An explanation of the ecological importance of biodiversity and its impact on several social outlets

Abstract: Biodiversity is a central theme of ecology; however, it also has broad-scale applications that impact seemingly unconnected socio-political topics. This report will introduce the typical applications of the concept of biodiversity. It will then further expound upon the basic concept to introduce its influences upon other factors such as economics and health. The current politics and public representation of biodiversity will also be discussed to give a holistic presentation of this topic. Overall, biodiversity is one current issue that has far-reaching, yet under-estimated, impact across many fields. Introduction Biodiversity is a term used to describe the diversity of important ecological entities that span multiple spatial scales, from genes to species to communities (Cain, Bowman, and Hacker 330). This definition may seem vague; however, it is an apt definition for biodiversity, which is a highly complex subject. By describe the diversity a lot of things are meant, from the number of species in an area to the variation within the species. The important ecological entities refers to the species and animals themselves acting within the given ecosystem. Including the mention of spatial scales within this definition is also highly important; a floating log in the middle of a pond can be an ecosystem, or the entire pond can be classified as an ecosystem. Thus, the spatial scale can be used to help define the area of study. However, this paper focuses not only on what biodiversity is, but also the impacts of biodiversity. Society is largely, if unobtrusively, affected by the environment, which is unequivocally tied to biodiversity. High biodiversity allows for a healthy ecosystem, which allows for a built in system of support if any one resource fails. Many people do not see intrinsic value within the natural world, so this paper will approach a few different reasons as to why biodiversity is important for everyone. The Basics of Biodiversity Lets introduce the idea of biodiversity through an example. A seemingly simple application of biodiversity would be the construction of a food chain: A worm is eaten by a sparrow, the sparrow is eaten by an eagle, the eagle falls prey to a wolf. This chain shows four inter-connected species. However, this can now be expanded upon. The wolf will eventually die, and when it does it could be eaten by a scavenger or decomposed by microorganisms. If you follow the process of the microorganisms, they decompose the carrion and that returns nutrients to the soil. The nutrients in the soil are further cycled by the worms in the soil, or there could be an immediate uptake of the nutrients by plants. Following the nutrients through the plants, a rabbit could then come and nibble on the leaves of a plant. That rabbit could fall prey to either the wolf or the eagle, or even some other prey. The originally straightforward, clean-cut example

is now a food-web, where any given species can be connected to two or three other species. However, there is more to biodiversity than the number of species in an area and how they are interconnected. Just like the example of taking the simple food chain to create a not-so-simple food-web, biodiversity can be superficially simple. Many species interactions are overlooked, and many other interactions occur without ever being observed. Many of these unobserved interactions occur at the gene level through the adaptation of the individual or evolution of the species. The processes of adaptation and evolution can eventually lead to speciation, or the creation of a new taxonomic species. As Swenson (2011) says, Speciation serves as the biodiversity pump while extinction serves as the agent that culls global to local levels of biodiversity. The extinction of a species is likely due to their inability to compete with a species better adapted to obtaining a particular resource that drives their extinction. These processes of adaptation, evolution, and even extinction increase the overall fitness, the ability to survive and reproduce, of a species. Thus each species is specifically adapted to fulfill a particular niche within its environment, allowing for the maximum benefit of all the species from the available resources. However, looking at just a species-diversity-centered approach will ignore some of the processes that produce biodiversity. According to Swenson (2011), the three pedestals of Biodiversity are species diversity, functional diversity, and Phylogenetic diversity. Species diversity refers to the number of distinct species within an ecosystem. Functional diversity refers to the differing roles that a species plays within its given environment. Functional diversity means that one species can fulfill two different niches, or functions, in a given environment. On the other hand, it also means that two totally different species could fulfill the same ecological role in two very similar environments. Phylogenetic diversity refers to the actual genetic similarity between two species that share a common ancestor. The best known example of this would be the study done by Charles Darwin and the finches of the Galapagos Islands. All of the finches shared a common ancestor, yet each island led to different adaptations that allowed the finches to better adapt to each individual island. If the main food source of the island was nuts with thick shells, the finches developed tall, thick beaks to better break the seeds. On islands where the main food source was berries, the beaks tended to be smaller. Biodiversity it a very scientific topic, thus understanding some of the scientific concepts behind it is important. However, promoting the biological and natural importance of biodiversity may not be very effective when trying to promote environmental justice and preservation. What are Ecosystem Services? One important perspective that is completely relevant to all people would be ecosystem service. Yet, most people have never even heard this term. So, what are ecosystem services?

