Biodiversity

Our Genetic Heritage

A growing global environmental awareness that includes understanding the consequences of tropical deforestation is fostering interest in biodiversity. Biodiversity, simply put, is the variety and richness of the Earth's genetic heritage, accumulated over the aeons of biological evolution. The diminution of biodiversity, then, is not the interruption of a short range genetic phenomenon, it is the abortion of the process of evolution itself. Species that evolved millions of years ago under conditions total different than those today are brought to extinction, nullifying species' histories back to their creation. What is more tragic is the contemporary loss of species not ever seen by humankind. Since we humans, from the stand point of Earth's history, have only recently acquired language and its consequent technology and since it is only a decade or so since we humans have come to understand the chemistry of the genetic code—DNA—we are ignorantly squandering our genetic heritage without regard for its value—value of which we are not yet capable of understanding or evaluating, but which doubtless contains vast and untold riches. We possess the genetical philosopher's stone but we are using it for a door stop.

Evolution

Evolution includes both speciation and extinction. Humans are not the only reason for the impoverishment of biodiversity, natural causes, even cataclysmic causes such as ice ages and thermal ages and giant meteors have caused extinctions in the past. The difference between the extinction of species in systems controlled the most part by genetics and natural systems and the extinction of species, caught up in technological systems, is that the manipulators of the technological ecosystems in most cases have alternatives to their predetermined actions while natural causes are more or less spontaneous one time events. Evolutionary extinction was followed by evolutionary replacement. Species were not being lost at a rate greater than they were being replaced. In addition, in the past highly developed animals were replaced by other highly developed animals—reptiles by birds and mammals for example. Extinctions brought about by development are occurring at a rate greater than replacement and nothing seems to be in the wings to replace the mammals, birds and reptiles being lost except maybe the insects. Much of the extirpation and extinction of species by technological ecosystem development is avoidable, certainly in theory and probably in practice.

Human Ecology

Preserving biodiversity from human depredation is a human ecological problem in so far as ecology is the study of species in relation to their environment. The loss of biodiversity becomes, adversely, an accommodation to human development. Species are lost to accommodate space for more human beings. When affected adversely, any species has only four alternatives; mutation, adaption, migration, or death. Pigeons, rats, cockroaches, mice, et al, have adapted very nicely to the technological ecosystem. The megafauna of the American prairies, the dodo, the dusky seaside sparrow, the passenger pigeon, and numerous tropical plant and animal species of all sorts have died—become extinct.

Humans are the biotechnical factor affecting the survival of the bulk of Earth's species, dwarfing all natural causes of extinction. The loss of species is mostly a matter of habitat modification where the landscape is modified to suit humans and thereby becomes unsuitable for the diverse species formerly occupying the habitat. Some habitat modification, as clearing tropical forests to support slash and burn agriculture in response to increases in population, is random and capricious. The tropical forest clearing, to support cattle grazing on the part of cattle barons to supply the fast food market for hamburgers, is planned and may have support from international bankers. In other parts of the world, habitats are destroyed in engineering projects—roads, dams, irrigation systems, towns and cities, with their land hungry suburbs—all in the name of development and human progress.

Uneven Competition

To a large extent, then, the loss of biodiversity or bio-adversity is a function of technology—human technology—competing for space with native fauna and flora. The competition may take the form of development—the occupation of land by roads and, engineering works, flooding and other forms of watercourse alteration—or pollution of habitats with the refuse of civilization—solid, liquid, and gaseous. The pollutant may be something as simple as hot water that alters a temperature regime of the receiving body of water, or it may be complex, like the emissions from automobiles which undergo chemical transformation in the atmosphere then affect the biota, or sulfur and nitrogen compound emission producing acid rain, toxic waste, land fills etc. The effects of pollution and waste disposal are avoidable.

Technological Ecosystems

When the technological developments of humans—domestic and industrial—are understood to have ecosystem properties, the solutions will also be found to have obvious ecosystem properties. The language based technological ecosystems of humans is the main cause of the loss of biodiversity and the degradation of nature.

The technological ecosystem is just as easy to study and analyze as natural ecosystems and would produce the insights necessary to manage the technological ecosystem so as not to be a needlessly destructive activity. Development can be managed and waste disposal from any technological process can be managed. We have mastered the art of production what we have not yet mastered is the art of reproduction. No natural ecosystem produces waste. The by products of all actions, in nature, are the main ingredients for some other reaction. The dead and decaying matter in the ecosystem is the nutritional source for other organic subsystems of the ecosystem. All processes are interlocked and balanced. The information that runs the natural ecosystem is genetic, physical and chemical. The information that runs the technological ecosystem is language for the most part but with humans still subject to their own genetics. Natural and technological ecosystems are homologous, the same principles of ecology apply to both. Industrial processes could be cyclical processes in the technological ecosystem but no person, or persons, corporation, or government takes responsibility for the ecosystem as a whole, as nature does in a natural ecosystem, and individuals or companies are free to do whatever they wish within the limits of their segment of the system. Our industrial ecosystem is so many straight instead of circular paths. Industrial systems are free to terminate at the factory door, or sewage outfall.

Arrogant Technology

The Environmental Protection Agency and the Council on Environmental Quality were established to do something about this but so far the efforts have been meager relative to the need. The only hope for benign technological ecosystems is for the operators of them to voluntarily undertake to operate them as ecosystems, but that is not possible until they perceive them as ecosystems.

Among the worst offenders of this process, by far, are two activities heavily supported by government and subsidized with tax dollars. The first is nuclear power generation and the second is the nuclear weapons industry. The tragedy is that nuclear power has not yet even been demonstrated to be economically viable, let alone benign in nature. Tons of nuclear waste are being held in temporary storage because no one knows how to design storage facilities that will work properly for 250,000 years. The fact that we as a civilization have undertaken to produce extremely toxic waste materials that will persist longer than all the past history of civilization, without having the solution to the waste disposal problem is a clear indication the arrogance of human technology. Even the astronomic sums that have been expended to build these technological monstrosities has not raised any deep concerns, indicating that the expenditures may have been incurred just to get rid of the money so it can not be used for social programs and for no other logical reason. Getting similar sums of money to protect nature would be difficult to imagine and yet the end is not in sight since huge sums will be needed even if the nuclear generation of power were to stop today.

