Conscious Choice: Biodiversity in Human Perspective

October 2001 | News of the Earth

Biodiversity in Human Perspective

by Dave Aftandilian

What does "biodiversity" mean to you? If you’re like many Americans, you may not have heard of it before, and even if you have it’s not likely something you think about on a daily basis. That’s a shame because biodiversity is crucial not just to the preservation of Earth’s plants, animals, landscapes, and ecosystems, but also to the daily lives, cultures, and spiritual values of every human being on this planet.

In the Biodiversity Recovery Plan for the Chicago region that it released late in 1999, the Chicago Wilderness Coalition wrote that "’biodiversity’ simply means biological diversity — all the genes, species, and biological communities within a particular place." That’s an excellent definition of the scientific sense in which the word is used within most Western nations. But to many indigenous groups around the world, the concept of biodiversity has a much wider meaning, one that links the human, natural, and spiritual worlds in a deeply interrelated whole. Perhaps the most eye-opening contributions to the consistently fascinating collection entitled Cultural and Spiritual Values of Biodiversity, published jointly by the United Nations Environment Programme and Intermediate Technology Publications (also in 1999), are the statements by indigenous peoples about what biodiversity means to them. Here are three of those statements:

"To me, biodiversity is all the beings that are related in nature: man, animals and plants, even vegetables, rivers, seas, animals in the jungle, and all the beliefs we have kept — from our ancestors and from our dreams. Wisdom itself is also a part of biodiversity." — Piedad Cabascango (from the Pichincha-Richarimui Federation, Ecuador)

"Biodiversity is the existing life within nature that functions by maintaining constant interrelations among its various components. Nature or biodiversity is all that which surrounds us and includes culture, our ways of life, traditional medicine, and so on. Biodiversity is the joining together through creation of the animate and the inanimate." — Fidel Sánchez, Ciro Cosnilla Olivares, Reyner Castro Martínez, Eliazar Muñoz, Guillermo Gómez, Elmer Guimaraes, and Leoncio García (from various peoples of the Peruvian Amazon region)

"Biodiversity is my home." — Siosiane Fanua Bloomfield (from Fatai Village, Tonga)

To give you a better sense of what biodiversity is all about, and why you should care, this column will cover some of the cultural and spiritual aspects of biodiversity, as well as its utilitarian functions for humanity.

Our home, the place that is also known as the Chicago Wilderness, includes many diverse habitats, such as oak savannas, wetlands, tallgrass prairies, and Lake Michigan. As Chicago Wilderness’ Biodiversity Recovery Plan notes, the Chicago region contains "the best concentration of prairies and oak woodlands that exist anywhere in the world." The state of Illinois’ 1978 inventory of natural areas found that only 0.07 percent of Illinois land was in a natural condition — but 25 percent of those lands were in the six counties of the Chicago metropolitan area. And just around the bend of Lake Michigan from Chicago, the Indiana Dunes National Lakeshore ranks third among all the National Park Service’s holdings in terms of the number of different native plants species. (As a result, the Indiana Dunes played a key role in the development of the ecological concept of "succession" of native plant communities; Henry Cowles from the University of Chicago developed the concept in the course of repeated trips to the dunes.) Keep all this in mind as you read on, and think about what biodiversity might mean to you as a member of the diverse community that makes up the Chicago Wilderness.

Utilitarian Values of Biodiversity

Another title for this section could be "What is Biodiversity Worth?" (in the economic sense). More than you might think — $33 trillion a year globally, or about twice the world’s gross national product, according to a team of economists headed by Robert Costanza of the University of Maryland (and this figure is almost certainly an underestimate). Here in the United States, David Pimentel of Cornell and his colleagues estimate that the many functions ecosystems perform that benefit humanity, known as ecosystem services, are worth at least $300 billion a year. Such estimates don’t include the cultural and spiritual value of biodiversity, of course, but they do give you an idea of just how much we owe to the world around us for everything we build, eat, and so on.

