The crisis: put down the pruning shears

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Part of applying to graduate school is figuring out who I want to work with and what questions I want to try to answer.  To do this, I’m reading a lot of papers.  I’d hate for all this paper reading to keep me from blogging, so I’ve decided to share some of the more interesting papers I come across.

ResearchBlogging.org

The best paper I’ve read this week is almost 10 years old, but is still quite relevant, especially for the International Year of Biodiversity.  Michael Novacek and Elsa Cleland summarize the current threats to biodiversity and detail our options for trying to preserve biodiversity.  I don’t think much of what they cover will be surprising to any of you.  However, seeing all of the threats outlined with connections drawn between them alongside our (very few and very daunting) options for saving biodiversity clarified the situation for me.  Hopefully it’ll do the same for you.

I’ll be doing several posts over the next week or so addressing the three main parts of the paper: How bad is the biodiversity crisis? What’s causing it? and What can we do?

It’s a well written and fairly accessible paper and is publicly available, too, if you’d like to read it yourself.  The main benefit to reading my summary of it is that I’ll be including pictures.

The Biodiversity Crisis: How Bad Is It and Why Do We Care?

The biodiversity crisis is very, very bad.  Species are going extinct much more quickly today than they did a long time ago and the extinction rate is only expected to increase if we keep on with business as usual.   Up to 40,000 species go extinct in the rainforest alone every year.  A quarter of all of mammal and flowering plant species are currently at risk of extinction along with more than a tenth of all birds and a third of amphibians. Many of the large carnivores we so admire and who play absolutely critical roles in their/our ecosystems are beyond hope.

extinction rates

Past, recent, and future extinction rates

You may not really care about extinct begonias, but living through a mass extinction event (think The Land Before Time) isn’t pleasant for anyone, except perhaps the fungi and scavengers.  Of course, you’ve heard all this before.  Right now you’re expecting me to go off about how we rely on biodiversity for clean water, clean air, and other ecosystem services.  If you’ve read this blog long enough, you’re likely wondering how long it’s going to take me to pull out that Jared Diamond quote about the airplane.  Not this time!

This paper makes a point I’d never considered:  When we cause extinctions, we don’t just change the earth now, we change it forever.  The “recovered” earth won’t be an earth we recognize.

Every time a species goes extinct, it’s like chopping a twig off of the tree of life.  At normal extinction rates, just a few twigs are lost every year, but extinction rates now aren’t anywhere normal.  The evolutionary future of a world with a tree of life like this:

A good tree of life

is very, very different from a world with a tree of life like this:

The future tree of life

Losing any species could have a very dramatic effect on the future of life on Earth.  Consider this phylogenetic tree:

In a phylogenetic tree, the nodes (branching points) represent the most recent common ancestor.  A long time ago, the most recent common ancestor of chickens and people wasn’t a branching point yet – it was just a leaf on the tree.  Imagine if that ancestor was wiped out by dinosaur farming (or maybe an asteroid).  What would our world look like now?  Would there be people, or even mammals? What about birds?  Could they (we) have evolved from a closely related species of that ancestor?

This brings up a second point related to biodiversity conservation: We have to prioritize species for conservation.  If the most recent common ancestor of chickens and humans had gone extinct but a closely related species survived, there’s a chance that evolution would have proceeded along similar lines – maybe we would have still gotten birds and mammals.  If all of the closely related species had gone extinct, too, evolutionary history would for sure be VERY different.

So in order to limit how much we change the evolutionary future of the earth, we need to save as much taxonomic variety as we can.  That is, we have to focus on keeping the tree branches intact – not the little twigs and leaves at the end.

Perhaps if we’d acted sooner we wouldn’t be in a position of having to choose to save 1 species from a small branch over potentially hundreds from a large one.

Novacek, M. (2001). The current biodiversity extinction event: Scenarios for mitigation and recovery Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 98 (10), 5466-5470 DOI: 10.1073/pnas.091093698

SB1070

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Arizona’s anti-immigrant law ignores the contributions of legal and illegal immigrants to our communities, violates people’s rights, and disregards the role of our foreign and drug policy in why people immigrate to the US.

Wouldn’t you leave, regardless of legality, if your home were so dangerous that children were trained to avoid gunfire in school? And it isn’t as simple as being illegal or legal – there’s a lot of grey area and ethical issues to consider. What would you do if your family were in this situation:

Before the law, it was no big deal that her husband was an illegal immigrant. There were no hiccups. For them to get married and for him to get his tax identification number was no problem.

“I guess that’s why I didn’t think much about it,” she said.

But now his visa process has been canceled and the family cannot afford the appeals process.

Talking with her husband about the future is hard, she added.

“He doesn’t want any harm to come to us just because of his status,” Esperanza said.

Under the new law, it is even possible for her to be arrested for harboring and transporting an illegal immigrant.

“Just by living with my husband, I am now a criminal,” she said.

We have better choices than SB1070.

Music for Writing

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I’ve been doing a lot of writing lately, mostly for work and the graduate school application process, and I’ve got a lot to do yet.  The music I choose while writing is essential for me to be productive.  Over the next few weeks (months?) I’ll share the music associated with my best writing sessions.  And please tell me what your best writing music is!

listenlisten’s Hymns From Rhodesia

On correct punctuation

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From Muriel Barbery’s The Elegance of the Hedgehog:

I open the envelope and read this little note written on a business card whose surface is so glossy that the ink, to the dismay of the defeated blotter, has bled slightly underneath each letter.

Madame Michel,

Would you be so kind as, to sign for the packages from the dry cleaner’s this afternoon?

I’ll pick them up at your loge this evening.

Scribbled signature

I collapse in shock on the nearest chair.  I even begin to wonder if I am not going mad.  Does this have the same effect on you, when this sort of thing happens?

Let me explain:

The cat is sleeping.

You’ve just read a harmless little sentence, and it has not caused you any pain or sudden fits of suffering, has it? Fair enough.

Now read again:

The cat, is sleeping.

Let me repeat it, so that there is no cause for ambiguity:

The cat comma is sleeping.

The cat, is sleeping.

Would you be so kind as, to sign for.

On the one hand we have an example of a prodigious use of the comma that takes great liberties with language, as said commas have been inserted quite unnecessarily, but to great effect:

I have been much blamed, both for war, and for peace . . .

And on the other hand, we have this dribbling scribbling on vellum, courtesy of Sabine Pallières, this comma slicing the sentence in half with all the trenchancy of a knife blade:

Would you be so kind as, to sign for the packages from the dry cleaner’s?