The Price of Secrecy

Nuclear weapons are a mess because so much was done in secret in the name of national security. The managers of the nuclear weapons factories were free to contaminate and pollute with radioactivity because they could hide under the blanket of national security. Needless to say the taxpayer has a big bill coming on these two things alone with no certain solutions with existing technology. Meanwhile we are making more nuclear waste. There is a modicum of rational to nuclear weapons, not that their use in prosecuting a war, to the contrary, they make limited sense because they have limited war. They allowed the Soviet Union to disband without the threat of foreign invasion. The last time the Russians changed their form of government they had six foreign armies on their soil including an American one. Nothing can be said to justify the nuclear power plants.

Greed is Blind to Consequences

The numerous toxic chemical waste dumps in the United States are grim and brutal testimony to short sighted thoughtlessness and greed. Industry can and should be designed to be a benign ecosystem. We can capture waste products and convert them to the raw product of some other processes. We need a new breed of industrial ecological engineers whose main preoccupation is to gather the knowledge necessary to eliminate waste from our industrial ecosystems by channeling it into other useful processes and things. A benign technological ecosystem should not produce unwanted results outside the factory door.

Closing the Cycle

What should be clear in the study of biodiversity is that extremely long term processes—evolution—are being interrupted by relatively short term processes—technology, development and the wastes they generate. The bottom line says that corporations that produce waste are wasteful. They deprive their stockholders of dividends because of the cost of complying with environmental laws and they miss the benefits of the new profit center—waste management. Many companies have discovered that they can add millions annually to the bottom line by managing waste, either reusing the products themselves selling them to people who need and use the stuff. This aspect of industrial development has been known in principle for decades. The automobile industry is living proof of recycling of cars, parts, and finally the metallic carcasses of used cars which are used as the scrap in the steel making process, saving about two-thirds of the cost of creating a ton of steel from iron ore. What the auto and steel industry have done for decades needs to penetrate into all aspects of our economy, from home collection of glass, paper and plastic, to industrial waste heat and materials management in all considerations of manufacturing and power generation.

Time, Time, Time

Nothing humans do, no technological ecosystem, nor any part of it can be placed on the time scale of evolution. Not even the decay of plutonium with a half life of 25,000 years. The evolution of some higher ape into Homo sapiens is a very recent event compared to the speciation of ants, for instance, and it occurred over a period of several million years. The impunity with which species are brought to extinction is testimony to the richness of the fauna and flora of the Earth. The fact that it continues unabated is evidence of the ignorance of humans-ignorance of the long term values destroyed as against the short term profits gained. The genetic heritage of the Earth is being squandered in a few short years (millennia if you like) when it took aeons to produce it. The tragedy of the deforestation of the tropical rain forests is that they are the richest floristic and faunistic ecosystems in the world and their depauperization in many cases will not be reversible. The habitats are being changed in nonreversible ways and will produce other less rich systems than the ones they are replacing. All for relatively short term gain.

Public Domain, Public Welfare

In the last election the question of the jobs of loggers was pitted against the old growth forest and the spotted owl. Much can be said for and against the old growth forest and the spotted owl but the short term economic interest is ephemeral in comparison to the values lost should a species become extinct because of the logging. Not only are the interests of the logger placed above those of nature, the public interest is held in jeopardy to private interest of jobs. No similar arguments to the owl are made when General Motors lays off 20,000 workers in a plant closing. It seems GM can have common sense but not the Federal Government when the use of the public lands is considered a welfare program to those who live nearby. Sears just announced the closure of its catalog business with the firing of 50,000 people. That is more than all the loggers in the Pacific Northwest. Should the public lands be exploited to provide a limited, short-term way of life to a selected group of citizens, when opportunities abound in forestry in other parts of the country, particularly the Southeast? The people at Sears should be so lucky.

The US. is not the Proper Paradigm

The United States does not come to the discussion of biodiversity with clean hands. We are hampered in our pleas for sanity in dealing with the tropical forests because we have already devastated our forests, and more completely our prairies. WE don't even have a proper prairie park. The circumstance of our past exploitation does not lessen the threat to the tropical rain forests or the oceans or any other major biological formation. The irony of the plight of the United States is that the rest of the world thinks that we achieved our wealth by extracting the natural resources of our country and they would like to become wealthy by extracting resources from theirs. If a smoke stack economy could make the United States a rich country, who cares about pollution, the idea is to get rich. Our job in the United States is to show that the real gains in our wealth have come about through real gains in knowledge not just in resource exploitation and real knowledge applied to resource problems is the answer to wealth not bald naked exploitation. Resources have to be used for any economy to run but resources can be used in a sustainable economy where preservation of biodiversity is one of the objectives of the economy.

Wealth

Wealth is generated through the interaction of resources and knowledge. Resources may be finite,, but reusable on an indefinite basis, but knowledge is transfinite. There is no end to knowledge. Consider the following equation:

where W is wealth, R is resources and I is information. The subscript des indicates design technology.

Information of design is the information humans use to regulate technological activities, it is information directly available to them for the production of their personal wealth. Increases in knowledge are the key to the increases in wealth. The economy of abundance is rooted in the transfinitness of knowledge. If knowledge can produce wealth it also follows that knowledge can produce wealth from healthy industrial ecosystems that produce virtually no waste and, which do not squander natural resources.

Demand Side Economics

The root cause of development is demand. Demand is generated, primarily, through increase in population but also by increases in knowledge and wealth. As long as the population of the world is increasing, the demand for development will increase. Remember, development is technology that alters the natural ecosystem to accommodate humans, i.e. the transformation of natural ecosystems into technological ecosystems is development. The transformation may be slight as is the case with subsistence hunters in the Amazon, or it can be great with market hunters or fishermen (witness the extinction of the Dodo and the Great Auk and the depletion of the Grand Banks fishery), the slash and burn agriculture of the tropics with its concomitant cattle grazing or, the building of the U.S. Interstate Highway system, or urban and suburban America.

The greatest transformations of natural ecosystems have come about through agriculture, forestry, and depletion of ocean fisheries. It is agriculture and forestry in one form or another that transformed the face of most of the Earth. It is non-sustainable extractive fishing and whaling that have transformed the oceans. The Japanese and others employing thirty mile drift nets are mining the open ocean for anything that gets caught in the net without regard to ecosystem principles—life cycles, abundance, replacement rates.

