I'm going to start off with a 10 to 15 minute overview of biodiversity
and touch on just a few salient issues. Because biodiversity is a
very complex subject, it actually seems like I could cover practically
everything in the world. But I'm just going to touch on a few things
and then the rest of the panelists are going to get into some of this
in much more depth. I think you'll hear us say some of the same things,
but you may hear us say some things differently. And you probably
will discover that we will disagree with one another, but that's what
scientists do.
Biodiversity is short for biological diversity. Scientists and policy
people in the convention on biological diversity define biological
diversity very, very inclusively. That is, they will say it includes
all of life, from ecosystems and habitats down to species, populations,
individuals, and even down to genetics. So genetic diversity among
organisms is also part of biological diversity and biodiversity.
There are about 1.7 million species that have been discovered and
described. That's plus or minus several hundred thousand, because
there are a lot of species names that apply to the same species and
there are a lot of species names out there that are really groups
of species hidden within a single name. So we think there are about
1.75 million species.
As you can see, most of them are insects and then other arthropods,
like crustaceans and spiders and so forth. The world is very much
insects and other small creatures. Vertebrates are only about 40,000
out of this 1.7 million. So we are a very insignificant part of the
world's biological diversity.
The thing is, we don't know very much about biological diversity.
There's not a scientist in the world who can tell you how many species
there are. In fact, all the estimates, vary by orders of magnitude.
On the conservative side, some people believe there are only about
8 or 9 million species, and on the very, very liberal side, people
think there are maybe tens of millions, even up to 100 million species.
It lies somewhere in between, but we really just do not have the science
- that's going to be a recurring theme, that our scientific information
is inconclusive on a lot of issues - and so we just don't know.
That's really important, because these 1.75 million species essentially
are our life-support system and they run the world economy, as I will
get into. Biological diversity is extremely important, and we're going
to have a number of people talk about these issues in some detail:
about their ecological services—Eleanor's going to talk in detail
about that—through their economic use—and I'll point out
some of that—and through promoting the human spirit and intellect.
This is just my cut at talking about the values of biodiversity. Eleanor's
going to have a different taxonomy of values. But these, to me, are
the three things that embody biodiversity, and the human spirit and
intellect. We all have pets. We go out into parks to partake of the
outdoors. These are the things that feed us and that we cannot live
without. We feel much, much better when we are surrounded by biological
diversity, unless you're being charged by a lowland gorilla, like
I was one time.
One of the points of understanding the nature of the crisis that faces
us nowadays—the loss of biodiversity—is to comprehend how
important it really is. So I give this little exam to virtually every
group I ever talk to. I just ask them, "How many species do you think
people are using to sustain their lives on a day-to-day or weekly
basis?" Generally speaking, people divide out more or less evenly.
They tend to know that it's more than two or three hundred, but they're
a little unsure of 1,000 to 2,000, and by and large most of them pick
10,000. But I'm jerking everybody's chain because what I really want
to pick for a take-home message is that it's many tens of thousands
of species that are being used. And this is just the tip of the iceberg.
There are many tens of thousands of medicinal plants and animals that
people use every day. Lots and lots of foods. If you go into a village
in Papua New Guinea, and there are two or three hundred species of
birds in the neighborhood, people will eat those two or three hundred
species of birds opportunistically. Effectively, they will eat whatever
comes across their doorstep. Indeed, much of the world's population
is right out there in biodiversity space, making use of it for many,
many utilitarian needs. Thousands and thousands of animals and plants
are traded and used for food and shelter. It is no exaggeration to
say that the use of biological diversity fuels the world economy.
Not only do we get many trillions, maybe 30-plus trillion dollars
worth of free services from these ecosystems—wealth that we have
to replace if, in fact, we destroy these ecosystems—but also
many trillions of dollars are generated by people buying and selling
food, medicines, clothing, etc.
Agricultural fits right in with biodiversity. It's just not a corn
field. Some biodiversity has to pollinate a lot of our agriculture,
has to take care of all the pests, and so forth. Biodiversity is very,
very important. To understand why we are losing it and the complexities
of it, I have put together this very simplistic flow diagram. (Arrows
should be actually going in many, many more directions, and there
should be many boxes.)
Environmental degradation is leading to the loss of biodiversity.
There's a whole network of causation. The causes that are taking place
in, say the United States, are not the same as those that are taking
place in Central Africa, which are not necessarily the same as those
taking place in rural Southeast Asia.
Notice that I have a little box labeled "population." It's small compared
to everything else. One of the myths is that population is the cause
of all of our problems, when, in fact, it's political and economic
decision-making that creates economic and political instabilities
and gives us very pernicious economic incentives for eradicating biodiversity.
This is what Andy is going to talk a lot about - the exploitation
issues. There's exploitation for subsistence by the poor. Out of 6.5
billion people on the face of the earth, probably about 4 billion
of them, or 3.5 billion, at least earn maybe a dollar, $1.50 or $2
a day. These people depend immensely on biological diversity to sustain
their lives directly.
It's poverty and political and economic instabilities that have led
to population growth. Population growth really did not start until
the 1950s, when death rates were reduced significantly by modern medicine.
