“To many people, ‘biodiversity’ is synonymous with the word ‘nature,’ and ‘nature’ brings to mind steamy forests and the creatures that dwell there. But diversity is much more than that, for it encompasses not only the diversity of species but also the diversity within species.’”
Biodiversity is the word no one used, until they did. It first appeared in 1985 — a blink of an eye ago, in ecological and zoological terms — at a wildlife conservation forum in Washington DC. According to evolutionary ecologist Daniel Janzen, veteran professor of biology at The University of Pennsylvania (Philadelphia) since 1976, the forum was established to make the US Congress aware of the complexity of species planet Earth was losing at the time. Much has changed in 35 years, and not for the better. This past month, the UN’s Global Assessment Report on Biodiversity and Ecosystems warned that a million species face extinction, thanks in large part to human activity. Biodiversity is important not only for reasons that we know, but also those that we don’t.
We might find new drugs in the Amazon rainforest, for example, that we did not know existed. Biodiversity is one of the prime drivers of pollination, the single most critical building block in the food chain. We can’t turn away from climate change, as much as some insist on denying it. If biodiversity is one of the building blocks of life, climate change is one of the key factors in its degradation. While plant and animal species can and often do adapt to a new climatic environment, that takes time, and if the warming oceans and shrinking ice caps prove anything, it’s that we’re running out of time. “I can’t imagine anything more important than air, water, soil, energy and biodiversity,” the Canadian geneticist David Suzuki once said. “These are the things that keep us alive.”