Let’s start with ecosystem services. These include flood and erosion control, maintenance of water quality, formation of soil (it takes between two hundred and one thousand years to form an inch of topsoil), conversion of solar energy to a form we can harvest as food, nutrient cycling and recycling, and pollination. You can probably think of dozens of others. These services are extremely valuable, even if it’s often difficult to quantify exactly how valuable. In terms of water quality, for instance, New York City recently had the option of choosing between building a $6 to $8 billion water treatment plant (with annual operating costs of about $300 million), or cleaning up leaky septic tanks and other pollutants and purchasing lands to protect the watershed in the Catskill Mountains, which currently supplies its drinking water. Wisely, New York chose to invest in natural capital, and they saved a bundle in the process. Total costs will likely be around $1.5 billion — only a quarter of the amount that would have been needed to fund the building of a new facility to get the same result.

Farming, logging, mining, fishing, and many more human activities depend almost entirely on biodiversity for their very existence. And of course ecotourism and other industries also make considerable amounts of money from places that host a spectacular diversity of plants and animals.

But that’s just the tip of the iceberg, according to Andrew Beattie and Paul R. Ehrlich. In their new book, Wild Solutions: How Biodiversity is Money in the Bank (Yale University Press), they give a tremendous number of fascinating and often surprising examples of how much we currently depend on thousands of species of plants, animals, and microbes for solutions to human problems, and how we will likely benefit from thousands more in the not-so-distant future. By the end of their book, I found myself fully believing their introductory assertion that "the creatures that live in our soils are worth far more to us than all the products of Silicon Valley."

Consider antibiotics. Most people know that penicillin, one of the first antibiotics, was isolated from a bread mold. But did you know that certain bull ants secrete antibiotics from metapleural glands, and that at least one antibiotic has been patented from such secretions, and is currently being used as a hospital antiseptic? Who can tell what other antibiotics might be isolated from the 9,500 species of ants, or from bees and termites, some of which are also known to produce antibiotics? Because bacteria have evolved resistance to some of our most powerful antibiotics, we need as much help as we can get in developing new ones. Why not take advantage of the 60 million years of research and development carried out by nature with the ancestors of living ants, and seek antibiotics among the insects?

One of the other unexpected values of biodiversity that Beattie and Ehrlich uncover is the use of bacteria, blue-green algae, yeasts, fungi, and certain plants in "bioremediation" to clean up human messes. For instance, instead of trying to clean up oil spills by hand, it is often more effective, and certainly cheaper, to simply spray them with "cocktails" of bacteria that love to eat oil. Add in some of the extra nutrients the bacteria need to prosper, and they do their job even more quickly. Plants are also being used in bioremediation. Plants that can tolerate soils contaminated with heavy metals, chemicals, or even uranium take the toxins out of the soil as they grow, storing them in their tissues; the plants can then be safely removed or incinerated, or perhaps even treated as a low-grade ore that can be "mined" if the substance in question is especially valuable. Indeed, as high-grade ores become harder to locate and more expensive to exploit, bacteria that can use metal ores and mine wastes as their food are being investigated as cost-effective "biological miners"; today about a quarter of the world’s copper production is obtained through similar uses of bacteria.

Beattie and Ehrlich also show us how some insects benefit humans as biocontrol agents by preying on pest species, especially invasive species that have no natural predators in their new environments (such as the Asian long-horned beetles infesting trees in Ravenswood and other parts of Chicago and the United States). Creatures as diverse as insects, crabs, fish, and flies are serving as models for the development of various kinds of robots. Renewable-energy technologists are investigating chloroplasts, which transform sunlight into chemical energy in green plants, as possible inspiration or blueprints for more efficient solar energy cells. Architects are learning how to design naturally air-conditioned buildings by studying termite mounds in Africa. The shells of mollusks (e.g., snails and mussels) have shown us new ways to construct flexible concrete and heat-resistant ceramics. And silk from spiders and others creatures is far stronger and more flexible per unit weight than high-tensile steel; materials scientists are developing applications from silk in making new types of bulletproof vests and body armor, cables for suspension bridges, artificial tendons, and sutures.

