Biodiversity, or biological diversity, is an unhelpful way of describing what we all understand to be ‘nature’. Plants, flowers, trees, insects, birds, mammals, fish and all the other species that we can and can’t see that make up the living natural world. It’s basically everything apart from humans, anything humans have made, rocks, air, soil and water.
We measure biodiversity as the number of different species in an area and the abundance of the species. The higher the numbers, the greater the biodiversity.
It is thought that for every species we have identified there may be 10 more yet to be discovered. The race is now on to discover them before they disappear.
What many humans have failed to appreciate is how reliant we are on the plants and animals that we share the planet with. It seems really obvious but plants generate the oxygen that we breathe, without plants humans would be dead and yet we continue to remove forests at an alarming rate.
115 of the 150 most prescribed drugs in the US are derived from plants. Scientists studying plants are discovering potential cures for diseases every year but they are worried that we’ll destroy plants before they are even discovered.
We all know about bees and how they take nectar from plants and in doing so also remove some pollen, which they deposit at the next plant thereby facilitating the reproduction process. However, it’s not just bees that are pollinators it is moths, butterflies, beetles, flies and even some birds and mammals. Without these pollinators we’d have fewer and fewer plants and in 2011 the National Ecosystem Assessment valued pollinators at £430 million per annum, but of course we actually get them free of charge.
The natural world is a complex web of inter-relationships, which for too long humans have disassociated themselves from. In fact we are in it and we influence it, and it is time that we took responsibility for our role and realized that we need the natural world more than it needs us.
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