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Well, Joel gave about half of my talk, so I should only be up here
for about five minutes. Can we have the second set of slides, please?
Joanna introduced me as a scientist but I think it might help you
all to know that I also have fairly extensive background in education.
Of those 15 years that I was overseas, I spent about a third of them
working on environmental education both in the formal and the informal
sector. So one of the things that I'll try to do to differentiate
my talk from Joel's is to talk about how I have used some of these
concepts in my classwork and what's worked with students in order
to give you some ideas.
I work at the Center for Biodiversity and Conservation here at the
museum, where our role is to create dialogues between scientists,
policy makers, educators, and the general public to find ways for
us to mitigate the threats to the global biodiversity. As Joel said,
we all have a different definition of biodiversity, and why is that?
Can everybody think of reasons why we would each of us come up with
a different definition of biodiversity?
It's a very complex subject. When I'm teaching it, I try not to come
in with a definition that I want everybody to memorize and walk away
with, but I try to have my students come up with their own definitions.
I feel that that way they'll understand it better. So I ask people
what they think the definition of biodiversity is, and we have a brainstorming
session and we put all the different definitions together and then
try to come up with the different aspects of the concept. First, the
two fundamental things that I guide them to understand is that biodiversity
is all the living parts of the environment - that's the "bio" part
of it. And that the "diversity", again as Joel mentioned, covers several
different types of levels. Sometimes I give them a slide show at the
beginning to show what I think of as biodiversity and that students
have come up with the idea that some of these ecosystem levels are
population levels, like these water birds, and others are species
level. Then I use examples that the students understand, like dogs,
to get at something like genetic diversity, saying, "These are all
one species of animal and yet there's such diversity. Why is that?"
As Joel mentioned, the value of biodiversity is a very important concept.
This is something I spend a lot of time at the beginning of classes
on conservation biology trying to get the students to understand.
I get them to understand their personal values in relation to biodiversity.
One of the things that Joel didn't mention was the intrinsic value
of biodiversity, and I try to get that point across fairly clearly.
The way that I classify the value of biodiversity is as "intrinsic"
and "extrinsic." You can argue for the value of biodiversity for biodiversity
itself, not at all how it relates to people. I feel that it's important
to express that to students, and for students to understand that we
shouldn't just be defining biodiversity in relation to its value to
humans.
On the other hand, it's a lot clearer and easier to talk about these
extrinsic—or utilitarian, as I believed Joel called them—values
for biodiversity, because that's something that we can grasp. A lot
of us actually do talk about direct goods that we get - food and fiber,
wood, genetic stock and medicines. Some of the points that are brought
out in the Life in the Balance IMAX are the indirect benefits and
values to biodiversity, and I'll be talking about a few of them in
the rest of my talk.
I try to get students to understand that intrinsic value isn't all
the pretty, fuzzy parts of biodiversity, but also the things that
people don't necessarily value highly. Joel mentioned that we use
thousands of species of food, for instance, in our daily or weekly
lives, and while that's true, I think another very important point
to make is that many potential food plants and animals are, in fact,
unknown in their utility to humans. Currently, we depend on startlingly
few species for the bulk of our diet. In other words, the staple crops
around the world are less than a hundred. So, if you look at Joel's
vision of the utilitarian value of biodiversity in the food category,
you can, on the one hand, argue that we use lots and lots and lots
of different kinds of food, but if you look at what we use on a day-to-day
basis, we're actually in a precarious position of depending on very,
very few staple food crops. If these conventional crops fail-and they
could easily fail, given plant diseases or uncontrollable pests—it's
important for us to keep wild stock or wild species as sources of
alternative foods for us. These—I suppose that they look like
insect larvae—are actually potatoes from the Central American
region.
