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                                                                                January 2, 1989

Planet of the Year

Biodiversity - The Death of Birth


By  Eugene Linden


    Before Brazil's great land rush, the emerald rain forests of
Rondonia state were an unspoiled showcase for the diversity of
life. In this lush territory south of the Amazon, there was
hardly a break in the canopy of 200-ft.-tall trees, and virtually
every acre was alive with the cacophony of all kinds of insects,
birds and monkeys. Then, beginning in the 1970s, came the swarms
of settlers, slashing and burning huge swaths through the forest
to create roads, towns and fields. They came to enjoy a promised
land, but they have merely produced a network of devastation. The
soil that supported a rich rain forest is not well suited to corn
and other crops, and most of the newcomers can eke out only an
impoverished, disease-ridden existence. In the process, they are
destroying an ecosystem and the millions of species of plants and
animals that live in it. An estimated 20% of Rondonia's forest is
gone, and at present rates of destruction it will be totally
wiped out within 25 years.

     Around the globe, on land and in the sea, the story is much
the same. Spurred by poverty, population growth, ill-advised
policies and simple greed, humanity is at war with the plants and
animals that share its planet. Peter Raven, director of the
Missouri Botanical Garden, predicts that during the next three
decades man will drive an average of 100 species to extinction
every day. Extinction is part of evolution, but the present rate
is at least 1,000 times the pace that has prevailed since
prehistory.

     Even the mass extinctions 65 million years ago that killed
off the dinosaurs and countless other species did not
significantly affect flowering plants, according to Harvard
biologist E.O. Wilson. But these plant species are disappearing
now, and people, not comets or volcanoes, are the angels of
destruction. Moreover, the earth is suffering the decline of
entire ecosystems -- the nurseries of new life-forms. For that
reason, Wilson deems this crisis the "death of birth." British
ecologist Norman Myers has called it the "greatest single setback
to life's abundance and diversity since the first flickerings of
life almost 4 billion years ago."

     Nearly every habitat is at risk. Forests in the northern
hemisphere have fallen to lumbering, development and acid rain.
Marine ecosystems around the world are threatened by pollution,
overfishing and coastal development. It is in the tropics,
though, that the battle to preserve what scientists call
biodiversity will be won or lost. Tropical forests cover only 7%
of the earth's surface, but they house between 50% and 80% of the
planet's species.

     But should people in developed countries care about the
survival of tropical species never seen outside a rain forest?
Yes, they should. Variety is the spice of life, goes the saying.
Biologists would go further and argue that variety is the very
stuff of life. Life needs diversity because of the
interdependencies that link flora and fauna, and because
variation within species allows them to adapt to environmental
challenges. But even as the world's human population explodes,
other life is ebbing from the planet. Humanity is making a risky
wager -- that it does not need the great variety of earth's
species to survive.

     Despite the alarm with which scientists view this trend,
biodiversity has just surfaced on the world's political agenda.
The troubles of high-profile animals such as the tiger and rhino
grab public attention, while most people hardly see the point of
worrying about insects or plants. But extinction is the one
environmental calamity that is irreversible. As these lowly
species disappear unnoticed, they take with them hard-won lessons
of survival encoded in their genes over millions of years.

     Only 1.7 million of the estimated 5 million to 30 million
different life-forms on earth have been cataloged. Since hundreds
of thousands of species may be extinct by the year 2000, the
world has neither the scientists nor the time to identify the yet
uncounted. "It's as though the nations of the world decided to
burn their libraries without bothering to see what is in them,"
said University of Pennsylvania biologist Daniel Janzen at the
TIME conference. Harvard's Wilson called this profligacy the
"folly" that future generations are least likely to forgive.

     Humanity already benefits greatly from the genetic heritage
of little-known species. Some 25% of the pharmaceuticals in use
in the U.S. today contain ingredients originally derived from
wild plants. Hidden anonymously in clumps of vegetation about to
be bulldozed or burned might be plants with cures for still
unconquered diseases. "I know of three plants with the potential
to treat AIDS," said Janzen. "One grows in an Australian rain
forest, one in Panama and one in Costa Rica."

     Nature's diversity offers many opportunities for
agriculture, especially now that genetic mapping and engineering
have given biotechnology firms the potential power to improve
crops by transferring genes from wild strains. According to
Wilson, biotechnology can transform a plant into a "loose-leaf
notebook" from which scientists can select a particular page.
Among the possible results: drought- and frost-resistant crops,
and natural fertilizers and pesticides.

     Diversity is the raw material of earth's wealth, but
nature's true creativity lies in the relationships that link
various creatures. The coral in a reef or the orchid in a rain
forest is part of an ecosystem, a fragile, often delicately
balanced conglomeration of supports, checks and balances that
integrate life-forms into functioning communities. Given the
complex workings of an ecosystem, it is never clear which
species, if any, are expendable.

     In the tropics the crucial question is how large a forest
must be to sustain itself. If a park or protected area is too
small to support some of its animal and plant life, the ecosystem
will decline even with protection. As yet, no one knows the
minimum critical size of a rain forest, but in 1979 Thomas
Lovejoy, now at the Smithsonian Institution, set up a 20-year
experiment with the cooperation of the Brazilian government to
determine just that for the Amazon region. Among the findings:
the smaller the forest, the faster the decline of insects, birds
and mammals.

