☼       Preserve the world’s biological diversity: all the Earth’s species and ecosystems

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When you were a kid, what were your very favorite wild animals – the ones that really fired your imagination?  Were they tigers, or lions, or gorillas, or polar bears, or pandas, or elephants, or great white sharks?  The awful truth is that every one of these wonderful animals will probably be extinct in the wild by the end of this century.  That is, unless we accept our responsibility for the Earth, act on this precept, and save them.

In the last few years, humanity has begun to wake up to the fact that our world is experiencing an extinction crisis.  If unchecked, this present mass extinction – caused almost entirely by human alterations of the Earth – could rival the catastrophic meteor impact that ended the age of the dinosaurs. 

There is a tremendous amount that we can do to stop this disaster, but we must act before species are on the brink of disappearing, and we must take a comprehensive approach.  Most anti-extinction efforts today begin far too late, and the best they can achieve is to maintain a critically endangered creature on “life support,” with little or no prospect of recovery to true ecological health. 

What we need to do instead is to preserve whole functioning ecosystems.  “Ecosystems” are the integrated arrangements of life that cover the biosphere; such as grasslands and tropical rainforests and Arctic tundra ecosystems.  The history of life has followed different paths in different places, and so ecosystems are further specified by geography.  African rainforests are home to gorillas and leopards, while the climatically-similar rainforests of South America have spider monkeys and jaguars.  To save the biosphere, we must save each of its ecosystems, because each expresses the unique biological potential and irreplaceable evolutionary history of that particular place.

Most of the world’s natural ecosystems are under severe pressure, and some have all but disappeared.  A recent study found that between 80 and 90% of the Earth’s land surface has been directly altered by human activity.  Once all examples of an ecosystem have been destroyed, there is little hope of restoring that bit of the biosphere to natural functioning and ecological health.

The great ecologist Aldo Leopold once compared nature to a finely tuned machine, and wrote: “The first rule of intelligent tinkering is to keep every cog and wheel.”  To preserve the biosphere, we must preserve “every cog and wheel” – all the species, each of which contributes to the smooth operation of nature’s mechanism. 

The good news is that the ecosystem approach to conservation automatically saves endangered species.  If we protect a large area of Amazon rainforest, we will save the variety of trees needed to support healthy populations of rodents and monkeys – and thus we will save jaguars.  If we preserve free-flowing and unpolluted rivers, we can save the salmon without the need for hatcheries or elaborate management plans.

Of course, to honor this precept, we must agree to allow large stretches of the planet to remain, not wilderness, but at least partly wild.  This may seem an extraordinary sacrifice until we consider that this is also the only certain way to preserve the biosphere’s integrity, upon which all our lives depend.

Next week, we’ll look at how restoration of the Earth is an essential responsibility that we all share.  Until then, this is Pepper Trail.

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