Biodiversity

What is biodiversity?

“Biodiversity is the totality of all inherited variation in the life forms of Earth, of which we are one species. We study and save it to our great benefit. We ignore and degrade it to our great peril.” —E.O. Wilson

Biodiversity is Nature in all of its wonderful, messy, beautiful variety. Imagine a wild meadow with hundreds of plant and insect species, rodents eating plants and bugs, mammals hunting the rodents, birds hunting the insects. Wild flowers and grasses blooming at different times of the year, soil microbes that we don’t ever see but are necessary for all of that growth to happen. We love some of it and aren’t so thrilled with some of it. 

All of it is biodiversity. All of it essential. It is a system. Take away one piece and the entire system changes in some way. Take away enough of it and the system collapses. When that system includes a wide variety of species and their abundance, as well as genetic diversity within species, you have a healthy ecosystem.

We love to hate annoying insects. When those insects are gone because of pesticide use, what will the birds eat? How will our food crops be fertilized? You’ve probably heard about the crisis affecting our honeybees due largely, but not totally, to the use of pesticides. In Japan some years ago, they were pollinating fruit trees by hand because the pollinators were gone.

Honeybees are the tip of the iceberg. 40% of the Earth’s insect species are in decline and facing extinction. Birds have declined by 30% across North America in the past 50 years (Rosenberg et al., 2019; Sánchez-Bayo and Wyckhuys, 2019).

As the abundance of life decreases on Earth, the likelihood of local and global extinction of individual species rises (MacArthur and Wilson, 2001; Matthies et al., 2004). Indeed, a 2019 United Nations report concluded that currently one million species on Earth are facing extinction, many within decades (Díaz et al., 2019). As a whole, humanity is clearly failing to live in harmony with the rest of life, and we need to change that.

Why is biodiversity important?

There are many lenses through which we can see the value and importance of biodiversity.

Nature for its Own Sake

Instinctively, many of us feel that nature simply has a right to exist and thrive for its own sake, believing that humans don’t have to receive any value from nature in order to protect and steward it.

Ecosystem Services

This is a techy term that encompasses all the things that nature does for us humans. Trees give us clean air through carbon sequestration; clean water is essential to all life; healthy river banks prevent flooding; pollinators are essential for food crops; we tap maples for our favorite sweetener; trees give us wood to warm ourselves through our long, cold winters.

In a 2020 report, the World Economic Forum estimated that $44 trillion of the world’s economy (over half of global GDP) is moderately or highly dependent on nature and its services.

Human Well-Being

Nature has been shown to contribute to human health in a number of other ways, improving human well-being from the cradle to the grave. Evidence based benefits of nature contact include improved birth outcomes; improved child cognitive and motor development; reduced ADHD symptoms; lower risk of psychiatric disorders; better eyesight; decreased stress, anxiety, and depression; reduced diabetes and obesity; improved immune function; reduced risk of death from cardiovascular disease; general improved happiness and life satisfaction; and more (Frumkin et al., 2017).

Memories are often tied to natural places, along with our sense of identity. If you’ve ever been away from Vermont for a long time, and then felt your heart swell when you see its forest covered mountains again – or if you ever have memories spring to life with the changing sounds, smells, and sights of the seasons – then you understand this sort of relational value. Many of us feel a sense of kinship and friendship with the natural world, or our sense of moral integrity depends on our stewardship and partnership with nature. For many people, nature is a necessary entity for passing on traditions and values. Protecting biodiversity can be our way of giving back to the ecosystems that support us, while also caring for ourselves, each other, and future generations.

Citations

Díaz, S., Settele, J., Brondízio, E., Ngo, H.T., Guèze, M., Agard, J., Arneth, A., Balvanera, P., Brauman, K., Watson, R.T., Baste, I.A., Larigauderie, A., Leadley, P., Pascual, U., Baptiste, B., Demissew, S., Dziba, L., Erpul, G., Fazel, A., Fischer, M., María, A., Karki, M., Mathur, V., Pataridze, T., Pinto, I.S., Stenseke, M., Török, K., Vilá, B., 2019. Summary for policymakers of the global assessment report on biodiversity and ecosystem services of the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services 45.

Frumkin, H., Bratman, G.N., Breslow, S.J., Cochran, B., Kahn Jr, P.H., Lawler, J.J., Levin, P.S., Tandon, P.S., Varanasi, U., Wolf, K.L., Wood, S.A., 2017. Nature Contact and Human Health: A Research Agenda. Environ. Health Perspect. 125. https://doi.org/10.1289/EHP1663

MacArthur, R.H., Wilson, E.O., 2001. The Theory of Island Biogeography. Princeton University Press.

Matthies, D., Bräuer, I., Maibom, W., Tscharntke, T., 2004. Population size and the risk of local extinction: empirical evidence from rare plants. Oikos 105, 481–488. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.0030-1299.2004.12800.x

Nature Risk Rising: Why the Crisis Engulfing Nature Matters for Business and the Economy, 2020. World Econ. Forum. URL https://www.weforum.org/reports/nature-risk-rising-why-the-crisis-engulfing-nature-matters-for-business-and-the-economy/

Rosenberg, K.V., Dokter, A.M., Blancher, P.J., Sauer, J.R., Smith, A.C., Smith, P.A., Stanton, J.C., Panjabi, A., Helft, L., Parr, M., Marra, P.P., 2019. Decline of the North American avifauna. Science 366, 120–124. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.aaw1313

Sánchez-Bayo, F., Wyckhuys, K.A.G., 2019. Worldwide decline of the entomofauna: A review of its drivers. Biol. Conserv. 232, 8–27. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.biocon.2019.01.020

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