Biophilia and Biodiversity 3: Nature – love it because it is essential to humanity!

One touch of nature makes the whole world kin.  William Shakespeare

BioDiversity is known to be a complete interaction of all the species in an ecosystem.  Modern science accepts that an ecosystem is a complete and interactive and dynamic collection of species (from the micro to especially the micro levels, which we tend to ignore in our rush to save the warm and fuzzies  – cute animals with which we identify) that determines the overall health of that system.  That system might be as large as a subcontinent and as close as our own bodies.  Think about your body as a metaphor for an ecosystem.  What parts of your body do you think you can do without?  Obviously, some parts are more crucial than others. While there are many SciFi stories of humans becoming transhuman, there does seem to be a weird real goal by the silicon valley technocrats in somehow making humans android-like, and then supplanting their consciousness into the replicant.  (Artificial Intelligence – A.I. is yet another troubling topic for another post.)  Besides that little aside, think of a full ecosystem as a climax system in which all the parts interact synergistically for the betterment of the whole.

Food for Thought – Think of the rivets that hold a planes outer skin to the frame.  Imagine that you are taking off from San Francisco on the long haul to Sydney Australia over the Pacific Ocean.  As the plane reaches cruising altitude, you know the plane is pressurized so that the skin is pushing outward on the frame.  Now imagine you have a windows seat over one of the wings.  Now consider what your thoughts would be if you saw a rivet on one of the flush panels on the wing suddenly pop out and fly away.  An engineer will tell you that the place on the panel that the rivet came out is crucial in its important to the integrity of the panel versus the rush of wind pressure (from flying at 550 mph) over that panel.  If it is on the backside of that panel the wind air will have a tendency to push that back edge down.  If however it was on the side or worse, the front edge of the panel, in relation to the planes flight forward, then the air will be forcing itself under the panel and potentially loosening other rivets from the one that has just popped out.  So some rivets are going to be more crucial than others, although all are there for a reason – to hold that panel tight to the frame.  Now imagine that as you stare concerned at the place of the lost rivet another one pops out. And then at other places on the wing, other rivets are popping out.  You are less than an hour into the 15 hour flight and you can see rivets popping out all along the wing.  Then you begin to wonder how many other rivets might be popping out on the plane that you cannot see.  You call the flight attendant over and show her what you are seeing and this person says they will inform the planes captain.  A few minutes later, over the intercom, the captain says, “OK folks, we realize that some of you are noticing that we are losing some rivets.  No problem, we still have plenty of rivets left, we estimate that we will not lose more than 50% by the time we get to Sydney.”  Are you reassured??

That, dear readers, is what is happening to our planetary ecosystems.  If we use the metaphor of the plane as our planet and the rivets as species, we are set to lose some 50% of species in the 6^th mass extinction, driven by human activities.  Now, some might argue that the plane could drop in altitude to reduce pressure on the panels and the plane will still fly.  (There’s a reason planes fly at 35-40,000 feet – it’s much more efficient.)  Since metaphors do not work as full equivalents for the real topic, it is pertinent to point out that the planet will not crash if we lose 50% of the species.  However, what will happen is that the stable and resilient climax communities that make up the planets ecosystems will ALL drastically change as the ecosystems start to restabilize into new kinds of ecosystems based on which species have survived and which niches are now open (niches are places in the ecosystem that a species realizes its boundaries to live).  Suffice to say, it is unlikely that anything will look like it does now.  Can humans adapt to those kinds of changes?  We seem to have a hard time adapting to current problems, let alone new ones we cannot even conceive of yet!  The underlying message I am saying here is that if we feel we are an integral part of the system, we are more likely to save it as it currently exists that also means we are saving humanity.  So, as I said some posts back, let’s stop saving the planet and instead work to save humanity.  Or in saving the world for humanity we save everything else.

The sad fact is that in our rush to obtain or keep a high consumer lifestyle we are literally trashing the planet and ruining the current resilient climax communities on this planet.  We have this notion that since we seem small in comparison to the size of the planet, we cannot hurt it and hence ourselves.  When one person does something that is harmful to a small ecosystem, the system can compensate.  What several thousand do that is harmful can affect a local ecosystem for a long time.  As of this moment when I typed this, the human population is 7.633 billion people mostly supporting harmful practices.

Now this post is not meant to be a doom and gloom announcement, but a wake-up call.  We can either work in harmony with the natural world or we can keep on the path we are currently on and wait for the natural world to change so much we as the human species, even with our technological hubris, are incapable of continuing to live on this planet.  Or at least the majority will not survive, but remnants of humanity may still be able to pick up the pieces.  I’ve a feeling if the latter is the case it will not be the technological people who survive but the indigenous ones.   I have said this frequently; if we are to live in a world that is sustainable, we must acknowledge that the sovereignty that makes the changes is our own sovereignty.  We are the ones we are waiting for – how long can we afford to wait to empower ourselves until the decision to act is too late.  If we continue to give our power to the hierarchy, they will not act on our behalf.

To accomplish great things, we must not only act, but also dream; not only plan, but also believe.  Anatoli France