In 2005, the Convention on Biological Diversity came up with the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment (MA), which defines ecosystem services as the benefits that people derive from ecosystems. Biodiversity is key to many types of ecosystem services such as the prevention of soil erosion, pest control, pollination, clean water, food, climate change mitigation, control of disease vectors, and local ecosystem resilience and stability. These ecosystem services can be supported singularly by human activities. One of the biggest examples would be timber forests, which is a completely human-dominated affair. However, when focusing on the production of this single ecosystem service, it can lead to people having an undervalued sense of the other ecosystem services, or even lead to their downfall (Schneiders, et al.). The complexity of ecosystems and the inability to assign specific dollar values to ecosystem services makes it difficult to quantify the value of a particular ecosystem service. However, the varied importances of these ecosystem services are becoming more important in talks of biodiversity, conservation, and even political circles. Ecologists, biologists, and even a few people and companies in the business and economic sectors are beginning to understand the importance of ecosystem services. This increased awareness will allow for the promotion of biodiversity within the business mind frame (Thompson, et al.).

Figure 1.1 Forest Biodiversity and cross-sectoral ecosystem services (Thompson et al.)
Beneficiary Climate change Agriculture Ecosystem Service Carbon Storage Pollination Important Taxa Trees, decomposers Insects, bats, birds Management Focus Forest area, forest degradation Heterogeneous landscape, plant diversity Heterogeneous landscape, corridor, plant diversity Heterogeneous landscape, corridors Erosion prevention Plant diversity, resilience Resilience Heterogenous landscape References Bunker et al. 2005 Tylianakis et al. 2005 Tylianakis et al. 2008 Wunderle 1997 Harris 2009 Thompson et al. 2009 Dukes 2001 Kumar 2010

Agriculture

Biological control

Forestry Forestry Forestry Forestry Life Quality

Seed Dispersal Soil formation and nutrients Productivity Reduction or prevention of invasive species Water retention

Parasitic microorganisms, invertebrates, birds, small mammals Birds, rodents Invertebrates, microorganisms Mostly trees, but also fully functioning ecosystems All species in the ecosystem Plants, soil microorganisms

The Socio-Political Importance We live currently in the Anthropocene, an age where humans have come to influence, if not dominate, all natural processes. Human impact upon biodiversity is clearly marked through the lines of domesticated animals, as seen in livestock, and plants, such as modern day corn. Those changes cannot be argued as negative or positive since that would be a non-objective argument. However, that is an absolute impact that humans have left upon the Earths biodiversity. In more recent years, typically argued since the industrial revolution, the human impact on the Earths biodiversity and natural systems has grown exponentially, and negatively. Extinction rates have increased to an amount that is said to surpass all previous mass extinctions. The natural balance of population growth versus resource availability has been stretched by human technologies changing the local environment to produce more of a limited set of goods and services causing many other ecosystem services [to] be overlooked and therefore undervalued (Thompson, et al). This kind of production has altered many of the Earths ecosystems, and yet the numbers of the human population now require that we continue this kind of production to support our population numbers, as seen from the evolution of the human lifestyle. The hunter-gatherer stage of humanity was a totally sustainable means of humankind living within the environment. It changed the landscape and animals of a region very minimally, and all changes could be undone after the hunter-gatherers moved to a different location. As humans switched from a hunter-gatherer lifestyle to a sedentary lifestyle, agriculture became necessary. Because of the increased need of labor for agriculture, having a larger population was actually beneficial, but then that created a further need for more food. Thus, the cycle for a larger population and more an ever-increasing demand for food was born. The Convention on biological diversity (CBD) is one of many events that has been held to try to bring the importance of biodiversity to the forefront of social and political concern. One way in which it does this is by recognizing biodiversity as the common heritage of humanity (Odile). The CBD was a French collaboration, however, the fact that one developed nation has thoroughly addressed the issue of biodiversity in their public policy is a step forward. Through addressing it in their public policy, French farmers, developers, and industrial companies have all stepped forward and began making business a sustainable endeavor. Many questions have arisen as to how much the government can enact and who really gets to make the final calls with a lot of these measures, however, having a foundation such as the CBD in place is what started these environmental initiatives in the first place. Odiles article goes so far as to even explain some of the qualities that the French government discussed to make environmental policy work on the national scale, including coordination of different scales, continued efforts to gain new knowledge, and biodiversity values and training (Odile).