Those are just a few of the wild solutions from biodiversity that we’ve found so far. One of Beattie and Ehrlich’s key points is that there are millions of other such opportunities waiting to be discovered — but only if we preserve all the plants, animals, and microorganisms that might harbor them. As Beattie and Ehrlich write in their conclusion, "numerous examples of industrial innovation show repeatedly that we can never predict what species or populations are going to be useful, or even desperately important, in the future.... The answer is to make sure we do not lose biodiversity, and that means conservation."

Biodiversity, Culture, and Spirit

Western scientists were not the first people to recognize the antibiotic properties of bull ant secretions. After a story about the discovery ran on Australian television, one of the scientists involved received a call from an old Aboriginal woman. She told him that when she or her brothers or sisters cut themselves when they were kids, her mother would throw a clean cloth into a bull ant colony, stir it around with a stick, then shake the angry ants off and apply the cloth to the wound, knowing that the secretions of the ants that seeped into the cloth would prevent infection.

This is an example of traditional ecological knowledge (TEK) — wisdom that indigenous peoples have built up from years of intimate experience of their environments, and passed down from generation to generation — and it is a crucial key to discovering and developing properties of biodiversity that are especially useful to humans. In many cases, traditions of indigenous peoples have led scientists to very productive medicines. A table in Cultural and Spiritual Values of Biodiversity notes that at least 25 percent of Western patented medicines are derived from medicinal plants identified and prepared through indigenous techniques. However, the same table notes that "almost all local knowledge of medicinal plants and systems as well as the plants themselves could disappear within one generation."

This is a graphic illustration of both the close ties between biological and cultural diversity, and the great dangers both face. It is no coincidence, writes Klaus Topfer, executive director of the United Nations Environment Programme, that "most indigenous and/or traditional populations inhabit areas of mega-biodiversity.... The very origins of environmental conservation lie buried in ancient cultures found throughout the world.... Learning and respecting the ways of today’s indigenous and traditional peoples, and integrating them into environmental and developmental considerations, will prove indispensable for the survival of biodiversity."

In addition to medicines, TEK-based farming and agroforestry practices of indigenous groups around the world have much to offer the West. Using few if any fertilizers or pesticides, traditional farming systems generate yields comparable or superior to those from systems used in the West, while also maintaining a much higher degree of plant diversity, Miguel A. Altieri writes in Cultural and Spiritual Values of Biodiversity. Tropical agroecosystems, for instance, often contain more than one hundred plant species per field. Traditional systems primarily achieve these results by planting a number of different species, and different varieties of a single species, together in what are known as polycultures (as opposed to the one-variety monocultural fields you can see anywhere in Illinois). This reduces risk, because if one crop fails for some reason, others will likely thrive. Traditional systems also leave natural vegetation untouched next to their fields, which provides a refuge for predators of agricultural pests.

Traditional agricultural systems are often centers of crop diversity with many different varieties of each crop as well as its wild relatives. Indigenous peoples trade the seeds freely among themselves, knowing that increased genetic diversity increases the vigor of their crops. (Contrast this with the trend toward bioengineered seeds in the West, many of which it is illegal to plant for more than one season because of the agrochemical companies’ stranglehold on the patents.) This genetic diversity is also the source of new varieties for crops grown in the West; if a devastating disease wipes out the one variety of seed corn grown across much of the United States, for instance, we would likely go to Mexico seeking varieties resistant to the disease. As Altieri rightly points out, "by safeguarding native plant diversity, peasants have provided a major ecological service to humankind, for which they have not been appropriately recognized or compensated."

More than anything else, though, the most important lesson we in the West can learn from indigenous traditions regarding biodiversity is a sense of kinship and stewardship with land and creatures, which is crucial for defending them. Over and over again, indigenous voices in Cultural and Spiritual Values of Biodiversity speak of how nature, culture, and spirit are inextricably bound together, each depending on the other for its existence. "All living things are equal parts of nature and we have to care for each other," as Cristina Gualinga of the Quichua people of Ecuador simply and eloquently puts it. From this perspective, biodiversity is inestimably precious. "Without biodiversity, life would be meaningless," writes Patrick Segundad of the Kadazan community in Malaysia.

