The following letter was published in one of Australia's broadsheet newspapers The Sydney Morning Herald on June 17, 2006. The Sydney Morning Herald could claim to have a more educated and influential readership than any other newspaper in Australia.
"Fellers not fellows
During my long and interesting life, and my travels around the world, I have observed that there are only two kinds of people: civilised people who plant and look after trees, and uncivilised humans who chop them down.
Moray MacDonald
Franz, Lane Cove"
The letter is perhaps indicative of the extent to which our elite is being swept along by environmental fundamentalism.
And I can't help but wonder whether Moray MacDonald knows where his toilet paper comes from:
"Here's to a logger
Who fills a need
From houses to paper
From one little seedFor those of you who
Wish to disagreeTry wiping your arse
without felling a tree."
The poem was on my stubbie holder at the TCA Conference last year.
Thanks Davey, thanks Luke.
I still have a problem with biodiversity Luke mainly because it seems that implicit in the definition is a value judgement. It would seem that higher biodiversity equals greater value - so that some tropical islands with high biodiversity are somehow better than say a farm or a desert or dare I say it a suburb because there is more life forms present. I think when you talk about it being measurable you are really talking about Davey's biota.
As for biodiversity after rehabilitation following mining - are you talking immediately after, 5 yrs later, 10 yrs later? Surely it isn't static?
Davey - Wasn't the Shannon index from Information Theory?
Of course we can get worse as there is alpha, beta and gamma biodiversity.
I thought you only had alpha males? Does Jen approve of gamma biodiversity? It's all too much.
Does the woody weed patch have too low a beta rating?
http://www.okstate.edu/artsci/botany/bisc3034/lnotes/biodiver.htm
http://www.uwsp.edu/geO/faculty/heywood/Geog358/Diversity/Biodiversity.htm
Perhaps a few things have changed since BIOL101
Anyway - the question unanswered for me is whether forestry as practiced in Australia reduce biodiversity from a remnant old growth forest? How - would it recover. Does it need to?
Thanks Luke,
We have wandered far from the thread topic, but wandering is a useful pastime. Yes, the word 'biodiversity' has a place in broad discussion, at dinner parties etc. A scientific parameter it is not. Most biologists use 'species richness', so why not call it just that? Yet even that is not entirely clear. A study in tropical forest (Knight 1975) suggested that different answers may arise depending on whether you count tree species per unit area, or tree species per fixed number of trees. A third possibility would be to count tree species intersecting a transect line of a fixed length. Suppose one of these methods showed increasing species richness, one no change, and the other a decrease? What then?
Due, I surmise, to the influence of Charlie Krebs' well known (and mainly excellent) text book, the Shannon-Wiener Index has been glibly used by ecologists without understanding its history, mathematics, and original intent. I suspect Claude and Norbert might turn in their graves if they knew what ecologists get up to, and publish.
Ref: Knight, D.H.(1975) A phytosociological analysis of species rich tropical forest on Barro Colorado Island, Panama. Ecol. Monog. 45:259-284.
Don't be too quick to reach for the "eject" button on biodiversity. The Wiki article explains it in considerable detail and is worth a read at least.
And after development e.g. clearing rainforest to pasture -in the Amazon - the system is obviously much less "biodiverse".
Similarly with revegetation in sand mining areas - often the revegetated result is less biodiverse.
And in most agricultural developments.
So the species richess (which there are mathematical measures of) is said to be "less biodiverse".
Of course if you want to argue if more biodiverse is "better", whether biodiversity means "more stable" or whether biodiversity is better for "ecological services" that's another matter.
So I think biodiversity is a measureable, useful and descriptive term. Why fret it ?
The problem with sustainable development is that it often isn't. And for how long a time period does it have to be sustainable - 100 years? - 1000 years ? over the inter-glacials? How much impact on the world around it is counted etc. What about climate change ?
Obviously at the gross end one can see a system is clearly not sustainable. However in the more "moderate" end of the spectrum the devil is in the details.
