Wildlife, biodiversity and climate
A habitable climate depends on wildlife and biodiversity, because:
- Climate is a consequence of biodiversity and biodiversity is everything that ecosystems represent to life on Earth;
- A stable climate and therefore, a habitable Earth, depends on stabilising ecosystems; and
- Animals are the only mechanism that can do that.
As wildlife declines, we are breaking down biodiversity structure and losing energy (in the form of carbon) out of food chains and into the atmosphere and ocean. This way, climate and our food security are inextricably linked. We’re not only stripping soils of the material needed to feed us, we’re also introducing chaotic free energy into our atmosphere and causing huge fluctuations in the weather. The latter makes it harder for us to know when, where and how to feed ourselves.
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The Biodiversity and Climate Change IPBES-IPCC report came out last week with delegates confirming the over-riding view that the two are connected. It’s a step forward but the report does …
Climate change: fossil fuels v. wildlife
Climate change has always been the symptom of biodiversity loss … that’s to say, the breakdown of the complex connectivity between lifeforms that allows Earth to flex in response to changing conditions.
Only recently have we created artificial climate change by mining carbon buried deep underground by animals millions of years ago. The animals that did that are no longer around and today’s animals, that would be busy moderating modern-day carbon, have populations that are heavily depleted.
We cannot engineer our way out of this crisis. We can only rebuild ecosystems rich in a diversity of animal life.
Latest posts about why the oceans are important
A new study on whale voice boxes shows how they can produce such complex sounds. But naturally, there are limitations to how loudly they can sing and the implications of this are vast for our own existence on Earth. How whale song and human survival are connected is a fascinating journey through the complexity of life that I cover in my book Wildlife in the Balance.
If we threaten the structural integrity of the soundscape it’s like moving the television into the office or the dishwasher into the living room. The complex acoustic scaffolding that wildlife produces is critical to ecosystem function. Animals are building rooms for themselves … we might call these ‘territories’. These are places where they can live in peace, and if we upset this, we destroy the ambience, increase anxiety and create conflict.
Quote from Wildlife in the Balance.
Communication between animals makes culture more stable
The language between animals like whales is not one we can understand. But we don’t need to. Culture is developed exactly the same way as ours through communication between individuals and societies. This ultimately leads to a balancing of ecosystems and the services on which we have built human civilization for the last few hundred years.
At the end of the day we are just another animal and our basic needs are clean air, water and food. The systems of noisy transport we create are not, of themselves, an evolutionary stable strategy as they don’t make the essential life support we need. We still depend on having animals as part of that ecosystem.
This is how whale song and human survival are connected. It’s why we cannot afford to allow whales not to hear each other … without this, we cannot survive.
Whales create a better climate for living
Sperm whales are the only species with individuals with that have a biologically world-wide home-range. Their entire life is spent listening for food and they would once have had a profound impact on our climate. Climate is simply the end-point of a system where energy is otherwise absorbed into providing food, clean air and water. Natural climate systems are built by animals.
Blue whales too, have a huge impact on our weather systems. They make the difference between bush fires and floods in Australia.
Sperm whales are among the world’s biggest (also in terms of body size) amplifiers and transporters of nutrients in the oceans, but have declined by as much as eighty per cent from pre-whaling numbers of 1.1 million animals. They are among the largest creatures to have ever lived and are the only animals that regard the whole of the world as their home range.
Quote from Wildlife in the Balance.
It’s one of the many reasons why the strapline of my book is ‘animals are humanity’s best hope’.
