David Bellamy might thrash his arms about and splutter, but he is not prone to exaggeration. The television naturalist recalls that when filming in Malaya 10 years ago he flew over vast areas of rain forest. "Flying over the same area recently, you could see there was almost nothing left. Worse, the government there has started locking up conservationists without trial. People have heard about the destruction of the Amazonian forests. What they perhaps don't realize is that it's a gigantic problem throughout the whole of the southern hemisphere."
On New Year's Eve the World Wildlife Fund will issue a report warning that a thousand or more animal species will not be with us to see in the next new year. Ironically, many of these will probably not even be listed as endangered. They will be creatures not yet known to science - or species discovered only as they are about to become extinct.
The uncertainty arises from the fairly recent realization that the world's animal population has been vastly underestimated. Mark Collins, of the Conservation Monitoring Centre, Cambridge, a unit of the International Union for Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources, explains: "The number of plants and animals described by scientists is around 1.4 million. Of these, birds account for only 9,300, while mammals amount to a mere 4,000. There are some 250,000 flowering plants, and most of the remainder of the total - or some 75 per cent - are invertebrates."
Estimates of the number of undiscovered species are now in the region of an astonishing 30 million or more. Most are invertebrates, the class of animals without backbones ranging from insects to snails and leeches. Surveys in the largely unexplored tropical rain forests suggest that these "missing millions' are teeming in the jungle canopy and floor. "You squirt a cloud of pesticide upwards," says Collins, "and this mass of insects falls into your collecting sheet, including many new ones."
To the ignorant, insects might appear unimportant. But as one defender of Darwin declared: "If the Deity created the world in one week. He must have been inordinately fond of the coleoptera."
Yet beetles, of which there are hundreds of thousands of different species, and other examples of the humblest fauna and flora have their role in the scheme of things - even from a self-concerned perspective.
For instance, properties found in obscure plants and animals have been found to be important to medical research. The Madagascar rosy periwinkle has been a source of vincriblastine, effective in the treatment of leukaemia and Hodgkin's disease. The chemical didemnin, isolated from a Caribbean squid, is being tested for clinical applications. An American estimates is that 25 per cent of the country's drug prescriptions originate from plants.
Wild plants are also now widely recognized as an important means of improving food crops through cross-breeding. Crops of rice, in particular, have been increased by the introduction of genetic material from wild strains.
The most insignificant-seeming insects can be of economic importance. The African oil palm introduced into south-east Asia as a source of palm oil for the region was, until recently, hand pollinated. Research in the Cameroons identified a tiny weevil as the natural pollinating agent which, since being sent east has produced such an increase in fertility that there is now a palm oil glut.
Sir David Attenborough comments: "While the conservation of the panda or mountain gorilla is, of course, important, the most important thing is conservation of whole eco-systems." As the richest eco-system on earth, covering only 7 per cent of the surface but containing more than half its known species, tropical rain forests are the main subject of anxiety. The ecological principles which explain conservationists' alarm apply to other habitats as well. In simplified terms, the rule is the larger the area, the greater the number of species living there. The converse is that as any habitat is reduced in size, the tally of species well decline.
It is this well-attested equation that explains conservationists' claims that 1988 will see the extinction of a thousand species, though many of them will die unrecorded. In each slice of rain forest cut down, it is beyond reasonable doubt that a number of species unique to that site will be lost. So, even if the examples pictured on this page survive to 1989, it will be only partial cause for satisfaction.
Bellamy points to a dangerous cycle of destruction. "In South America and elsewhere they are building stupid dam and hydro-electric schemes - which the World Bank is still financing, despite its professed attention to environmental factors. Governments than have to encourage the clearance of forest to make way for cash crops in order to pay back the debt incurred in building the dams." Wealthy countries are equally guilty of insufficient concern. Bellamy says. Satellite pictures of Queensland, Australia, reveal a massive shrinkage of the habitat.
Efforts to halt such devastation include a scheme organized by the Conservation Foundation showing the arrival of an anonymous cheque for รบ100,000. Young Scientists for Tropical Rain Forests arrange for fledging scientists to see for themselves what is happening in these areas - and to the people in them. Nottingham University has established a department of ethno-science, which Bellamy welcomes. Bellamy's final warning is for the rest of the world: "The destruction of rain forest is now beginning to affect not only local but global climates."
