Biodiversity conference links Bay and global habitat issues
Karey Harris is the toxics subcommittee staffer with the Chesapeake Research Consortium at the Chesapeake Bay Program office.
Imagine seeing a video of a frog in the Amazon that was
believed to be extinct until she was caught on this tape. You see her, abdomen full of eggs, struggle
to get to water to lay her eggs. What a
find! How exciting for that scientist behind the camera! Then you are told that she was ill, died soon
after the video was taken, and no other frogs of her species have been found
since. She is currently in a jar in the
Smithsonian. Just an instant after you
expect to hear a success story, you realize that you have just watched a
species go extinct from the planet. That
happened to me last week, and this little frog tugged at my heart like no amphibian
before.
I had the pleasure of attending the 9th National
Conference on Science, Policy, and the Environment held by the National Council for Science and the Environment
(NCSE) at the Reagan Building in Washington,
D.C. on December 8-10. This year’s conference topic
was “Biodiversity in a Rapidly Changing World,” during which, among other
activities, I watched the frog go extinct.
So why tell the sad story?
As species go extinct worldwide, we are losing biodiversity as
well. Biodiversity
is lengthily defined as “the variability among living organisms from all
sources … and the ecological complexes of which they are a part; this includes
diversity within species, between species, and of ecosystems.” Without all the
words, a place that has good biodiversity has many different species all living
in a small area. A coral reef is probably
the most vivid example, with its multitudes of coral, anemones, and fish. An environment with very little biodiversity
may be as bleak as a cornfield, all dominated by the same species with a few
others thrown in. Biodiversity is often
used as a measure of ecosystem health.
As biodiversity decreases, the ecosystem’s health and stability
decreases as well.
(Check out an
example of good biodiversity from MarineBio, versus an
example of bad biodiversity from Holistic Management.)
The three-day conference focused on ways to preserve
biodiversity worldwide. Topics covered
policy and legislation, scientific research gaps, and communication to the
public. Speakers who made their case for
making changes and saving biodiversity included the director of the
Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History and a Pulitzer Prize-winning
author! Each day after the speakers, various
breakout sessions were offered to give each participant an individual
experience. I could write pages on what
I learned in those discussions, and I have a stack of literature on my desk
that I still need to read!
In addition to new things, I heard several familiar
themes: less pollution, more preserved land, better land use, teach the public
how to be more environmentally responsible, and so on. Some of these are ideas we
focus on here at the Bay Program. Since
this conference had a global focus, we must not be so far off base in our ideas
of how to save our Bay. I hope that one
day the world, and the Bay, will resemble the thriving systems they once were,
in part because this conference had something good to say.