In developing countries, the ecosystem services are more fundamental to the citizens livelihood. As Nghiem states, biodiversity loss poses a real threat to the livelihoods, food security and health of the poor. Because so many people in developing countries are poor, many oof them make their living as subsistence farmers. Developing countries also may not have the treadmill of production that developed and other developing countries are stuck in, where the developed countries have large-scale economic markets based on the cheap-labor and products coming out of the developing countries. Even if the developing country in question is one of the countries involved in producing products for the developed countries, the unskilled, cheap labor crews do not typically earn enough in wages to allow themselves to buy into the treadmill. Thus many times a few people in the family will be factory workers and the others will work on a farm where they can produce at least a partial amount of their food. Socio-Economic Impacts The livelihood of a country is largely based in the ability of their government. However, poverty rates in many countries could be helped through an increase in their general income. Yet instead, conservation costs may be displaced from the government unto the citizenry. This policy hinders the conservation, harms the social standing of the people, and nullifies the positive impact of the conservation act within the minds of the people who are paying for it. It has been found that poverty and environmental degradation are directly correlated. As poverty rises, so too does environmental degradation. This correlation is also found in tandem with low or threatened biodiversity levels. For many biodiversity indicators, environmental quality has been found to deteriorate as per capita incomes rise at low levels of income, but to improve at high levels of income- yielding an inverted U shaped relation between income and environmental quality (Perrings and Halkos). For the correlation between increasing income and environmental quality, there must be some point at which the citizens are willing to trade their increased consumption for a basic increase in environmental quality. This brings into question the values of people, and shows a direct correlation between the expression of a communitys values and their income and ability to support themselves. If the citizens have the resources to support themselves, they will, even if it means going against some of their traditions, which are, historically speaking, environmentally friendly. On the other side though, as stated by Perrings and Halko, people who gain more value from conservation, rather than using the resource, will conserve it. Thus it is important to address policies that will increase the value of conserving a resource. Using a widely known example, people in the tropics have been farming non-native crops for various reasons. For some it was represented as modernization, for others they are farming what is considered a cash crop for the instantaneous money. Either way, much of the tropical rain forests are very ecologically specialized. The trees are long established with a few emergent trees, a dense canopy, and few sub-canopy trees and shrubs. The animals are well-adapted to the environment and certain species utilize each layer within the canopy, allowing for that

maximization of available resources. The tropical rainforest is a biodiversity hotspot, a place where the species diversity, functional diversity, and Phylogenetic diversity greatly surpasses our knowledge of what exists there. However, the soil within these tropical rain forests is typically nutrient-poor. When people cut down the natural growth of the tropical rainforest, the nutrientpoor soil can support only a few crops of the new crop before becoming depleted. Then a new section of forest needs to be cut down to continue growing the new crop. However, moving on to that new section does not allow for the old section to just begin a process of re-growth that would be comparable to what had previously been in that place. The soil is not only nutrient-poor, but without the old-growth trees it is also very susceptible to erosion and much of the top-soil disappears. By allowing the natural environment to flourish, people relying on their surroundings for subsistence would not be so detrimentally affected by the loss of any one species. Also, a high rate of biodiversity has been concretely associated with a higher value of ecosystem services, which are relevant to all people regardless of socio-economic and socio-political status. A successful strategy to improve both the economy and the standards of living, would incorporate plans to maintain the natural biodiversity within an area. Thus, the socio-economic factors tie back into the socio-political sphere, and the topic of biodiversity remains as a basis of interconnectedness between each. Health Impacts One possibly surprising field that is touched by biodiversity is human health. Now that the idea has been introduced, the obvious importance lies within the plants of the rain forest with medicinal qualities. This is a singular, primary effect; however, the positive impacts of biodiversity on human health have been found to have both primary and secondary effects. These effects are also not just physically important, but important to the mental health of people as well. Dean et al. proposed the figure below as a model of the mechanism linking biodiversity and mental health within the urban environment. It shows very basic, yet central, ideas as to how the goals of particular environmental changes can impact mental health. The figure below shows a positive correlation between high levels of biodiversity and improved mental health within a locale. They also propose that this correlation is especially true in regards to the culturally enriching services- think ecosystem services!- of an ecosystem. Their whole idea centers on the basis that people evolved within the natural environment, as much as any other species on the planet today. This connection to nature can be seen by the way that humans face severe post-traumatic stress due to natural disasters such as flooding, psychological consequences due to drought, and over-developed adaptations that helped humankind survive in the pre-technological world but are useless in this day and age which lead to the mental disease of attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). Whereas the ability to be easily recognize spatial cues, operate at a high activity level, and be able to transition quickly from one task to another may have been helpful in pre-historic societies, it is now a

counter-productive issue for the single-focus business model of developed countries. The concept that increased biodiversity levels are correlated to human mental health in urban settings is not new, for there is a well-developed body of evidence supporting the premise that contact with nature provides a range of health benefits for humans (Dean et al.). Figure 1.2 A model of the ecological linkage mechanism connection urban environmental change with mental health (Dean et al.)