     Biologists have identified numerous "hot spots" where
ecosystems are under attack and large numbers of unique species
face an immediate threat of elimination. Among the troubled
areas: Madagascar, where more than 90% of the original vegetation
has disappeared; the monsoon forests of the Himalayan foothills
that are being denuded by villagers in search of firewood,
building materials and arable land; New Caledonia, 83% of whose
plants occur nowhere else; the eastern slope of the Andes, as
well as forests in East Africa, peninsular Malaysia, northeast
Australia and along the Atlantic coast of Brazil.

     Since less than 5% of the world's tropical forests receive
any protection, the stage is set for mass extinctions. Many
plants and animals are doomed, no matter what measures are taken.
Some researchers estimate that at least 12% of the bird species
in the Amazon basin, as well as 15% of the plants in Central and
South America, can be counted among what Janzen calls the "living
dead." Many tropical mammals and reptiles face only bleak
survival under what amounts to house arrest in game parks and
zoos.

     Why are so many species and environments threatened? The
main reason is that throughout the tropics, developing nations
are struggling to feed their peoples and raise cash to make
payments on international debts. Many countries are chopping down
their forests for the sake of timber exports. In Central America
forests are giving way to cattle ranches, which supply beef to
American fast-food chains. The pressures on forests have led
Janzen, who has spent 26 years struggling to save Costa Rica's
woodlands, to conclude that "everything outside parks will be
gone, and everything inside the parks is threatened."

     Efforts to stop the destruction run into moral as well as
practical obstacles. How can developed nations demand onerous
debt payments and ask the debtors to preserve their forests? How
can countries worry about biodiversity when their people are
concerned with feeding themselves?

     To begin with, the rich nations must reduce the debt burden
of the poor. But just as important is a concerted campaign to
convince the people of developing countries that it is in their
own long-term interest to preserve their environments. Wiping out
forests may make developing nations momentarily richer, but it is
bound to produce a poorer future.

     Experience has shown the Third World that destruction of
forests can have disastrous consequences. Forests are vital
watersheds that absorb excess moisture and anchor topsoil.
Deforestation contributed to the recent droughts in Africa and
the devastating mud slides in Rio de Janeiro last year. In Costa
Rica topsoil eroded from bald hills has greatly shortened the
life of an expensive hydroelectric dam. Alvaro Umana, Costa
Rica's Minister of Industry, Energy and Mines, estimated that the
surrounding watershed might have been protected 20 years ago for
a cost of $5 million. Now the government must reforest the
watershed at ten times that price.

     Halting the assault on biodiversity will not be easy, but
there are many actions that governments can take. First, they
should develop and support local scientific institutions that
train professionals in conservation techniques. More money should
flow into educational programs that alert people to the
irreversible consequences of a loss of genetic diversity. An
international, environmental version of the Peace Corps could
spread conservation expertise to the Third World.

     Throughout the developing nations there are encouraging
stirrings of local environmental activity. In Malaysia
blowgun-armed Penan tribesmen have joined forces with
environmentalists in an effort to stop rampant logging. And in
Brazil, which has some 500 conservation organizations,
environmentalist Jose Pedro de Oliveira Costa organized a
coalition of legislators, conservationists, industrialists and
media barons to stir public support to preserve Brazil's
remaining Atlantic forests. ``The threats to the forests remain,"
said Costa, "but now at least there is a network in place to
scream when a threat arises."

     But environmental protection must make economic sense, and
development must go hand in hand with preservation. Development
should be sustainable, meaning that it should use up resources no
faster than they can be regenerated by nature. Governments and
private firms should organize projects to show that forests can
be used without being obliterated. If trees are cut selectively,
forests can yield profits and survive to produce more money in
the future. Another way to harvest cash from forests and other
habitats is to set up tours and safaris to attract animal lovers
and photography buffs. Long a moneymaker in Africa and the
Galapagos Islands, this "ecotourism" is spreading to such places
as Costa Rica.

     For sustainable development to work, observed Paulo
Nogueira-Neto, environmental adviser to the Brazilian Ministry of
Culture, governments will have to devise comprehensive national
zoning plans so that their countries can achieve the right mix of
preservation and economic growth. Local residents can be
encouraged to earn a livelihood in the more robust areas, while
habitats that are fragile can be protected. Sustainable
development can proceed, noted Kenneth Piddington, director of
the environmental department of the World Bank, "right up to a
park's boundary."

     Financial as well as political leverage can be used in the
cause of preservation. Governments should force local lending
institutions to review the environmental consequences of proposed
loans. No bank, for example, should be allowed to lend a company
money to set up a cattle ranch if the operation would destroy too
large a section of an endangered forest.

     Finally, the unfortunate reality is that many habitats are
not going to be saved. To prevent the genetic legacy of those
areas from being extinguished, as many species as possible should
be preserved in zoos, botanical gardens and other "gene banks."
There, scientists can study a small percentage of threatened
organisms and have the options of later returning them to the
wild or transplanting some of their genes into other species.

     But the best place to preserve the earth's biodiversity is
in the ecosystems that gave rise to it. Man must abandon the
belief that the natural order is mere stuff to be managed and
domesticated, and accept that humans, like other creatures,
depend on a web of life that must be disturbed as little as
possible.