What does Biodiversity mean and why we should care about it?

The term ‘biodiversity’ is shortened from ‘biological diversity’.  It describes the great variety of all life forms on Earth, from the tiniest bugs living in the soil, to the butterflies in your garden, the plants they feed from, and the biggest whales in the sea.  The healthier and greater the biodiversity the healthier we are.

According to the visionary scientist James Lovelock who proposed the ‘Gaia Hypothesis’, named after the ancient Greek goddess of Earth, the Earth System behaves as a single, self-regulating system with physical, chemical, biological, and human components which maintain the climate and biochemical conditions which make life on Earth possible. In other words everything is connected!

Another influence for the Gaia theory and the environmental movement in general came as a side effect of the Space Race between the Soviet Union and the United States of America. During the 1960s, the first humans in space could see how the Earth looked like as a whole. Photographs like ‘Earthrise’ taken by astronaut William Anders in 1968 during the Apollo 8 mission became an early symbol for the global ecology movement.

Biodiversity is all the different kinds of life you‘ll find in one area — the variety of animals, plants, fungi, and even microorganisms like bacteria that make up our natural world. Each of these species and organisms work together in ecosystems, like an intricate web, to maintain balance and support life.

The biological diversity we see today is the result of millions of years of evolution. It is constantly changing and evolving as some species adapt to new surroundings, become extinct, and others, over time, evolve into new species. We as human beings are an integral part of biodiversity and we can influence it in a positive or negative way.

If we humans allow the increasing rate of biodiversity loss to continue we will lose the essential services that biodiversity provides, therefore preventing us from handing down an invaluable gift to future generations.

Whatever humans do, life will carry on in one way or another. But if we continue to emit greenhouse gasses and so change the atmosphere, then we risk producing dangerous and potentially runaway climate change. This could eventually stop human civilisation affecting the atmosphere, if only because there will not be any human civilisation left in the atmosphere.

We could be close to a tipping point.

Gaian self-regulation may be very effective. But there is no evidence that it prefers one form of life over another. Countless species have emerged and then disappeared from the Earth over the past 3.7 billion years. We have no reason to think that ‘homo sapiens’, (humans), are any different in that respect.