Conservation Biology

pg 210

There was a time when the interstate highway system of the United States existed only as an ambitious plan requiring implementation over several decades. To its credit, the Eisenhower administration both initiated and funded the interstate highways that today are such key components of our national infrastructure.

(Just try to imagine our nation without them.)

Today, conserving earth’s ecosystems and biodiversity hotspots must be planned and implemented in a similar way.

We will see that costs exist, of course – but that they are both affordable and manageable – something like car or home loan payments might be to an individual or a family, or sponsoring an Olympic games might be to a city or a nation.

pg 216

Although development plans and projects might envision 10% as sufficient to save half the species [of the Amazon] (and we should not be at all cavalier in acquiescing to the loss of the other 50%) in fact, it seems most unlikely that such a percentage would preserve the existing climatic services and global functioning of the tropical systems.

Somewhere during the 90% eradication that current policy envisions and may permit, a catastrophic threshold or tipping point (with global repercussions) will almost certainly be crossed.

pg 217

Conserving species does not necessarily conserve function.

If Brazil “saves” only ten percent of its rainforests, will the remnant forest still generate the region’s rain each day? And sequester the world’s carbon? And generate an equilibrial supply of molecular oxygen? Will it still continue to function as “the lungs of the world?”

Or will disappearance of ninety percent of the forest

spell the end of its role as a functioning system,

so that even the remaining 10 percent

gradually deteriorates and collapses?

Suppose that we take representative samples of the tissues, molecules, and cells in a human body and store them. And by so doing, we successfully manage to conserve tissue samples of endocrine, bone, blood, heart, muscle, brain, kidneys, and connective tissue, etc.

Saving tiny samples of each of these tissues offers no

assurance that the organism itself will continue to function.

pg 212

E. O. Wilson (2002) points out that “the tropical wilderness areas and the hottest of the hotspots …which together contain perhaps 70% of earth’s plant and animal species can be saved by a single investment of roughly $30 billion.”

To put this in perspective, keep in mind that a single nation, Greece, is estimated to have spent $12 billion for the 2004 Olympics held in Athens, Beijing is expected to spend $10 billion or more as host of the games in 2008, and London is expected to spend $17 billion on the Olympics of 2012 (Maidment, 2005).

If three nations, in less than a decade, can make financial outlays that ensure that the Olympic games survive and prosper, world leaders must make similar expenditures to preserve the fabric of life on earth.

Even when we have available the luxury of time to think about tomorrow, we typically do so

while taking the continued functioning of nature, natural
systems, and natural processes for granted -

by supposing that they constitute

some sort of on-going constant.

Such assumptions are no longer warranted under current conditions of population growth.

Finally, when it comes to our demographic impacts on earth's biosphere and the continued functioning of its diverse ecosystems,

there will be no planetary "do-overs" available

if we don't get things right the first time around.