Urbanization

Urbanization has been a curse and a blessing. Urbanization has taken a lot of land and paved it over—that's bad. On the other hand urbanization has concentrated human settlement so that many more people can live on less land—that's good. Urban populations have to be sustained by agriculture—the more people the more agriculture. Even with greatly increased efficiency, agriculture, where more people can be fed from less acres of food, has its limitations and ultimately the solution to increased resource utilization, with its increased bio-adversity is to limit population. This is not a Malthusian argument. The Malthusian principle of scarcity does not apply to biodiversity since Malthus was talking about sustaining human populations only. There is limit to the number of people the Earth can sustain and if we are willing to sacrifice everything to that goal, human population will grow to an astronomical number. The question is not quantity but quality—not the quality of human life alone but the quality of all life on the planet. Malthus had no concern for biodiversity, he would have not understood the concept in terms of his day. His argument was introduced into a public discourse on the idea of progress which held that there was abundance and that there would be enough for every one. The idea of progress and abundance are closely linked and point to the betterment of mankind. The status quo in Malthus time was that only the upper classes should enjoy the abundance, otherwise there would not be enough to go around. In a very real sense Malthus' hypothesis was propaganda against the idea of progress which challenged the status quo. It was, devastatingly, successful as evidenced by the fact that it is still prominently quoted today to support the basis for haves and have nots. Malthusian logic took a new form in the Club of Rome study, "The Limits of Growth." The "Limits of Growth" was discredited in short order but Malthus still lives with us as dictum even though his proposition is patently false! Limits of growth have been played out in another way in the last two decades.

The Redeemer Presidents

While no one was watching, three redeemer presidents of the United States arranged the Federal government's taxing and spending priorities to produce a huge debt—artificial scarcity—not theoretical like Malthus but real as in no money. This caused some 7.3 trillion dollars to be siphoned out of the United States economy and into the hands of the top 1/2% of our richest citizen magnates. This was the prosperity of the decade of the 1980s. One would have to go back to the 18th Century Enclosure Acts in England to see something comparable. Our Federal government now faces enormous problems, but with scant resources since most of the discretionary wealth of the system has been siphoned off to its richest members who were very rich before they got this windfall. It is particularly dreadful since the demands that will now be placed on resources as a result of skewing the abundance will exacerbate the problem with biodiversity. This gross misuse of the Office of the Presidency will have to be redressed either in the form of new taxes with surtaxes on the very rich or through the inheritance laws, or both. And in the future, the American public will have to take a close look at any President who claims that lower taxes will produce prosperity and who smilingly tells us it is, "Morning in America." As a result of the Nixon, Reagan, Bush "largess," it is mourning in America. There is no evidence from history—all history—to support the notion that the rich will voluntarily share their good fortune. The rich have to have the opportunity to stay rich, others have to have the opportunity to get rich, but the nation as a whole (as an ecosystem) thrives only when rich, middle class and poor alike pay their fair share of taxes and every body has access to education and other the unalienable rights that together provide opportunities for all to survive and thrive in this society and share in the abundance.

Development and Population Restraint

Intelligent development and intelligent population control are the keys to the sustainable Earth where biodiversity will flourish. Human beings, used language based technology and removed most of the threats to survival of Homo sapiens L. The threats to life have been reduced. The death rate has gone down dramatically. Survivorship is way up. More children are living, more adults are growing into old age, as more people achieve their life expectancy. The result is population numbers un heard of for a single large species. Vast areas of the Earth have been cleared of natural ecosystems to support humans. The increase in technology has assured the increase in numbers. Since population is a human problem originating out of human's language based technology, it is a problem that requires a solution from that same base of knowledge—language based technology. Human population is a self-generating; self-replicating decision system. The decisions are, for the most part, random and normally distributed, and consequently are understandable. Simple statistics tells us what is happening in population growth and gives us penetrating insight into the future of the problem. Since human technology is causing the problem, human technology is obligated to solve it.

Morality

The birth rate is not a moral problem. It is a technology problem. If it were a moral problem it could be solved by the bubonic plague. That is to say when populations were limited by disease and plague was that morally ok? When most children died in child birth or did not survive their first year, was that morally ok. Technology was the cause of the reduction of the death rate, technology let the population genie out of the bottle. If population is to be mediated, it must be through knowledge and technology.

The Education of Women

The major factor in mediating the increase in population is the education of women. Not just third world women, but women all over the world. To go with their education, women need the opportunity to survive and thrive in the human ecosystem as independently consenting and economically, consenting members. In the American republic, women are moving to become equal members, politically and socially, and should enjoy the unalienable rights in their own right as citizens sovereign. We have to complete this transformation as quickly as possible in order to assure we have the most dynamic and innovative society so that we can offer genuine leadership to the world, leading by example and deed, not just lip service. If we are a nation of "Liberty and Justice for all," we ought to quit pussy footing around and deliver. The United States Constitution does not say, "We the Men of the United States." Women are citizens sovereign in every sense that men are and are entitled to the unalienable rights. In addition to the unalienable rights women need services to assist them in the process of childbearing and rearing. The education of women can not be a carbon copy of the education of men. There is obviously an overlap in information needed by both sexes, but the information for the successful male will not necessary suit the successful. female and females should receive what it takes to make them survive and thrive in our society and be successful at whatever they choose to do—politically and economically. It was said repeatedly during the last presidential campaign that the first woman president of the United States has already been born. If we believe that and we certainly should, we should make no bones about providing the moral leadership for world, particularly in the case of women's rights. Margaret Thatcher and Golda Meier are not the appropriate role models. They succeeded in a man's world by acting more like men than men. We need a woman president who acts like a woman. We need a national-policy that addresses the problem of liberating women the world over to be full partners in the governance of their lives, their nations, and the world. Women's rights is the key to the next level of democratic government. We have a national ecosystem that is only about 2/3 up to speed. If we are all to prosper and lead the good life, economically secure, with tranquility and happiness for all, the key is the education of all our citizens sovereign, in life time learning.

The $25 annual fee for a young woman to attend school in Kenya may mean the difference between 3 children, she would have if educated, as opposed to the 10 or 11 should would otherwise have. Education can not be complete without the knowledge of the control of conception. As a nation we should spend a lot of money on the research necessary to allow women to control conception so that only wanted children are born. Abortion is the right of women under the right to privacy. Abortion is only one way to control pregnancy and not necessarily the best. Avoidance of pregnancy through physical and/or chemical contraception provides other remedies: The important point is for women, world wide, to be educated to understand their choices. Armed with the best knowledge, women are capable of making their own decisions for the care and maintenance of the own bodies.

