industry’s influence over research grows, so does the potential for bias. Therefore they said that “it is essential follow them from the beginning and silently, examining each step and deal”.
You should remember that any extreme is that; an extreme is that makes you lose the right criterion. But you are who must achieve this criterion, and you have many tools: common sense, reasoning, logic, study; and go slowly, never fast.
17. These diffuse words: biodiversity and climate change
Currently, you will be forced to be hearing up and learn about all this things, always in the words climate change and biodiversity: you are already completely rounded by this stuff, actually you are filled. And the worse, people usually do not know and are not able to know exactly what to believe. This is simple.
Despite this, sometimes Nature is shocking us again, with unforeseen events that open your mouth… and your mind. We have reasons to care of all this are there waiting some mankind smart.
Many professionals, each in a task, working altogether! That is biodiversity
A simplified idea of the word biodiversity could offer the image of a branched tree of species, colorful and beautiful, some of them rare, but like those in zoos. It does not correspond with reality; it does not mean anything for people in the daily life. There are one imaginary tree of species on the world, where the trunk, the primary and secondary branches, the medium and little branches, relate those leaves that can be seen at the end of every branch, and some leaves which are not at the end but the middle path. The number of branches is not known very well, but yes roughly; the number of leaves, species that live in the world, let alone.
What is quite very well known is that every species as "group" means that, in some point in time and place, and also in some point in these imaginary branches along the structure of this tree of life, between species, has taken place a change, a new adaptation between the specie concerned and ... perhaps other species, probably the environment, but more likely the whole, the sum of other species that surround it and the environment. And this change has its translation in a different use, an expected genetic change, a new communication between organism and the surrounding life or environ. New venom, a new receptor, an improved sense, and a released ability to digest other food… all this is important. All are keys to understand relationships between organisms, thereby those, which also are relations, diseases.
Biodiversity also means a strong and large chain of beings interrelated which allows create and maintain all the goods that are there, where you look. And of course, for me as for many others, the best of all, the marvelous burst of life. Why we need keep up the biodiversity? Because represents a complex mass of conjoined beings that is efficient, overlapping each other sites, after falling back moves forward, goes everywhere, is able to live for hundreds of thousands of ways that those we have managed. Hopefully, biology, medicine, chemistry or genetics follow the path that has followed other times the physics: learn and let go by the behavior of nature, and found electricity, magnetism or telephone.
Currently, the most accurate knowledge that we can have of biodiversity is… where it is? It is not in the field. That we call biodiversity (or accurate knowledge of real existing biodiversity) is at the shelves, boxes, books, papers, draws, pictures, notes, herbariums, botanical gardens and museums. Shockingly, all these sources could become the only stores of life and biodiversity, if we end up destroying everything that lives outdoors. Out of doors, we have still more than what we never will have: there always come times when someone must stop crack the toy, ever before later when there is no solution.
What really threatens biodiversity? An easy answer again: is the mankind. Neither the volcanoes, not the asteroids, not the tsunamis, not the Sun, nobody barring the mankind is. The biodiversity as model of life diversity has changed strongly under certain periods and conditions, as we learned (we know some periods of big extinctions). But within the scale of geological time, our life is an infinitesimal span, so short as is very, very unlikely that any natural catastrophe could deplete the biodiversity existing: on the contrary, is our behavior what allows produce a strong change, immediately, and we already have a large list of proofs.
The concept of biodiversity must be understood according to human time: we are a different agent of pressure, a quick agent: we cannot be worried for the possible biodiversity existing 300,000 years before or ahead; we must be worried by our biodiversity, our current biodiversity, in our future of 100 years at least, because we are able to deplete this in only 100 years.
All these natural threats are like a lonely word within the definition of what is Nature, which has survived to all of them along millions years. The present threats are other kind of menaces, our menaces. Europe already is a clear sample, despite its efforts to be a green region: what are there? There are some closed parks with some plants and some herds of deer? There are still a few lakes with geese and cranes? We are used to do not see anything, from far, few times, ever on TV. Surely, the next decades we will be aware that the most of the landscapes in developed countries will have nothing to do with real ecosystems, and almost absolutely all have been lost forever.
A spot on mind for everyone has been forever Africa. A site of jungles, savannas, forests, big carnivorous and more "specialties" on which to enjoy. This is no more than a consumerist viewpoint, the bigger extent of our sight that we seem to have. Underneath goes other vision: a site for do business without permission, pay a royalty to local chief, reach goods at low price, make business with no one restrictions, and make profitable business that in other places already cannot be profitable, or are not admissible for their aggressiveness or dirty - for the softer case that can be mentioned. At least, some little organizations have tried maintaining some micro-worlds of life, isolated, and some natural parks hardly try to balance tourism with conservation. Other places are not suffering the same fate: Brazil, Borneo, Indonesia, and the Central America continue to experience losses year after year, and some sites become unrecognizable. When do we go understand the obvious?
Climate Change and other matters.
A problem to change the attitude facing words as “climate change” is this, things are much and more complex than our own garden and fruit trees, but as ever, our ordinary sight does not notice easily.
Australia has suffered intensively the last year’s strong fires and droughts… and dry, and salinization, and loss of plants and animals, and the arrival of invasive species. Then, I understood perfectly the words of a scientist who worked in an Antarctic station, Peter Cosier (he belongs to the Australian Wentworth Group of Concerned Scientists): he says, referring to the South Georgia Islands, “… it carries the romantic history of the explorers like Ernest Shackleton, and it is a place of indescribable beauty. But is also a place of great tragedy where millions upon millions of penguins, seals and whales were slaughtered for their oil. Do we need whales, fur seals and penguins for our civilization to survive? Of course not… After all, only four species of plants -wheat, corn, rice and potato- provide over half of plant based calories in the human diet, and around a dozen animal species provide 90 per cent of the animal protein. Europe wiped out most of its biodiversity centuries ago…” He is probably tired of seeing what is going alone. And his country also is tired, and his mates and citizens.
For the common people who sits on a couch to listen to or watch (because reading almost already does not) what in good faith believes that is being reported, the idea that surreptitiously holds in his mind is: does every time "more warmth", so the polar ice "melts", goes to sea, the sea level "rises" the polar lands (where any) may get "in sight" therefore will not "so cold" and you can "work" the land and its 'resources', and other sites will have "better climate", and also "likely" that there will be some clever idea, and "all we will draw match" of it all. But things can be explained in other more suited way.
With what we are playing really.
Energy circulates continuously through all physical med
ia that finds, as are on a planetary scale the air, the land, the biomass, and the water, and each of them have no choice but to move at the speed that each of these compartments provides or allows, and stays the time that physically is possible.
These compartments have different capacity to house the energy which circulates: well, the air transports the energy faster between compartments, biomass energy is a state that "stays a while" (the weighted average lifespan for all beings), the earth transfers the energy more slowly into its superficial processes, and water (where the seas are the bigger part) makes it very, very slowly, being a sort of accumulator-battery. When we look to water, the ice is a minimal part of the whole, and nonetheless, we are seeing how the "bricks of ice" are decreasing (are melting taking up heat from its environ). What it means? If there is enough energy for melting a minimal part of water on the Earth (those ice cubes), there is much more energy flowing around, and sure into the whole liquid water, so this means that the water battery has more energy accumulated and flowing. Where go we see more intensively this energy flowing, on first sight? We will see it as more intensive cycles of
An Invisible Chain of our Time Page 38