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By Root 740 0

the murky and uninviting body of water it is today: Once its waters were kept clean and sediment-free by rich oyster beds on the sea floor—but these have been plowed up by trawlers and the sea bottom reduced to a muddy, turgid wasteland. The pressure is unrelenting: Intensively fished areas can be hit tens of times in a single year. Deep cold-water corals thousands of years old, supporting flourishing colonies of other marine life, can be reduced to rubble by a single pass of a trawler. Photographs of trawled coral colonies show piles of stony wreckage like the ruins of a pillaged city.

Oceanic island birds are some of the most threatened species anywhere because they are particularly vulnerable to predation by introduced alien invaders. Half of Hawaii’s 140 native bird species are now extinct, thanks to the devastation wrought by introduced rats, pigs, and cats. On Australia’s Christmas Island, the Pipistrelle bat population (I realize bats are mammals, but the point is the same) has plummeted by 90 percent in the last decade (down to a mere 250 mature individuals), due largely to predation by invasive species like wolf snakes, rats, and feral cats.

Consequently, one of the quickest wins for biodiversity conservation is the elimination of alien species from islands. In the biodiversity “hot spot” of the Galápagos Islands, 140,000 marauding goats have been removed, while in the islands off western Mexico—well-known for their unique species and thriving seabird colonies—cats, rats, goats, pigs, donkeys, and rabbits have all been removed to protect endemic animals and plants from destruction. The cost has been tiny, compared with the benefits achieved: just $20,000 per colony for 200 seabird colonies protected, and $50,000 per species for 88 endemic species that are found nowhere else on Earth.32 That any species anywhere else might be lost for the want of such paltry sums would be a terrible indictment of our current lack of concern for the myriad plants and animals that share this planet with us.

BIODIVERSITY AND THE EARTH SYSTEM

Of course, we may fret about biodiversity loss, but life in general is incredibly resilient. Living species have colonized every nook and cranny of the planetary system. Spiders, anchored by tiny threads, whizz across the stratosphere carried by hundred-mile-an-hour jet-stream blasts. Thermophilic bacteria cluster hungrily around deep-sea volcanic fissures where temperatures soar well past boiling point. Oil-well samples show flourishing microbial life 2 kilometers or more below our feet.33

Extraordinary diversity is everywhere: A single 30 g sample of soil from a Norwegian forest has been estimated to contain 20,000 different species of bacteria.34 We are ourselves walking ecosystems: tiny mites crawl around in our eyelashes, while billions of bacteria populate our guts. Higher forms of life may be fewer in number, but are far more varied in form. All told, there are estimated to be 11 million species in the world—with countless more waiting to be discovered. Scientists working on a 2009 update for a global biodiversity report first issued in 2006 had to add 48 new reptiles, 200 new fish, and 1,184 flowering plants, all identified for the first time in the intervening three years.35 Recently ecologists working in the crater of a single extinct Papua New Guinean volcano found 16 new frogs, three new fish, a giant bat, and a giant rat; luckily a BBC camera crew was on hand to record each unique moment of discovery.36

But who cares anyway? Here’s Marcel Berlins, columnist at the Guardian: “I passionately believe in saving the whale, the tiger, the orangutan, the sea turtle and many other specifically identified species. What I do not accept is the general principle that all species alive today should carry on existing forever. We have become so attuned to treating every diminution of animals, insects, birds or fish with concern that we have forgotten to explain why we think it so terrible.” Warming to his argument, Berlins concludes: “How many mammal species can you think of? Can the remainder