Why Preserve Biodiversity?
The loss of species is the folly our descendents are least likely to forgive us E.O. Wilson, Professor, Harvard University 1. Ever since the United Nations’ 1992 “Earth Summit” in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, the word biodiversity has jumped out at us from magazines and news articles. What is biodiversity, and why should we be concerned with preserving it? Biodiversity refers to the total number of species within an ecosystem and to the resulting complexity of interaction among them; in short, it defines the “richness” of an ecological community. 2. Over the 3.5 billion-year history of life on Earth, evolution has produced an estimated 8 million to 10 million unique and irreplaceable species. Of these, scientists have named only about 1.4 million, and only a tiny fraction of this number has been studied. Evolution has not, however, merely been churning out millions of independent species. Over thousands of years, organisms in a given area have been molded by forces of natural selection exer
