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From YubaNet.com Op-Ed
Recently, I suggested that in order to manage something sustainably, we need to have both an inventory of everything involved and a blueprint describing how all the components function together. This would be the minimum amount of information we would need to sustainably manage anything from a bakery to an ecosystem. So how complete is our biological inventory? Among animals, the most intensively studies are mammals and birds, yet new species are found every year. The breakdown of animal species is: 9,950 birds, 4,630 mammals, 7,400 reptiles, 25,000 fishes, 75,000 spiders, and 950,000 insects. You can see right away that the most numerous animal species on Earth are bugs. It's been estimated that for every human being on Earth, there are at least 200 million insects! Suppose we spray an insecticide over a patch of ecosystem like a tree canopy or grassland, then collect and identify every insect. The proportion of ones that are "known to science" to those that are new, can provide an estimate of how much we do or don't know. Thus, when Terry Erwin of the Smithsonian Institute fogged some of the canopy of the Amazon rainforest with insecticide, very few of the thousands of recovered specimens had ever been seen by a scientist before. On that basis, he estimated there might be 30 million species of multicellular organisms on Earth. How many have already been reported by scientists? Harvard's famed naturalist, Edward O. Wilson, calculates that some 1.5 - 1.7 million species have been identified (there is some uncertainty because sometimes different scientists independently capture the same species and each gives it a name). If there are 30 million species, that would mean we may have identified five per cent of all that exist. Do you think we could manage that bakery knowing five per cent of everything inside it? Now the second requirement is a blueprint, a description of how all the parts work together. If we know so few of the components of ecosystems, any blueprint would be ludicrously incomplete. When it comes to knowing even the most basic aspects of the life cycles of species, what they eat, how they reproduce, their distribution and interaction with other organisms and the air, water and soil, our knowledge is miniscule. We have studied some organisms very intensively - for example, human beings, cows, and yeast. But even a scientific favorite like the fruit fly still has fundamental mysteries to be resolved, such as how they survive winters in northern Canada. Of the million and a half identified species, we may have detailed information about a thousand or less. Now think again about that bakery. If we had an inventory of five per cent of its contents, and of that five per cent we had an idea of the role and interconnections between 0.1 per cent of them, who among us would have the temerity to claim we could manage the store in any kind of sustainable way? Yet that is precisely what we are doing with our natural resources when we claim to manage the air, water, salmon, deer, spruce trees, soil, etc. Rather than filling us with a sense of how knowledgeable we are, science informs us of the vast areas of our ignorance and challenges us with new questions and horizons. I think we've gotten carried away prematurely as we rush to apply our incremental bits and pieces of insights as new technology. That's why several leading biologists, such as E.O.Wilson, are urging a crash program to create a global inventory of every species on Earth and to compile everything that is known about each one. Just as the human genome project succeeded in deciphering the code in human DNA, scientists now believe we must seek to identify the components of the very life base of the planet. It's critical if we are to find a way to a truly sustainable future. David T. Suzuki PhD, the Chair of the David Suzuki Foundation, is an award-winning scientist, environmentalist and broadcaster. Source: David Suzuki Foundation © Copyright YubaNet.com |
