Thinking Beyond Science

High and underexplored biodiversity is not something that is peculiar to tropical rainforests. In fact, we don’t need to look far to see equally striking examples, starting in our own bodies. On our skin and hair and in our cavities and gut, healthy individuals are home to over ten thousand species of microbes, a large proportion of them still undescribed scientifically – bacteria, archaea, fungi and viruses. Their cells outnumber ours several times over.

In our gut alone, our co-inhabiting bacteria host over two million different genes, which is about 100 times more than contained in our own DNA. This human ecosystem, our microbiome, provides numerous but scarcely known functions, strongly influencing our physical and mental health, our immune, endocrine and nervous systems, and leading to – or preventing – a wide array of illnesses, from inflammatory bowel disease to cancer and depressive disorders. We inherit a large proportion of our mother’s microbiome during or shortly after birth, and within our first year of life some 1,000 species colonize our gastrointestinal tract, leaving a lifelong microbiome signature.

The microbiome varies widely among individuals and age, often increasing in diversity as we get older. There are large differences among individuals and regions, with strong links to our diet. Medical treatments, in particular the ingestion of antibiotics, can largely disrupt the system, but the microbiome eventually returns to a state of equi-librium, even though its species composition may change.

Throughout our exploration of life on Earth, we have not been satisfied with observing, learning and carefully profiting from the species around us. Instead, we have left profound and often irreversible destruction. If our planet’s entire 4.5-billion-year history could be condensed into one day, modern humans would have made their arrival six seconds before midnight. Yet, these few seconds – which translate into some 300,000 years of Homo sapiens – have seen the world transformed in ways so radical that it is almost impossible to grasp. In the cradle of humankind in eastern Africa, we set fire to vast swathes of savannah to help us spot and chase game, a trick we later took with us into Europe, Asia, Australia and North America. In South America, thousands of years before the first Europeans set foot on the continent, people in the Amazonian rainforest had been hunting monkeys and rodents, moving around their favourite plants – cacao, manioc, Brazil nuts – and clearing large chunks of what has long been thought of as one of the last untouched havens of nature.

The traditional use of natural resources by indigenous communities around the world has been sustainable in many ways, but the same cannot be said about the changes that came much later. It wasn’t until the 1950s – 1.3 milliseconds before midnight on our world clock – that the gradual transformation of the planet turned into something completely different: a massive, ubiquitous, and disastrous transformation of nature. Even though the drivers of change had existed for a long time before, for most regions their intensity underwent a drastic acceleration. In these few decades, we’ve lost a quarter of all tropical rainforests, pumped 1.4 trillion tons of the planet-warming gas CO, into the atmosphere, and added over 5 billion people to the planet.

As a consequence, species are now probably disappearing faster than any time in human history*. On every island, every continent, every coral reef, a significant proportion of the world’s species are becoming increasingly rare, until they will one day disappear, never to return. Several hundreds of species of mammals, birds, plants and frogs that were still alive in the 1500s have been confirmed extinct, while the true number is certainly many times more. Today, scientists estimate that about a fifth of all species may face extinction in the coming decades. If this happens, it could be classed as a new wave of ‘mass extinction’ – a period when species extinctions are exceedingly larger than the normal background rate. This planet has only had five generally agreed mass extinction events in its long history – the last one 66 million years ago and caused by the impact of a 12-kilometre-wide asteroid that hit Earth off the coast of Yucatán in Mexico. Today, humans are becoming the equivalent of that asteroid.

It is no exaggeration to assert that the escalating degradation of nature and associated loss of biodiversity pose an existential threat to our own future. As the species around us disappear, we lose invaluable sources of food, medicine, fibre, clothing and many other properties that we have barely begun to explore, but which could provide solutions for the next pandemic or for ending hunger. As deforestation continues in Amazonia, the whole ecosystem now risks passing a tipping point, after which large regions may irreversibly convert into savannahs – greatly reducing regional rainfall and water supplies for tens of millions of people and releasing vast amounts of greenhouse gases that drive global climate change.

Despite the huge challenges facing biodiversity today, there is still time and there are concrete ways to reverse the negative trends of global extinction and local losses.

But action requires commitment, and commitment is best brought about by an emotional connection – a deep sense of meaning and purpose that we can only gain from our personal experiences. I am sure you will have your own fond memories in nature. I don’t think that any person could remain emotionally unaffected while standing in front of a monkey carrying her baby on her back as she grabs and eats a banana you give to her; or at an island cliff packed with noisy and restless seabirds; or in a desert in full blossom after the first rain in years. No matter how many nature documentaries we may have seen from our sofa, no one can be really prepared for the things that happen in reality, when we are not merely observers but truly part of it. Instinctively, we are all trained ‘biologists’ and ‘life-learners’. I believe that keeping this inbuilt condition alive, through our lives and that of our descendants, is the most critical factor in building a world where humankind and nature can co-exist and thrive.

Source : The Hidden Universe: Adventures in Biodiversity by Alexandre Antonelli

Goodreads : https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/56669607-the-hidden-universe

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