However, there is also an important recognition in the difference between how the culturally enriching services impact human health versus the regulating services, though some effects will overlap between the two. Culturally enriching services of psychological benefit include the social engagement, physical activity, restorative experiences, educational, and ethical/stewardship values for participants (Dean et al.). These services have a direct impact on people by creating community, promoting physical health, causing awareness of the environment, and directly influencing how people see the world around them. Using urban waterways as an example to determine regulating services impacts reveals that these benefits include reduced flooding and storm damage, mitigation of thermal heat from urban infrastructure, reduced air pollution and carbon emissions through uptake of toxins by vegetation (Dean et al.). The benefits from either culturally enriching or regulating services are hard to determine quantitatively at the public level. For example, placing a dollar value on the worth of reduced carbon emissions would be difficult, if not impossible. However, to determine the qualitative value of an item, just even by determining that lower carbon emissions are better than higher carbon emissions shows a sense of worth for the benefits of these ecosystem services. This qualitative determination is how public policy makers can successfully enact positive environmental changes, at the cost of the tax payer, to increase the overall health of humans.

Yet the health of the public is also tied to ecnomics and policy, whether the country is developed or developing. In developed countries, access to medicine is pretty common, though to different degrees for different people. For example, here in the United States, access to our medical resources is decently open to most of society. However, based upon the type of insurance a person has, which is based on there job, how much they can afford to pay, and possibly even where they live, their ability to access certain services of the medical field may be impaired. Yet, the expertise and knowledge is, at the least, present. In developing countries with a poor infrastructure, many times the citizens access to an expert within a medical field is limited, if not impossible. Many times people rely upon those that they have access to, such as a medicine man, a witch, or a shaman. It is important to use cultural relativism when making any judgements about the fact that many poor countries rely upon these individuals, and to also realize that at least most of these individuals do have at least a basic understanding of some methods by which they can help the infirm. However, it is still sad to acknowledge that many people in developing countries would not have access to a trained medical professional, even if they wanted or needed that access. Biodiversity ties into this issue because the countries that have the resources to train doctors, and thus actually have a solid medicinal knowledge base, are the same countries that are most likely trying to do more research into new medicines. Developed countries and drug companies have recognized the need to search for natural resources in locations with the greatest biological diversity (Mackey and Liang). Those areas of greatest biological diversity are most often those undeveloped and developing countries who lack the resources to have even a decent health care infrastructure, nonetheless the ability to research the natural resources that could provide new medicines to the world. This has become a problem known as biopiracy, which can really happen anywhere yet most frequently does occur in countries that lack the basic resources and knowledge to know that theyre being taken advantage of. Biopiracy is closely tied to the idea of environmental justice, where the term justice is used to mean an equal distribution of both the good and the bad in environmental matters. This is different from the idea of justice as the greatest good for the greatest number of people, which inherently implies inequality within society. The poorer the country, the more often it is exploited through cheap labor. The company builds a factory in the poorer country and all of the environmental pollution associated with it then becomes the burden of those people living and working in close proximity to the factory, and these are people that typically do not even get the benefit of participating in the market that the product is being sold in. Another prime example of a lack of environmental justice occurs here in the United States. As landfills are becoming fuller and the search begins for new locations, the wealthy and educated citizens are able to provide the money, resources, and campaigning to prevent new landfills from occurring near them. However, the poorer and less educated citizens typically lack both the ability and the resources to prevent landfills from being created near them. Overtime, toxins from the landfill leach into the soil and water and air currents move air-borne pathogens.

The likely poor and uneducated people that are living closest to the landfill are the most likely to face health impairments. Conclusion: Biodiversity in the Social Scheme Biodiversity within the natural environment has far-reaching impacts on the organisms living within that, and neighboring, environments. Some interactions are very visible, such as the trade-offs associated with the bee gaining food from flowers but then helping the flowers by carrying the pollen from one to another. Other interactions are not always so visible, and yet others may not ever be even guessed at. However, no matter the visibility of the interactions, and thus the impact, of biodiversity within an environment, there has been definite proof of the value of maintaining biodiversity within the natural environment. When discussing the impacts of diversity in the social sphere, distinguishing its political and economic ramifications can be a little difficult because they themselves are so interconnected. Even outside of the environmental debate, the effects of the economy on politics and vice-versa can be seen. However, within the environmental scheme, many of the economic changes enacted at an impact to the environment will prompt new political actions, and again many new environmental policies affect the current economic situation. However, these social impacts are also not distributed evenly amongst the different socio-economic groups. Environmental justice is the idea of justice, not for the greatest number of people at a cost to the few, as an equal impact upon everyone impacted. Environmental justice is a growing consideration within current policy and planning measures because it helps to protect those that have no voice for themselves within politics. Biodiversity is an extremely integrated topic, in both environmental and social spheres. However, the impacts of biodiversity on both the environment and in the social spheres is largely understudied, and often disregarded. Because of its many social ramifications- political, economical, and in the health sector- biodiversity is one subject that should be further studied and then incorporated into the basic policy and planning values. Themes such as environmental justice help to protect both the people as well as the natural environment. And by helping to protect biodiversity within the environment, we are really helping to protect the ecosystem services provided to people as well as many other social impacts within society.

Works Cited
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