A Technological Solution

Population is a problem humans created with their language based technology and the problem cries for solution through the same mechanism. Reproductive research must necessarily address the problems of fertility—pregnancy inducement—as well as pregnancy prevention. The sooner we start educating women and allowing them to choose for themselves, the sooner will be on the road to population mediation.

At first blush it would seem that these arguments should apply primarily to the third world since that is where the most people are and where most kids get born. Not necessarily so. A child born in the third world, during the course of a life time, will consume far less in material goods and energy than will a child born in the first world. The demands of the child growing up in the developed world will be consonant with the expectations of the developed world and that-person-may, in fact, consume more of the world's goods, by far, than the third worlder. Population reduction is a universal not a local problem.

A Crowing Achievement

Development is the crowning achievement of language based technology. When we speak of civilization we are speaking about development rising out of language based technology. How to provide for the needs of populations without needlessly exploiting the resources necessary to do so and without diminishing the shared resources, in particular air and water. Development in its form and extent is a manifestation of wealth. The wealthier the nation the more the development. Our interstate system is a perfect example of development to satisfy the needs of a wealthy society, one where everyone has at least one automobile. The rational for the Interstate system was to evacuate the cities in the case of nuclear attack. Any one who has driven in the commuter traffic of a big city can tell you evacuating the cities in a pipe dream. The system has come to be highly regarded even though in and out of most cities the roads have to be greatly widened to accommodate the normal traffic on the roads. The transportation systems of the United States are the key to its development. First the rivers and canals, then the traces and roads, then, the railroad,, the State and Federal highway system and finally the Interstate system. Air travel affected, primarily, the need to accommodate airplanes, i.e. the airports and attendant facilities. At each level of transportation development, more infrastructure was development and more in the way of human settlement. Our huge cities, particularly our World Cities are hubs of all forms of transportation. Transportation of power, electricity, fuels, and water played an equally vital role, but followed transportation.

Resource Depletion

History is replete with horror stories of resource depletion and destruction. The Mediterranean basin is a catalog of resource horror stories similar to the logging of the Central Valley of Mexico and numerous others. The tragedy is that some of the same depredations are occurring today and we know better. The watershed slopes of the Himalayas are being logged subjecting the down stream areas to severe flooding with almost complete loss of soil. Desertification is many parts of the world is the consequence of resource depletion and abuse. Over grazing is chronic and endemic in these parts of the world.

Resource Management

One only has to go to the Canary Islands to see water conservation practiced on an enlightened scale. Watershed forests are carefully managed. The native tree species have been replaced after a flurry of experimentation with exotic species such as Australian Eucalyptus. The Canary Island pines are much more fire resistant and they require much less water than the eucalyptus, thereby making more water available for downstream use. Water is captured at all levels of the mountains, preventing floods but also making much more of the water available for agricultural use. The irrigation catchment pools are used to cultivate fish.

Land intensive development in the tropics is doing the main destruction of tropical forest habitat with the resulting loss of species. Since the tropical forests may have as many as 60 species per hectare and have as many as 180 species in 100 hectares it is floristically the richest forest habitat in the world. These forests may be the primal centers of distribution for all the non-desert tropical floras. These enormously rich areas could be the centers of speciation for vast floras that are distributed from that place.

My personal belief is that urbanization is the only ecological force that will save the tropics. They can not otherwise, be depopulated. Language based technology is providing the basis for population increases which produce the demand for subsistence lands. The people of the tropical rain forests have to have the opportunity to survive and thrive in other less destructive ways and, to me, urbanization seems the only reasonable alternative. The developed countries should adopt rain forest areas in which to promote urbanized industry which will reduce the pressure on the land. Urbanization will alleviate some if not all the slash and burn agriculture, but it will have no effect on cattle grazing. The cattle grazing people are tied into the world market for beef. What is required here is some international trade convention that takes into account this activity and provides alternative incentives. It is in this area that trading foreign debt for conservation would be best used. The idea would be that debt developed nations would be forgiven for proper conservation of the tropical forests. And again the best use of the debt would be to reduce cattle grazing since the cattle barons may not be susceptible to any other persuasion. In general various international banks, particularly the ones that supply capital to developing countries have to be better managed.

Technological Development Promotes Famine

It's hard to believe but the international banking community promoted famine in Africa by promoting cash crops in areas where women did the farming. The women were taken away from their food producing chores to work on the cash crops. The return on labor for the work in cash crops was paid in cash and in a male dominated society that meant giving the money to the men, who suddenly found themselves with new wealth which they promptly spent on prostitutes, gambling, and drink. Since the women did not produce the usual food crops necessary for local consumption while they were working in the cash crop, and the men spent the cash that could have bought food or other things, the local food supply plummeted producing local famine. The effect of capital improvement for the cash crop system was to enrich the corporate farmers and the prostitutes. So much for international banking. They simply have to do better than that.

In our own country and in the rest of the developed world, the whole notion of development has to be re-assessed in terms of its impact on nature. The temperate world is not as floristically and faunistically rich as the tropics. That does not excuse us to disregard development practices that would impoverish our own flora and fauna. The United States has been particularly at fault in the wholesale destruction of natural habitat, because we had so much wilderness to "tame." When we weren't busy taming the wilderness we were busy regarding it as waste land. The Everglades of Florida were and are regarded as waste land by many Floridians. Now that Everglades is a National Park and adds to the tourist dollars of the State of Florida is it held in higher regard, but it still have a great deal of difficulty competing with the surrounding agricultural land. Its real value as a bird sanctuary has been compromised and much destruction occurs because of excessive fertilizer leaching from sugar cane lands to the north of the park. This latter is a result of our foreign policy. If Cuba were permitted to export sugar to the United States, the Florida sugar cane would disappear.

The Public Domain Welfare System

The public lands of the West form the basis of a public domain welfare system. The public lands of the West are not managed for they common benefit of the people of the United States but are managed for the local population, who in one form or an other, with or without leases, forge squatter's rights to the resources. Grazing leases are supposed to be agreements between the United States and cattle owners. Theoretically they can be withdrawn and reissued. But in actual practice, and without the sanction of law, the grazing leases are treated as private property, as if they were permanent easements for the purpose of grazing for the private gain of individuals not the common benefit of the citizens sovereign. A candidate for the position of Secretary of the Interior refused to be considered for the position when it was obvious that he would have a conflict of interest since he held grazing leases in Grand Teton National Park. The grazing leases which were obtained in the first place by trespass were later perfected and are now perfectly legal.

