Village Matters

What is Biodiversity? Why does it matter?

By S E Burt 

Recently, there has been a lot of talk about the natural world and the effect humans have on it. Global Warming, deforestation, biodiversity, greenwashing, carbon footprint, are all familiar terms – but what do they actually mean? Biodiversity for example, means the variety and abundance of life on Earth, but in reality, it is a system that is fragile as it is complex. 

Imagine you have a 10,000 piece jigsaw. A gust of wind blows 200 pieces out the window, gone forever. The jigsaw is full of gaps, destabilised with missing pieces of information. Biodiversity is similar. Now imagine you have a jigsaw of around 1 trillion pieces. It is wrapped around Earth and made up of plants and animals, from bacteria to blue whales. 

If every individual piece in the global jigsaw represents a species, its unique genes set it apart from every other organism. All the genes from all the species add up to make a ‘gene pool’, a range of genes available to evolve and adapt, like a living jigsaw piece that can change shape slightly if it needs to. Each species occupies a separate ‘niche’, a lifestyle which makes it different to everything else. Its own place in the jigsaw. No other piece will fit that exact space, and each inter-connects with other pieces around it perfectly. 

But, something has gone wrong, namely humans. No species, in the history of the planet has ever been so successful – or so ignorant. Today, the balance has been tipped by the careless and greedy activities of man. Since the Industrial Revolution 250 years ago, between 200-2,000 species have been lost EVERY YEAR. Deforestation, habitat loss, meat and food production, waste, overfishing, pollution, and rising global temperatures due to the burning of fossil fuels are causing too much change all at once. In 2021 we are in the midst of a mass extinction. 

What does it matter if something becomes extinct? Well, if one thing dies out, others that rely on it become more likely to die out too. Take a tiny fig wasp that lives in the Amazon jungle, 5,000 miles away. It crawls inside a fig to pollinate it. No other insect can do this. One day all the fig wasps die out. The figs can’t produce new fruit so all the monkeys, fruit bats and birds that feed on the figs go hungry. On the ground, beetles and other insects that fed on the dropped fruit starve. Snakes and lizards that ate the beetles and insects starve. Birds and other mammals that ate the lizards and snakes don’t have enough food to feed their young, and no new generations come along. The seeds of the tree are not dispersed. The forest shrinks. Carbon dioxide levels rise. Floods increase because the burning of fossil fuels by humans has changed the weather patterns. Fortunately, Fig wasps have not died out – yet! But many other organisms have. The chain reaction has already started. 

The good news? Earth has the capacity to provide everything we need, if we do so sustainably. 

There are 5 things you can do right now to make a difference: 

1. Become better informed- the Dasgupta review is free and can be found on Google. 

2. Grow something to attract wildlife and forget pesticides/fertilizers. 

3. Waste as little of anything as possible 

4. Buy local/organic food 

5. Join a group, or campaign for companies and politicians to make the changes we need to be sustainable.