If you were flying in a plane, would you remove a rivet or bolt from the fuselage? Would you toss the spare parts out the window because they’re not doing anything at the moment?
I thought you wouldn’t. Joel Cohen, who is Professor of Populations at Columbia and Rockefeller Universities, says the world and its biodiversity are like that airplane and “getting rid of species whose function we don’t really understand” is analogous to chucking those parts. The plane might work fine now, but we might need those parts one day.
When I interviewed him on November 2, he noted that by reducing biodiversity, “In the longer term, you lose a reservoir of genetic diversity, the uses for which we do not fully know, but we do know that a very large fraction of medications come from natural products – that is from chemicals extracted from you know free living plants and animals and bacteria. We lose the opportunity to discover what those natural products may do for us if we push to extinction or to unavailability the species … that produce those natural products.”
In the short term, the risks associated with losing biodiversity are different. Mudslides after hard rains on the west coast of the United States, or in Latin America or China occur because the forests that once held down the soil have been cut. When the soil slides away then farmers lose their topsoil, too. Says Cohen, “So the short-term is you lose the ecosystem services that the plants provide, that wetlands provide in purifying water. If you overhunt game, you lose your food supply. That’s all in the short-term.”
Scientists estimate that we are losing up to 3 percent of our species each year.
Cohen believes – and I agree – that we ought to pay more attention to preserving natural habitats that support genetic and species diversity, both to preserve those ecosystem services that we rely on, and to keep genetic diversity intact for future generations “who will be better able to use that genetic diversity in ways that we can only begin to imagine now.”
So let’s slow down deforestation and limit or stop the bottom-dredging of the oceans for food. As Cohen would say, we need to be very prudent about conserving the parts of the airplane we’re flying.
(See also How population interacts with biodiversity)
(Photo from WorldIslandInfo.com via Flickr)
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