The-Five Million Dollar Ranch

A 5000 acre ranch in Montana has a sale price of $5,000,000. The price seems a bit high for 5000 acres until it is known that included with the sale are leases on 60,000 acres of Federal land. None of this would be as bad as it seems except for the fact that the Federal leases are set a prices 1/3 to 1/4 of leases on adjacent State land and may be as much as 1/10 of the leases on local private land. Where is the interest of the citizens sovereign in all these transactions? It is not there because the Congress, in the case of the public domain lands, does not represent the common interest of the citizens sovereign but represents the interests of the people who finance the political campaigns of the Senators and Representatives from the States with the public land. They in turn represent the wealthy landowners of the Western States who provide the campaign financing. The tragedy is that less than 10% of the livestock of the United States is produced on the public lands, yet most of it is subjected to some sort of pressure, simply because it is there to exploit. If only fair market lease prices were charged a lot of the abuse of the public land would stop. Mining forest products in the public forests is a travesty. The Federal Government builds the roads that makes the logging possible and the logging does not even pay for the cost of the road. It would make more sense to put our head in a brown paper bag and simply pay these exploiters with checks from the treasury and let the forests stand.

Mining for minerals on the public lands is a similar travesty. The mining law of 1868 was passed when there were few people and lots of land and the country needed developing. Viewed in today's economy the program is a give away. Persons file claims for trivial finds of minerals, do some developing and then file claim to the land for as little as $2.50/acre. The government gives them clear title to the land for a pittance. On mineral claims on public lands which do have substantial and valuable mineral deposits, the discoverer is not required to pay a royalty. The public land is treated as if it had no value. This form of management is much more destructive to biodiversity than if the land were managed properly with good economics.

Considered in the light of biodiversity, our public land policy could be improved if the public lands were administered as if they were an asset—economic entities—rather than as welfare. No individual, nor corporation, should have any special privilege to exploit the public lands for private, personal gain. The public lands are part of the common wealth and as such are part of the birthright of all Americans. An equal share of that common wealth is the unalienable right of each and every American no matter where he or she lives. It seems paradoxical but the cause of biodiversity could be well served by a proper, profit-motive, management of the public lands. Grazing leases should have a fixed term and they should be auctioned off to the highest bidder at the end of the term or they should be assigned by lottery to any citizen in the United States for a fixed term, which citizen would be free to sell his/her interest.

Urbanization

The urbanization of the United States saved it from itself. Urbanization has had its own effects on biodiversity but for the most part urbanization has removed vast numbers of people from the land. Much marginal farm land in the United States has been abandoned as farm land and is now reverting to nature. The State of Pennsylvania is reverting to forest at a rate of about 2% a year. Much of the deciduous forest is expanding all over the Eastern United States and few incursions have been made into the Great Smokey Mountains which are the center of distribution of the deciduous forest Of Eastern United States and is therefor the richest most luxurious forest we have. Keeping the Great Smokey Mountains intact is a major plus for biodiversity in the United States.

The Prairie Ecosystem

The prairies are another matter. Settlers on the prairies had to overcome great hardships to bring the prairies into cultivation. The prairies were under water until early summer and were frozen solid all winter. Edgar Nelson Transeau, the great American ecologist, spoke of ice skating from town to town, across the prairies, in Indiana in his youth. He died at age 80 in about 1955. Travel across the prairie was all but impossible except in winter. When the prairie was drained it open up a vast agricultural heartland, the richest in the world considering the fertility of the soil and the latitude at which it is found and consequently the length of the growing season. The prairie is not adequately represented in the National Park System. Attempts to put the Flint Hills of Kansas in the system in the stewardship of Interior Secretary Stewart Udall resulted in a threat of violence on the part of the owners. Calves can register a 300 pound weight gain in a summer in the Flint Hills. No living person has seen the ocean of tall grass that dominated the prairies of the United States what we call the, "corn belt." The grass was taller than a man on horseback and it stretched for millions of acres. Fires in the tall grass were formidable, stampeding vast herds of ungulates in its path.

There is enough drain pipe in the State of Iowa to reach to the moon. The tall grass prairie of tall blue stem and Indian grass was replaced by a domesticated tall grass from Central America—corn. Means have to be found to add tall grass prairie to our system of nature preserves. Now the tall grasses, some of them 16 feet tall are now found only in graveyards and along railroad rights away. The animals are all but gone. There are only a few wild buffalo. The prairie grizzly may exist in only few number. Sixty million bison which once roamed the prairies of the United States, moving annually from Minnesota to Texas have been replaced by 60-70 million cattle. A last hope for a prairie park might be to work with one of the prairie Indian tribes to convert a reservation to a prairie park. The deal would have to be a substantial improvement over what the Tribe now gains as income from their reservation, they would have to retain all their rights and they would have to be the primary beneficiaries. It would have to be strictly voluntary. A suitable model is Kakadu National Park in Australia.

The Highest and Best Use of Water

A system in gross mismanagement is the system of Federal water management in the West. Every major river in the West has one or more dams to provide irrigation water. The original concept of the West was to develop water to sustain irrigation agriculture. Irrigation agriculture in the West is highly subsidized by the price of water and with subsidized water, Western agriculture is competing with natural rainfall agriculture of the rest of the nation. The highest and best use of water in the desert is to sustain urbanization. Urbanized water can be purchased at market prices and does not represent subsidization. The native desert fauna and flora will not suffer if they are not irrigated and we won't have the situation where farmers with subsidized water are raising price subsidized crops.

Urbanizing the desert is similar to urbanizing the tropical rain forests or the deciduous forests of Eastern United States. The State of California represents this dilemma very well. The Imperial Valley of California uses Federally subsidized water to raise Federally subsidized crops. The farmers pay about $11.00 an acre foot for the water. Water in Los Angeles will sell for more than a $1000.00 an acre foot. Some deals are being worked out where the farmers are selling their water allotments for urban water. This is totally wrong. If Federal water is going to go to Los Angeles instead of to farming, it is the United States who should sell the water and the tax payers should recover some or all of their investment in Western water development. This is another case of private enrichment from the public domain and its lese majesty—a crime against the citizens sovereign.