Linking nature and culture together, for many indigenous peoples, is the world of spirit. In most traditional religious systems, everything in nature has a spirit and is sacred; humans must therefore respect all life — both animal and plant — protect it, and use it wisely so that future generations may benefit from it as well. One thing we can do is recover the ecological values within our own religious traditions. These values exist in every major religion, from Christianity to Judaism, Islam to Buddhism. Our generation is charged with the task to rediscover these values and prioritize them (one place to start is by contacting the National Religious Partnership for the Environment; see Resources below). Until our spiritual and ethical relation to nature changes, it will be very difficult to change our destructive behavior toward it. In the words of Michael Kapo of Papua, New Guinea, "if we can link biodiversity to the spiritual aspect, things will change."

Unfortunately, the West has not returned the favors that indigenous peoples have done us in sharing their TEK expertise and spiritual traditions regarding nature and culture. Instead, we have exploited these peoples for their knowledge and labor, then driven them off their land when we decide we want to mine, log, or farm it, or even when we want to set it aside as an ecological reserve. Without the land that is an inseparable part of their cultural and spiritual heritage, many indigenous peoples are losing their TEK wisdom, along with the languages in which this knowledge has been expressed for generations. And the world, in turn, is losing its most knowledgeable, passionate defenders of biodiversity. The bottom line is that to preserve biodiversity, we need to nurture cultural diversity as well.

What We Can Do

Most obviously, throughout the world, we need to preserve as much open space as we can, and manage it wisely to preserve and enhance its biodiversity. This does not mean we need to create huge parks and fence them off from people — as we have seen above, people are often our greatest defenders of biodiversity. To see how this works on the local level, just visit one of the many prairie, wetland, or forest areas that volunteer stewards from the Nature Conservancy and other groups are restoring to healthy ecological function throughout the Chicago region. Preserving open space is not just an altruistic activity either. As the Trust for Public Land points out in its report on The Economic Benefits of Parks and Open Space, protecting open space can help communities avoid the pitfalls of sprawling growth, including massive infrastructure costs to build new roads, schools, and sewers and provide fire, police, and ambulance services. The presence of nearby open space also makes communities more attractive places to live, which in turn increases property values, and can be used to attract new residents and businesses to revitalize inner cities.

You can also buy organic produce and meat, or better yet, become a member of a community-supported agriculture (CSA) farm. In CSAs, people purchase a share in the fall or spring, and then throughout the summer receive weekly shipments of fresh organically grown vegetables from local farms. Because organic farming draws on the lessons of polyculture and many other techniques pioneered by indigenous farmers, it helps increase local biodiversity, as well as reducing runoff of pesticides and fertilizers into our rivers and streams (and, of course, also keeps pesticide residues out of our bodies). One of the largest CSAs in the Chicago area is Angelic Organics. I’ve been a member for several years and can recommend it highly, but I also encourage you to check around and select the CSA whose values and approach you feel most comfortable with.

Another thing you can do is use native plants grown from local sources for landscaping at your home or office. The Biodiversity Recovery Plan from Chicago Wilderness lists several sources in the area that can supply you with native plants and seeds. In many cases, native species require much less intensive care than nonnative plants to grow well, since they are already adapted to this region. For instance, a colleague of mine at work converted her backyard from grass to a garden filled with native shade-tolerant plants over the past three years, and found that not only does it take less work to keep her backyard looking good, but the many shade plants in her garden are also much more aesthetically pleasing than a monoculture of lawn grass. Butterflies agree; she has seen many more, of many different kinds, since converting her backyard to native plant garden.

Finally, and most importantly, you can work on becoming a true Chicago native — a native of the Chicago Wilderness. There are many different ways to do this, from visiting more of Chicago’s natural areas with your family to taking classes on identifying native species, volunteering to help restore a piece of land near your home or monitor local wildlife, or becoming a member of a local environmental group. And, of course, you can also make a huge contribution by educating others about the economic, natural, cultural, and spiritual values of biodiversity.

Resources

Angelic Organics, 815-389-2746

Chicago Wilderness

National Religious Partnership for the Environment, 212-316-7441

Nature Conservancy, 312-346-8166, extension 24

Trust for Public Land, 312-427-1979

United Nations Environment Programme

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