Diversity:A Scientific And Political Overview
In the vastness of Creation, among 50 billion galaxies of 50 billion stars, our home--the Earth--is the only place we know of where life exists. We know that all this life has a fundamental unity, that the wisest scholar, the loftiest tree, the swiftest bird and the humblest bacterium all share an ancient, common origin. We know that from this basic unity has sprung a dazzling diversity of millions of living species. Our living planet is, indeed, a miracle, and knowing this can fill us with awe and reverence for Creation and the Creator.
But we also know two very distressing things about the Earth's biological diversity. One is that it is being destroyed very rapidly. In the next half-century--less than one human lifetime--the Earth could lose blue whales, giant pandas, tigers, black rhinoceroses and millions of lesser-known species. Entire ecosystem types, such as tropical dry forests, mangroves, and floodplain rivers could be damaged beyond repair. Our planet is now facing the most devastating biological catastrophe in the last 65 million years, since a huge asteroid hit the Earth and caused appalling damage, killing off the dinosaurs and more than half of the planet's other species. But today's mass extinction has a very different cause: the way we humans live our lives.
Fortunately, it is not the inevitable momentum of a mindless mass of rock that is destroying life on God's Green Earth. It is the Earth's most intelligent species. And while we have the power to kill off millions of other species, we also have the ability to distinguish right and wrong and to act in our own best interest. We can recognize our impact and change our course.
The fate of the Earth is a complex and difficult topic, one that is so daunting that we generally shy away from facing it. In the next few pages, I am going briefly to discuss biological diversity: what it is; why it is so important; why it is threatened; what the US has done to protect it; what is now happening in Congress; and what we must do to effectively protect biological diversity. I speak as a biological scientist who has studied living things since childhood, as a conservationist who has spent my career working to prevent extinctions, and as a Jew who is passionately devoted to celebrating God's Creation. What I can offer here only summarizes a much larger body of thinking, but if you understand its essence, you will know most of what you need to safeguard the diversity of life.
In the vastness of Creation, among 50 billion galaxies of 50 billion stars, our home--the Earth--is the only place we know of where life exists. We know that all this life has a fundamental unity, that the wisest scholar, the loftiest tree, the swiftest bird and the humblest bacterium all share an ancient, common origin. We know that from this basic unity has sprung a dazzling diversity of millions of living species. Our living planet is, indeed, a miracle, and knowing this can fill us with awe and reverence for Creation and the Creator.
But we also know two very distressing things about the Earth's biological diversity. One is that it is being destroyed very rapidly. In the next half-century--less than one human lifetime--the Earth could lose blue whales, giant pandas, tigers, black rhinoceroses and millions of lesser-known species. Entire ecosystem types, such as tropical dry forests, mangroves, and floodplain rivers could be damaged beyond repair. Our planet is now facing the most devastating biological catastrophe in the last 65 million years, since a huge asteroid hit the Earth and caused appalling damage, killing off the dinosaurs and more than half of the planet's other species. But today's mass extinction has a very different cause: the way we humans live our lives.
Fortunately, it is not the inevitable momentum of a mindless mass of rock that is destroying life on God's Green Earth. It is the Earth's most intelligent species. And while we have the power to kill off millions of other species, we also have the ability to distinguish right and wrong and to act in our own best interest. We can recognize our impact and change our course.
The fate of the Earth is a complex and difficult topic, one that is so daunting that we generally shy away from facing it. In the next few pages, I am going briefly to discuss biological diversity: what it is; why it is so important; why it is threatened; what the US has done to protect it; what is now happening in Congress; and what we must do to effectively protect biological diversity. I speak as a biological scientist who has studied living things since childhood, as a conservationist who has spent my career working to prevent extinctions, and as a Jew who is passionately devoted to celebrating God's Creation. What I can offer here only summarizes a much larger body of thinking, but if you understand its essence, you will know most of what you need to safeguard the diversity of life.
Why is Biological Diversity So Important?
Biological diversity is important for many reasons, but they can all be placed into two large groupings: for its own right, and for us.
Humans are only one of the Earth's 10, 30 or even 100 million species, and every other species was shaped over the course of 3.5 billion years from the same stuff by the same processes that shaped us. If we cherish Creation, we must recognize that the willows, eagles and bristleworms are all our siblings. It can be argued that our species is special and unique. That is true, but we are no more so than cheetahs that can accelerate faster than a sports car, king salmon that can circumnavigate an ocean and return to the very stream in which they hatched five years earlier or bolete mushrooms that can grow on dead wood and endure the fiercely Borgian competition in forest soil. Seen as a conservation biologist sees them, all species are astoundingly complex variations on the single theme of life, and none deserve to be driven to extinction by us.
Although Seattle, a 19th century Chief of the Duwamish Indians, was not a member of our particular tribe, an insight attributed to him has a distinctly Jewish feeling: "...to harm the Earth is to heap contempt on its Creator." If we humans are good because what made us is good, the same is true of all other species, the big, warm-blooded species with which we feel special kinship, as well as the ones we overlook and those that cause us problems. And while most species that have ever existed in the vastness of time are now extinct, it is hubris--or chutzpah--to believe that we possess the God-like wisdom to decide which species can survive and which can be condemned to extinction.
by Elliott A. Norse
http://www.coejl.org/learn/bd_norse.php
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