When I arrived on the planet, there were only two billion. Wildlife was more abundant, we were less so; now the situation is reversed.
Photosynthetic organisms in the sea yield most of the oxygen in the atmosphere, take up and store vast amounts of carbon dioxide, shape planetary chemistry, and hold the planet steady.
By the end of the 20th century, up to 90 percent of the sharks, tuna, swordfish, marlins, groupers, turtles, whales, and many other large creatures that prospered in the Gulf for millions of years had been depleted by overfishing.
We are all together in this, we are all together in this single living ecosystem called planet earth.
I actually love diving at night; you see a lot of fish then that you don’t see in the daytime.
I’m haunted by the thought of what Ray Anderson calls ‘tomorrow’s child,’ asking why we didn’t do something on our watch to save sharks and bluefin tuna and squids and coral reefs and the living ocean while there still was time. Well, now is that time.
The observations that have developed over the years have given us perspective about where we fit in. We are newcomers, really recent arrivals on a planet that is four and a half billion years old.
Evolution is not something to be feared. It’s to be celebrated, embraced, and understood.
If Darwin could get into a submarine and see what I’ve seen, thousand of feet beneath the ocean, I am just confident that he would be inspired to sit down and start writing all over again.
The diversity of life on Earth, generally, is astonishing. But despite those large numbers, it’s also important to recognize that every species, one way or another, is vulnerable to extinction. And in our time on Earth our impact on the diversity of life has been profound.
It has taken these many hundreds of millions of years to fine-tune the Earth to a point where it is suitable for the likes of us.
Most of life on Earth has a deep past, much deeper than ours. And we have benefited from the distillation of all preceding history, call it evolutionary history if you will.
The single non-negotiable thing life requires is water.
So, should we race to see how quickly we can consume the last tuna, swordfish, and grouper? Or race to see what can be done to protect what remains? For now, there is still a choice.
Knowing is the key to caring, and with caring there is hope that people will be motivated to take positive actions. They might not care even if they know, but they can’t care if they are unaware.
Our near and distant predecessors might be forgiven for exterminating the last woolly mammoth, the ultimate dodo, the final sea cow, and the last living monk seal for lack of understanding the consequences of their actions. But who will forgive us if we fail to learn from past and present experiences, to forge new values, new relationships, a new level of respect for the natural systems that keep us alive?
Currently, up to 20 percent of human greenhouse gas emissions are being caused by deforestation in tropical Brazil and Indonesia, making those countries two of the highest carbon emitters in the world. It is estimated that halting forest destruction would save the same amount of carbon over the next century as stopping all fossil-fuel emissions for ten years.
Thanks to generations of curious, daring, intrepid explorers of the past, we may know enough, soon enough, to chart safe passage for ourselves far into the future.
The bottom line answer to the question about why biodiversity matters is fairly simple: The rest of the living world can get along without us, but we can’t get along without them.
Even smaller pieces are engulfed by inch-long krill; ant-size copepods; and filter-feeding salps, clams, oysters, and mussels. Large plankton feeders such as whale sharks and manta rays swallow gallons of water at a time, plastic and all. Whether at the large, medium, small, or ultra-small scale, ingested plastic lumps, clumps, pellets, or microscopic mites kill by physically obstructing, choking, clogging, or otherwise stopping up the passage of food.
It has taken about four billion years for living systems, mostly in the sea, to transform the lifeless ingredients of early Earth into the Eden that makes our lives possible, and less than a century for us to destabilize those rhythms.