Sustainable Development

The system of public land, the national parks, wildlife refuges, national forests, lands administered by the Bureau of Land Management and the Department of Defense together with all the public State and local lands is not adequate to sustain biodiversity. All lands, public and private, have to be managed to foster biodiversity. This does not mean that all land has to be managed from a preservationists viewpoint, although all National Parks System land should be so managed and all wilderness should be managed as wilderness. All other developed land, whether Western gazing land or the land of New York City or Los Angeles, should be managed so as to permit the land not directly used in the development to sustain a native flora and fauna. Landscaped parks such as Central Park or Prospect Park in New York should be treated like botanical gardens. Land for development should be used parsimoniously. All land not directly in development should be allowed to support the native flora and fauna.

Using the Interstate to Promote Biodiversity

The Federal Interstate Highway System is a case in point. Great swaths of land crisscrossing the nation, north and south and east and west, carry the concrete travel ways. The early super highways had no medians and no barriers separating the oncoming lanes from each other. Many people died in head on collisions. Later roadways were widened and a median, sloping to the center, was added to avoid the head on collision. The lanes were made wider and more managed land was used for the rights of way to improve the sight distance of drivers moving at high speed. Every improvement took more land. In some areas, particularly in the East, land suddenly ran out. It was necessary to use less land and to divide the lands with heavy metal barriers, such as those found on Interstate 70 in Western Pennsylvania, where heavy semi-trailer trucks loaded with fabricated steel pass each other just a few feet apart in the opposing lanes. The steel barriers have in many places been replaced with concrete barriers which reduce to near zero the probability of jumping into the opposing lane. The heavy concrete barriers are used every where, especially where the road is under repair, as a means of protecting the road workers while the road work is under way. These concrete barriers can well form the basis of an interstate system of highways which could use a minimum amount of land.

Mow No More

If the opposing travel ways of our interstate highway system were separated from each other by these concrete barriers, if the berms were widened so that a car or truck could comfortably pull on to them and the berm ended with a concrete barrier there would be no need to maintain the vegetated parts of the rights of way. All highway mowing could be suspended with a great saving of labor and equipment and thousands of acres of land could be recaptured for the native flora and fauna. For engineering and safety purposes the rights of way should be maintained as wide as they presently are, but rather than mow the right of way, let it revert to the native vegetation. The reason for maintaining the present width of the right of way is to prevent conflicting use of the adjacent land.

If advertisers could get close to those roads they would be plastered with signs and billboards. If for some reason it were necessary for the right of way to be mowed, mow it like hay not like a lawn. It could be mowed at the least once a year and at the most twice. There is little reason except tradition to mow the right of way or to clear trees from the right of way. In the mountains of Pennsylvania, the Pennsylvania Turnpike goes through some steep terrain. For years the Turnpike Commission allowed the trees to grow right up to the berm on steep slopes. In numerous trips over that highway, I never saw any problem as a result of trees growing right next to the berm. Then one day to my chagrin the crews were out there with chain saws. They didn't improve anything and they did leave the ugly scar of cut stumps on the steep slopes. Its a wonder some of them didn't come down. Why they didn't slide became apparent the next spring when root suckers from the cut stumps sprouted abundantly. I hope they see the light and let the trees grow. Its a lot cheaper and it looks a lot nicer.

The present median should remain where it exists, but it should be separated from the travel way by a berm and a concrete barrier. The land necessary for the travel ways would be dedicated to the travel ways and the rest of the land necessary to maintain the road could be allowed to support the native flora and fauna. If larger animals pose a problem, the margin barriers, at the edge of the berm could carry a higher fence, in addition to the fence at the outer limit of the right of way! This should eliminate the problem of stray animals on the travel ways. At intervals along the right of way, conduits could be placed under the road to allow the passage of small mammals, amphibians, reptiles etc to traverse the road way. This should also be the case at each intersection so that the highways could actually function as migration routes, if the local fauna were so inclined. When I discussed this idea with a Smithsonian botanist, he exclaimed, that in such a system it should be possible to find new species—new to science.

Every Little Bit Helps

A thirteen acre dump at the northern edge of Manhattan was cleaned up by the local science teacher and transformed into a thirteen acre nature preserve. There are bits and pieces of land every where, left over from some project, out of the way, too steep to do anything with, too wet, too isolated, these bits and pieces of urban America can support thousands of individuals and hundreds of species. Consider the birds. Most insect eating birds need to be someplace where the land or water supports insects. What does it take to support insects? Not much. Why not do it? When the birds, or the frogs and salamanders go, and many amphibians are becoming endangered, its because the invertebrate life can not be sustained. They are the creatures we pay least attention to, unless they are biting us, which most are not. When they go because a swamp was filled to build a shopping center, the birds and small mammals are sure to follows. Certain creatures like the fairy shrimp live and die in ephemeral bodies of water. Little puddles that form in the pot holes on a dirt top road harbor the fairy shrimp as well as many similar places. There is something growing everywhere, and we are not so smart that we know what is growing where. As much of the landscape has to be allowed to follow its own course, so that the major number of types of habitat can remain and be available to support life.

This same reasoning applies to all forms of development, whether rural farming development, or city high rise development. The management of farms to foster wildlife has been known and taught for decades. Fence rows should not be cleaned, wild fruits and berries have to be left for the birds and small mammals etc. Hunter-conservationists are fond of planting barley and buckwheat for the deer, imitating the Fish and Wildlife Service which plants corn on large acreages to support migrating ducks. There is another potential for urban development which has a basis in antiquity but which is not much practiced in the modern world.

Roof Top Refuges

The Hanging Gardens of Babylon were one of the seven wonder's of the Ancient World. The gardens were an engineering feat of the day, but pose no mystery. The roof surfaces were covered with lead, then soil, then planted to suit. The roofs were terraced to take advantage of gravity for a trickle down irrigation system. This must have produced an awe some sight in the desert, as well as producing a beneficial effect. It should have supported the local birds and improved the local climate. Rooftop America could produce the Hanging Garden effect over thousands of acres of the urban landscape with equally beneficial effects. John Hoke, my friend and colleague at the Department of the Interior for many years, developed the rational for the modern "Roof Top Refuge."

