| Biodiversity Most people these days are familiar with the term "biodiversity," but why is it important? There is a book by Ian Clark, an Irish doctor who has lived in Uganda for decades, titled The Man with the Key is Gone. It is a tribute to the phenomenon in developing world bureaucracies, where there is one and only one person who can deal with any particular issue or access a particular item that is "locked up." If you are trying to conduct a piece of business and the person you are dealing with falls ill or goes on leave (this tends to happen when you are on a very tight timeline), there is just nothing you can do about it. Your process is on hold until that person returns or until you give up. The system breaks down. Biodiversity is nature's way of avoiding that type of breakdown. Preserving biodiversity is not just about having lots of different plants and animals to look at or use, it is the strategy that the earth's natural systems have come up with for survival. If there is a blight that kills off a particular species of tree or bird, there is another closely related species that can gradually adapt to fill that now-vacant niche. When a natural forest is cut down for timber, fuel, or to clear land for crops, an enormous amount of biodiversity is lost. In areas around the world where intensive logging takes place, there are often massive replanting efforts to "replace" the forests that have been cut down. Unfortunately, the new plantations are often composed of a single species of economically useful or quick-growing tree. By comparison, the Budongo forest in the Murchison Falls Conservation Area has more than 400 species of trees alone, not to mention the variety of shrubs and smaller plants to be found there. And, those trees and plants support countless mammals, birds and insects, and hold the secrets to medicines that may save millions of human lives in the future. So, conservation of biodiversity is not some esoteric scientific exercise. It is about protecting the earth's natural systems on which we all depend. At some point a system loses too many of its parts to continue to function. We don't know how many of those parts the earth can afford to lose before it will stop working, but can we afford to find out? |