Davey Gam Esq. has nailed it. Biodiversity, like "sustainable development" is a term so imprecise as to be of no utility. If one has to define a term every time it is used so as not to be accused of misuse, then the term is useless. Except to those who want to blather.
ok thanks most informative - so it means different things to different people ( public, scientists of varying breeds, policy makers, media etc) and is not really measurable. Not very useful I would have thought either to science or to political debate.
So how do you measure a healthy environment or for that matter a degraded one? And how do you get it to stand still long enough to take a sample?
Alice, perhaps you have forgotten, handkies are made of cotton.
Surely, they must be "bad".
Mary and Luke,
Last year I commented on a submission to the West Australian EPA about 'biodiversity conservation'. In it, the authors used the word over fifty times in a few pages, which irritated me. It reminded me of Orwell's sheep, only instead of 'four legs good' they were chanting 'biodiversity good'.
Over the past few decades 'biodiversity' has become a popular word (Goldstein 1999, Nobis & Wohlgemuth 2004). However, its widespread use by journalists, politicians, environmental lobbyists, or even by scientists is no guarantee that it is a defined, operational, fully measurable, scientific parameter. There is an extensive review on this topic (Doherty et al. 2000) in which it is suggested that "science cannot determine the existential value of biodiversity per se since there is ultimately no endpoint to ecosystem development ... there is therefore some debate within the scientific community as to the utility of the term biodiversity."
The word was popularised in the early 1990s by Edward O. Wilson, an American biologist with a talent for rhetoric. In fact, Wilson merely shortened the term 'biological diversity' usually accredited to the English biologist, Sir Arthur Tansley (1935). However, the Russian academician Ghilarov claimed a much older history for the concept, and astutely questioned the status of biodiversity as a precise scientific parameter. He suggested that its liberal use in scientific writing is often simply a bid for status or funding (hear!hear!). Gaston (1996) suggested that "Biodiversity is an interdisciplinary concept, appearing in various guises as a biological concept, a measurable entity, and a social/political construct." Most often the latter, I suspect.
References:
Doherty et al. (2000) The interaction between habitat conditions, ecosystem processes and terestrial biodiversity - a review. Dept. of Environment and Heritage, Canberra.
Gaston, K.J. (1996) What is biodiversity? In Biodiversity: a biology of numbers and difference. Blackwell Science, Oxford.
Ghilarov, A. (1996) What does 'biodiversity' mean - scientific problem or convenient myth. Trends in Ecology & Evolution 11:304-6
Goldstein, P.Z. (1999) Functional ecosystems and biodiversity buzzwords. Conservation Biology 13(2): 247-255
Nobis, M. & Wohlgemuth, T. (2004) Trend words in ecological core journals over the last 25 years (1978-2002). Oikos 106(2): 411-421.
Tansley, A.G. (1935) The use and abuse of vegetational concepts and terms. Ecology 16: 284-307.
Hope this helps. I still think that the word 'biota', being plural, implies the obvious fact that there is a variety of life forms, both between, and within species. If you want to consider the variety of potential interactions between n life forms, consider the sum of the nth row of Pascal's Triangle. Oooer! Perhaps that was what Doherty had in mind. Having peered into the abyss, he withdrew.
What if an area A had 30 bird species, 5 mammals, 8 reptiles, 573 invertebrates, 100 vascular plants, and 1 tonne of bacteria per hectare, whereas area B had 10 birds species, 12 mammals, 9 reptiles, 328 invertebrates, 74 vascular plants, and 3 tonnes of bacteria per hectare. Which is more 'biodiverse'? Should we count species? Which species? Biomass? How many interactions should we include? This is getting too long - I'd better shut up before Jen censors me.
Mary - Origin of term biodiversity:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biodiversity
http://www.forestbiodiversityinbc.ca/what.asp
99 why not 29? because if you wait 71 years then you've got to your 100. And of course with some species 100 is middle aged and others may be dead and gone before they ever reach 100.
As for biota - when I was at university many decades ago it meant all living things plants, animals - mammals to microbes in a particular area.
Biodiversity seems to be a more recent term certainly since I did biol 101 - my understanding is that it is bigger than biota in that it encompasses diversity within each of the species present as well as diversity of species. Does any one know the history/ derivation? It certainly seems to pack an emotional punch, just like old growth.