John's notion was simple and straight forward. Reduce the maintenance of roofs and provide an amenity. A roof such as is found on the Interior Building in Washington could cost more than 60 cents/square foot/per year to maintain. Its a true waste land; having no other purpose than to keep the weather out of the building. The reason roofs go bad is that they are subject to the extremes of heat and cold while they perform their work. Heating and cooling cause expansion and contraction and pretty soon the best roof leaks. Even the lead clad cathedral roofs eventually spring leaks. Copper is less effective than lead but very good, except that now all metal roofs are being attached by acid rain.

Roof Maintenance as Gardening

The secret of the stable roof, reasoned John Hoke, was to insolate it with a living surface. A high tech version of a sod roof. Take a flat roof like that on the Interior Building in Washington. It is very strong since it was built to carry antiaircraft guns in World War II. Place a thick seamless coat of plastic directly on the roof, (the plastic should be an inch or two thick), and on top the plastic place several feet of soil. In the soil plant trees and shrubs and flowering plants. The original purpose is to build a stable leak proof roof that requires little or no maintenance. Putting these roof top plants in flower pots, no matter how big, will not do the trick. The plastic inter-surface of the roof has to be isolated. The plantings could be "landscaped" and used to accommodate employee amenities such as snack bars, restaurants, etc, but the main surface of the roof must be covered with soil and plants or the original purpose will not be achieved. Once in place, a new form or maintenance is required, that of looking after a garden or a wild planting.

The first things that will be present in the Roof Top Refuge will be the things brought there in the soil, and the soil should be rich in microflora and fauna and invertebrates, like earth worms. The trees and shrubs—and they can be full grown trees—will attract all sorts of flying life, birds and insects. Each refuge could be come a colony of amphibians and reptiles, as well as birds and small mammals.

Roof Top Refuges should do a number of things. Lets look first at the bottom line of the maintenance of the building. Roof repairs should be greatly diminished. The need to put on a new roof should be determined by the life of the plastic barrier and that, from our experience with plastics in land fills, should be a long time. Several feet of moist soil, planted with several layers of woody plants, will make a formidable insulation barrier. The constant moisture and temperature at the plastic barrier will insure its long life. This should have a simple and direct effect on the cost of heating and cooling the building. Such a facility on an office building will boost employee moral, simply because the place is pleasant.

Biologically, the benefits to biodiversity of Roof-Top Refuges, are enormous. These places could be come a principle habitat for certain endangered amphibians. They would attract bird life and the cities would really become bird sanctuaries. A few peregrine falcons will do more to reduce the number of pigeons in cities than anything I can think of Roof Top Refuges could also ameliorate the climate of cities. Planned properly they could also be come botanical gardens with certain roofs specialize with certain special flora. For instance in the prairie states the roofs might harbor the tall grass prairie. Arrangements could be worked out with the local botanical gardens to support certain desirable species in this fashion.

Save the Earth

Biodiversity is not some specialized fad pushed by people in T-shirts and split toed sneakers. Biodiversity asks simply what we are going to do to save the Earth and us with it. The problem encompasses everything we as the human species thinks and does. The problem is not just for the scientists either. As a matter of fact the most important players are politicians. The people who create land and resource policy, the people who say how the international banks are going to work. Those people, the movers and shakers of our industrialized modern world, the people who make promises to get elected, these are the important people. Second in importance, and second only because they are not enlightened or organized is the citizens sovereign, the people who cast the votes to elect the movers and shakers. Protection of biodiversity is a maintenance system for planet Earth. Maintain biodiversity and live, neglect biodiversity and perish. Homo sapiens L. is just as susceptible to extinction as the elephant.

Conservation v. Exploitation

Contrast the administrations of Jimmy Carter with Ronald Reagan and we see the what differences exist over this problem. Carter was pushing a genuine enlightening program of conservation both of energy and resources. Much of industrial America was going along with him. The United States was supporting family planning around the world and women's rights at home very moving toward equity and equality. With the election of Ronald Reagan and later George Bush the climate changed from responsibility to permissiveness. Touchy feely good time patriotic politics replaced reasoned governance. The dogs of greed were loosed and the nation went through a wrenching period of corporate dissolution and annihilation, with the junk bond dealers leading the liquidation stampede. A lot of money was made, and lost. Corporate America was bled at a time when it was most vulnerable from foreign competition. On the fabrication of false threats from The Soviet Union, defense spending went through the roof and the nation incurred its largest ever foreign and domestic debt, a debt whose main propose was to enrich the richest among us. The banks failed. The public land policy was to give away national resources, the common wealth of the citizens sovereign as fast as it could be done, selling coal on Federal land for as little as 5 cents a ton.

Concepts

The concept of biodiversity withers and dies in an environment so pervaded with greed, avarice, and disregard for the future. Twelve year's later, we as a nation are far worse off than before Reagan and Bush took office. The public lands have been pillaged. Persons whose livelihood is dependent upon the public lands think the public lands should be managed to provide them a sinecure. To address the question of biodiversity, we first have to address the question of our national purpose. If we are going to continue permissiveness greed, avarice, hostility to the public purpose so private enrichment can occur, then forget about biodiversity. At best the concept of biodiversity is a fragile, delicate, frail idea. The idea of biodiversity is like the idea of love, or good, just, or right. Its like the concept of happiness where happiness means fulfillment. Biodiversity means nothing and is helpless against disbelief. Biodiversity, greed, cupidity, rapacity, avarice are not compatible thoughts.

Ecological Equity

Biodiversity goes with the idea of common benefits, sharing, equity, fairness. Biodiversity goes along with the idea of democracy where the idea of ecological equity in a democracy can be extended to the biological world. The word is equity not equality. A purple violet is not the equal of a giant sequoia, any more than John Doe is equal to John D. Rockefeller. The purple violet and the giant sequoia have an equity in the system just as John Doe and John D. Rockefeller have their equities in they system. What is the equity of the purple violet? A chance to survive and thrive in the system. What is John Doe's and John D. Rockefeller's equity in the system, the chance to survive and thrive. For John Doe and John D. Rockefeller it means having their unalienable rights. For the purple violet arid the giant sequoia it is their equity which is having their habitat.