Up until that time, we only had about 2 billion people on the face
of the Earth, and population growth has been very, very low throughout
recorded history. So it was when populations really began to just
go gangbusters that this problem became increasingly important.
The reason why population growth is important now is because death
rates are low and fertility is high as a result of poverty, the lack
of education for women, and the political disenfranchisement of women.
Over the last 20 years, birth rates have been going down significantly
in virtually all countries in the world, with few exceptions, and
that's because of the political and economic enfranchisement of women
and the upgrading of people's standard of living. So this is getting
more in control now in terms of long-term growth, but there's a lag,
and population growth is still a major issue. We wouldn't deny that.
People have transformed the landscape for tens and tens of thousands
of years in one form or another. This just gives you a very rough
idea of how much we've done it around the world. The only thing you
need to look at is "high disturbance" and "medium disturbance." You
can see that virtually half of the vegetated land in the world has
been converted for human use. We've converted almost all of this primary
productivity—all the green parts of the world that provide us
with the fuel for biological diversity.
This gives you an example of forest loss in Madagascar over time from
1950 to '73 to '85 and then up into the present. You can take these
satellite images from virtually anywhere on Earth and this is the
story of the last 50 years. Most of this land degradation, most of
the forest loss in most of the world, has been over the last 50 or
60 years, although, of course, places like Europe were virtually clear-cut
by 1000 A.D.
Different places have had different histories of biodiversity loss
or forest loss. This is an envelope for extinction - this is sort
of a high value, this is sort of a low value. Ross is going to tell
you that there's a tremendous amount of uncertainty in extinction
data, and I would certainly go along with that. But some people—like
E.O. Wilson, on the basis of very little data—have said that
about 30,000 species are going extinct every year. There are a lot
of assumptions that go into these figures. It wouldn't surprise me
that at least 30,000 are going extinct every year. But because we
don't know how much biodiversity is out there and where it's distributed,
we really don't know very much about extinction.
One of the problems we face in dealing with biodiversity loss is knowledge.
That knowledge really has to come from science and sciences. Even
in this country, we don't know enough about our natural resources
to manage them effectively. If you talk with managers from the Fish
and Wildlife Service, the Park Service and so forth, almost all of
them will say, "We don't have enough knowledge to manage the ecosystems
we have." And if that's true in the United States, it's doubly true,
triply, quadruply true elsewhere in the world, because the developed
world has about 94% or so of the scientists. The biodiversity-rich
regions of the world, that sustain 80% of all the species of the world,
they have about 6% of the scientists, roughly. Those are rough proportions.
These are what I call the core biodiversity sciences. These are really
the sciences that deal with whole organisms, their functioning, their
roles in ecosystems, and so forth. In an institution like this, we
focus mainly on systematic biology. The scientists here are all what
we call systematists. Systematists do taxonomy, we do phylogenetic
analysis, we do classification. We consider ourselves to be conducting
the science that's really dedicated to discovery, to describing and
organizing and interpreting biological diversity. We discover species
and we name them, and we begin to classify them because we want to
understand their evolutionary history, their phylogenetic relationships—and
then we put those into classifications.
I like to tell lay audiences that without systematic science, basically
life as we know it would collapse and the quality of life would collapse.
The audience says, "Now, why is that?" and I say, "Well, if we didn't
have advances in systematic science, you wouldn't know about HIV.
You wouldn't know about West Nile virus. You wouldn't know about the
pests that are attacking your crops. You wouldn't know about the other
insects that are predators on the pests that are attacking those crops."
And on and on and on and on.
As I said, it's the discovery of biological diversity that generates
billions and billions of dollars of economic activity, but also it's
basic, underlying knowledge. You can say that about ecology, about
behavior and so forth. All these sciences are incredibly, incredibly
important. And there are many, many uncertainties.
I can't end without saying something about collections, because the
things that make this institution such a great institution for the
public, for schoolchildren, for formal and informal education, are
our collections. Scientific collections are our permanent record of
our natural heritage. I go out into the woods, and I say I see a certain
kind of bird. If I don't have the specimens to back up my observations,
in 10 or 15 years, who's going to believe me? Who's going to even
remember me, for instance? And who's going to trust my identifications?
Countries need a permanent record of biological diversity. It's very,
very important for them to have this and to know what they have because
you need to know what you have there in order to know what's invading
you, for instance. That's one of the major things.
We support lots and lots of kinds of research. Not only the research
that goes on here, but people come in from the outside—people
in agriculture and human health and resource management and biotechnical
fields—to use our collections. When the big DDT brouhaha developed
years ago, researchers came into scientific collections like ours
and looked at egg shell fitness prior to being exposed to DDT and
then compared that to eggshell fitness after DDT exposure.
Collections provide support for formal and informal education. The
biodiversity hall that you've all seen, or will see is totally informed
by the science and research in institutions like this and elsewhere.
All these exhibits in this institution just provide the raw materials
for education. And as you will see as we get into these panels, we
will be bringing these issues out time and time again. So I'm going
to stop there. Thank you very much.
