rarely does the extinction of a species come without a significant impact on everything else around it. Even if maybe one species could go extinct and have only a minimal impact, the trouble is we don't know which species these are. Thus, we really can't risk anything going extinct, because we don't know what could happen. If we lose enough species or if certain keystone species go extinct it is very possible that entire ecosystem could just collapse. Along with the aesthetic value provided by many natural ecosystems, they also play important role. As we have discussed many ecosystems provide ecosystem services that are essential for human life.
    I think it is quite interesting that global warming does get so much more coverage (and as discussed in the previous chapter, even then its not nearly enough) than biodiversity loss. I think one of the reasons global warming gets more coverage is its effects are more quantifiable and sound way scarier. Losing entire cities to flooding, or hurricanes, or any number of terrible effects of global warming simply sound a lot more daunting in comparison to the loss of a single species that might be important for some other species that might be important for a whole ecosystem that might do something terribly insignificant like provide us with fresh water. Now of course this isn't the case, but for many average people the long chain of causal effects gets convoluted and the end impact just doesn't seem terribly unfortunate. This is quite unfortunate. For the sake of brevity I won't repeat my rant from my other post on global warming, but quite similarly I think that many necessary changes may not come until the effects of bio-d loss become so severe at which point it may be too late.

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  9. Humans have the misfortune of being the one species on Earth who's obsession with itself can actually lead to the destruction of the rest of the Earth. We only really care about ourselves, although occasionally we do something good for our environment or other, and I think this answers the question of why climate change studies gain more attention/support than say Conservation International. It's because when there is an issue like global warming that threatens us directly, we will be more responsive that we would be to an issue of conserving biodiversity. Most of the human population does not understand the interconnectedness of everything in Earth's environment. An issue like saving a species is not going to muster great amounts of support because we(as a whole) do not see the effects that an extinction of a species is going to have on us, whereas when the situation involves our extinction, we are quicker to react.
    That leads to the second point, the importance of biodiversity. Even though the Earth and its other species do not depend on us, we do depend on them. When we destroy a species through our actions just to gain a temporary profit or advantage, we are actually taking a piece out of the Earth's ecosystem, and hurting ourselves. And this damage is permanent. The quote "Destroying tropical rain forest and other species rich ecosystems for profit is like burning all the paintings of the Louvre to cook dinner" shows how we are damaging our world for brief profit but we are actually destroying something vital to our existence permanently. Thus, if we can work on preventing extinctions of species and further damage to our environment for unnecessary ephemeral gains, we will help ourselves and every other aspect of our Earth.

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  10. Biodiversity is a very important part of life on earth, but is sadly lessening all the time. Humans are constantly developing on and destroying many organisms' precious habitat. Biodiversity provides mankind with countless ecosystem services, and by losing species, we loose not only the valuable services they provide us with, but their natural beauty. Friedman talks about how much biodiversity we have lost and are continuing to loose, and proposes that we must try and save as many species as we can while they are still alive. The 60 minutes segment on species and saving DNA reminded me of this.

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