Choices and Costs

Are individual plants and/or people sacrificed in the name of development? Certainly. We accept that there are costs to development. We tend to isolate the cost of development into economic considerations and profit and loss sheets. Not all factors are to be found in the accountants books so we tend to be short sighted as to what the real costs. For humans, the cost is what is in the actuarial tables. World War II soldiers were costed out at $10,000 a piece. The price was actually too high because the government run insurance program that provided the coverage made a lot of money that was distributed to the surviving policy holders. What is the price of the purple violet. If there were a wild flower market it would be a simple matter to go to the market and find the price. The giant sequoia has a readily attainable price in the lumber market. How could we establish the price of the species Homo sapiens L.? Nonsense question? Probably so, since if Homo sapiens L. were brought to extinction where would the value-system be to establish the worth of the now extinct species? Would the cost of the extinct Dusky Seaside Sparrow be the cost to recreate it? How could that be done if the DNA is gone? If no quantity of money is sufficient to recreate the Dusky Seaside Sparrow does that mean that it has very great value or no value? Or is the question moot? Is there a answer at all? The question of establishing the price of life or extinction is confounded by the absolute finality of death and extinction. In such a circumstance there must be a presumption of value to any species though at the present we may not have an accurate means to assess it. This should lead us to favor nature, when it comes to a choice, precisely since the potential loss can not be evaluated. There is no value that can be put on an extinct species, especially if its DNA is lost. Every living species no matter how abundant or rare, how useful to man or not has value. Its value as a living species is vastly greater than its value as an extinct species, until the value of a living species can be established, the species should get the benefit of the doubt in a situation that could lead to its extinction. That is what the Endangered Species Act is all about. To jeopardize the act in the name of unemployment is arrogance in the extreme. There are alternatives to unemployment. There are none to extinction.

Transplants

In addition to altering habitats by technological development, humans have altered habitats by introducing exotic species in to ecosystems that are vulnerable to them. New Zealand and Hawaii are basket cases of damage wrought by exotic species in environments that have no evolutionary potential to cope with them.

Hawaii's island ecosystem plants have not had grazing pressure in their evolutionary development. There simply were no grazing animals on the islands until the Hawaiian immigrant brought the pig and Captain Cook brought the goat. The goats without discrimination eat all herbage. As for the trees, they eat the leaves,, flowers, fruits, seeds, bark, wood, roots, in short the whole tree. An acre enclosure with two goats containing a representative example of the flora, in short order was reduced to a place that looked like it had been napalmed. The pigs root. They are capable of uprooting acres of soil in search of food; corms, bulbs, roots, etc. A National Park Service policy of isolation, was responsible for great damage to one of the only tropical rain forests on U.S. territory. The Kipahula Valley of Maui was pristine. Fearing that exotics could be brought into the valley forest even on the shoes of scientists, the Park Service maintained a policy of isolation. In the meantime the pigs found the valley and since it was isolated they were able to uproot most of it before it was discovered. Unfortunately, both the pig and the goat, are endeared to the residents of the Islands who like to hunt them. The Park Service has been able to reduce the damage done by the goats by making large enclosures from which the goat was excluded. In one such enclosure a bean species, new to science, was found.

The red deer, introduced into New Zealand for hunting purposes, without predation, exploded its populations. The animals became so numerous as to become pests. Only by devising an entire industry around them has their numbers be regulated and brought under control. The red deer is now ranched with the venison going to Europe and the antlers to China into the drug trade as an aphrodisiac.

The Dutch Elm Disease, the Chestnut Blight, and the Japanese Beetle—all introduced into the United States—have been responsible for untold damage to the flora of the United States. Only with the strictest management is it possible to maintain and American Elm stand in any of our cities, and in cities where they once flourished—Columbus, OH and Minneapolis, MN—they are gone. Washington, DC is one of the few major cities of the United States that still has its elm trees. The chestnut was one of the magnificent trees of the Eastern deciduous forest. It produced an edible crop in the form of chestnuts, and it's wood and bark were the principal source of tannin for the leather industry. The loss was horrible. The Japanese Beetle will eat over 300 different kinds of plants.

Weeds

Most of the plants we call weeds were introduced into the country from the earliest days of exploration and settlement, usually with hay for livestock. Some species of animals were specially introduced. The English sparrow was introduced into the United States to control the gypsy moth which had been accidentally introduced earlier. The only thing was the English Sparrow is a seed eater. Not to worry, however. The Starling was introduced to control the English Sparrow. Bird houses were erected for them on Boston Commons. Two exotic birds were introduced for the most specious reasons. They have occupied the bird niches in our urban areas driving out the songbirds which were, once common and thrived in our cities and villages.

Some of the most devastating exotic biological organisms that were brought to the new World from Europe were the common viral and bacterial diseases of Europe. The diseases for which most of the European population had immunities. Small pox, chicken pox, measles, and scarlet fever among others killed an estimated 90% of the native populations in the Americas. It was unintentioned biological warfare, but it was the devastation of the diseases that conquered the Americas not the likes of Cortez or Pizarro.

Biodiversity is a Whole Earth Problem

Biodiversity must be preserved every where on the face of the Earth were life exists. With the Golden plover or the Arctic Tern and such other migrating birds the whole Earth is the problem. Tropical forest clearing causes losses to familiar songbird populations, that winter there and summer in the Northern Hemisphere. Biodiversity is a global problem and the whole Earth is involved. Biodiversity is a local problem because species live and die in localities.

Why, how, and when we solve the problem of biodiversity will depend entirely upon our conscious recognition that we are integral to the biosphere and that its integrity and our integrity as living systems are irretrievably intertwined. We diminish ourselves and our progeny if we continue to diminish the genetic heritage of the Earth. If we accept our connection to the Earth; and if we will take the time to perceive that our connections to the Earth are the source of our altruistically based ethical and moral powers; then felicity, serenity, and tranquility will, be ours for merely understanding. We did not make the Earth, the Earth made us. We express our thanks by acknowledging and understanding that.

...Ted Sudia...

Editor's note: Further recommendations to foster and promote biodiversity will appear in a future issue of We The People.

IdT's Goals and Objectives

• To promote the pacific arts and sciences.

• To promote the teaching of nature study and ecology.

• To promote education and research in human ecology.

• To reach out to people in all walks of life to inform them as to the merits of ecological thinking and its value to human society.

• To promote the use of this knowledge to increase citizen awareness and understanding of government, society, and the human community of the world.

• To promote the application of this knowledge to improve our personal natural and social environment and the natural and social environment of our nation and the world.

© Copyright 1993
Institute for domestic Tranquility