Joel mentioned the use of biodiversity for medicine. One statistic
that I like to tell students is that 57% of the 150 most-prescribed
drugs have their origins in biodiversity. Again, this is bringing
things home to the students—holding up aspirin and talking to
them about where aspirin comes from or about some of the other really
common drugs in students' lives. I think you can get them to really
understand where the original inspiration for the drug came from,
or, in some cases, where the drug is still extracted from. In fact,
80% of the world's population relies on traditional plant- and animal-derived
medicines for their primary source of health care.
Commercial lumber and fuel are a very important part of the lives
of people, particularly outside of the United States. Things that
we don't really think about are that farmers spend $25 billion on
pesticides annually, and that there are organic alternatives to these
and there are also organic pesticides we derive from nature.
I'm going to be focusing the rest of my talk on what are called "ecosystem
services," which is also something that is covered or treated in the
Life in the Balance IMAX, in part because we feel that it's
a poorly understood concept about the importance of biodiversity.
The natural world is very important to us in terms of our economy.
Bees and other insects, butterflies, birds, bats and small mammals
pollinate 75% of the world's staple crops. If we did not have those
animals, we would not have agriculture. We also forget or don't think
about the fact that certain organisms disperse seeds and translocate
nutrients through the ecosystem, so if you lose one organism or a
series of organisms, then that affects, as many of you know, the rest
of the organisms in that ecosystem.
This is a slide of leaf litter that Keyfn Catley was working on when
he worked with us a few years ago. It's a sample of leaf litter from
Central Park, and I'm using it here to illustrate the service that
small soil invertebrates, fungi and microbial life serve in soil decomposition.
They help recycle plant nutrients and improve the quality of the soil
for us. In addition, bacteria turn atmospheric nitrogen into usable
nitrate fertilizers for the plants that we harvest. I think most of
you talk about photosynthesis in your work, so I won't spend a lot
of time on it, but again, biodiversity cleans our air. Another thing
that's touched on in Life in the Balance is the hydrological
cycle and the function of biodiversity in mitigating the effects of
floods and droughts, and in providing clean water, not to mention
the function of wetlands in water cleansing. Another thing that I
think we don't think very much about is the homeostatic regulation
of the earth's temperature and maybe even the salinity of oceans.
All of these cycles - water cycles, nitrogen cycles, and homeostatic
regulations - are things that nature does for us on its own. The more
that we degrade the environment, the less these cycles work, and the
less nature functions in its ecological services. We do not know enough
to replicate these services. I hear all the time, "It's all right.
Technology will figure out another way to do this." We can not hand-pollinate
all of the world's crops. We can not recreate the hydrological cycle
or nitrogen cycle. We lack the knowledge to do that. I don't actually
think we ever should do that, because I think it's important for us
to try to find ways to balance our needs with those of nature so that
nature continues to function as an ecological service mechanism for
us.
I've shared some of the ideas that I use with students in class on
the value of biodiversity with Kefyn, and I think he'll cover some
of them with you later this week. But I just want to mention one exercise
that I start off my classes with. I usually bring in magazines from
the United States, and overseas if I can get them, and I ask the students
to go through the magazines and come up with advertisements that use
biodiversity as a vehicle for selling their products. Once they've
gathered those, I ask them find the products that actually destroy
biodiversity. Can anybody think of something right off the top of
their heads? There's one product that I can think of - there's nothing
good about it to the environment, but it is almost always sold using
biodiversity as an argument for buying the product.
Audience: Mobil oil.
Eleanor: That's one good example. I was thinking of another
one that most of us use every day, except if you live in New York
City.
Audience: A car. Automobile.
Eleanor: Automobiles. Sport-utility vehicles in particular.
If you look at every single advertisement for sport-utility vehicles,
they are selling it because they are using biodiversity. They're using
people's internal love for biodiversity to get them to buy those cars,
which then affect biodiversity.
So it gets us to open up our dialogue about our daily use of natural
resources. And then I like to take it a little bit further and have
them spend the rest of the semester actually going out and exploring
the science behind what affects and causes resource destruction, using
those particular products. Maybe Kefyn will talk some more to you
about that, or if you have any questions, you can talk to me. Thanks.
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