Planet Earth is our precious home and we must look after it – allowing biodiversity to flourish is crucial to our success
For many of us when we first think about the problems we are facing with the environment, we think of climate change, we think of pollution of the air and pollution of the rivers and seas, and then we might go on to think about the threats to iconic species like the polar bear or the elephant through the loss of habitats.
It is probably only after that that we may begin to think about the threat to bees, the loss of wild flowers and hedgerows and the wildlife that these plants support. But why do these apparently insignificant, tiny and unremarkable creatures or plants matter?
We perhaps appreciate that we need bees and other pollinators and that they need flowers – but it goes much deeper. It is the interconnection of the multiplicity of the millions of animals, insects, plants, microbes in their complex relationships that have created the stability of life on our planet.
This is biodiversity and the numerous ecosystems that are absolutely fundamental to the continuation of life on earth – including human life.
The natural world has generously provided us with everything we need and depend on – a system for cleaning our air and providing oxygen, it locks away carbon, it provides a water cycle delivering rain and water, it pollinates our crops that we need for food – and has even provided us with medicines.
It is biodiversity that balances and sustains life. Furthermore, it is biodiversity that can provide some of the solutions to the other environmental problems that we are facing.
We are only just beginning to understand the complexity of ecosystems with the multiple entities needed.
More time, research and money has been spent on studying and exploring outer space than in exploring the soil beneath our feet, for example how worms replenish the soil.
It is only now that we have begun to have any understanding of the amazing world of fungi, now classified as a kingdom, distinct from both plants and animals, and how fungi contribute to ecosystems underground. Their complex web of thin hair-like tendrils, called hyphae, secrete digestive enzymes, decompose dead organic matter, recycle and exchange nutrients, help control plant diseases and even provide information to trees.
It is an underground world wide web about which we still understand very little. Sustaining life on Earth may owe more to the humble earthworm and the maligned fungi than to anything else.
Human activity, over the millennia, has been gradually shaping and taming the planet, and this has accelerated hugely over the last 200 years with industrialisation and mechanisation.
Over the whole planet there is very little wilderness left and England is one of the most manicured landscapes, and so one of the most depleted in biodiversity.
In these 200 years, worldwide, we have deforested and cleared land for farming and for grazing animals, seeking higher and higher yields on depleted soil, turning it to dirt and relying on chemicals like phosphates and nitrates to get plants to grow.
All this in turn has fed into the pollution of our water ways, the reduction of oxygen from trees and the sequestration of carbon by forests leading to climate change.
We have gone through an era where we have been fighting nature and reached a tipping point, where we must change and start to work with nature. All is not lost. Understanding is growing at last and opinions are changing.
There are examples of projects that have re-wilded and restored their ecosystems. In Yellowstone National
Park for example, where the wolves were eradicated, resulted in the elk multiplying in the absence of a top predator. The elk over grazed the pasture as there was no need to move around. This depleted the plants and fruits for other animals, the scavengers had no food and disappeared. This in turn affected other smaller creatures… and so the story goes on. The wolves were reintroduced and stability was restored.
Here in West Sussex there is a project at Knepp, where an unproductive conventional farm has been returned to nature, and animals are allowed to roam freely. After 20 years there is now a rich and diverse plant and insect population, as well as livestock, and species of birds and butterflies thought to be extinct in this area are now flourishing.
Meanwhile, local volunteers have spent 20 years increasing the wetlands ecosystem of the low-lying coastal plain and harbours around Chichester. Their efforts have led to the creation of Europe’s largest coastal realignment scheme and the restoration of ponds and ditches creating room for more species and plant life that depend upon wetlands, the planet’s fastest disappearing ecosystem and yet the most effective system for carbon sequestration and flood mitigation.
So what is the benefit of this? We are all experiencing the changes happening in the natural world, the rise in temperatures, the melting of the icecaps and sea level rises, the increase of storms and winds, unpredictable rain fall, huge fires. Our planet is out of balance. A planet that is less wild is less stable.
Allowing biodiversity to flourish is a return of life, complex life, sustaining and balancing itself and being fruitful. It is possible for humans to work within this framework and satisfy the needs of both mankind and nature. In Brazil, there is a farmer who grows palm oil, but does so among the trees of the rainforest.
We can farm our land sustainably, rotating crops and renewing hedgerows and grazing animal around trees and restoring wetlands and other ecosystems.
Humanity, with all its intelligence and ingenuity, can provide for its own needs by being more efficient in how space is used, by farming more efficiently and so leaving space for the rest of life, as some people around the world are already demonstrating.
Those who have travelled on space missions to visit the moon or to explore the stars have had the opportunity to look back down at the Earth from a different perspective. What they have seen is a planet floating in space that is incredibly beautiful, but also very vulnerable, on its own, with all life as we know it depending upon it. It is our precious home and we must look after it.