Date published: 2009/05/07
Barry Gardiner (a Labour MP) says on the BBC:
Every form of life on this planet stands not on its own but is supported by, and supports, other living things.
Lose one species and you lose a vital part of some ecosystem.
That means you lose not just a plant or an insect but a service: you lose the medicine that comes from that plant; you lose the pollination of crops which that insect provides.
Climate change matters, not because the world mustn't get any hotter, but because the rate of change is too fast for species to keep pace.
As species die, so biodiversity is depleted and with it the ecosystem services that such biodiversity provides.
How ridiculous then that over the last three months, climate change has had 1,382 mentions in British national newspapers.
Yet, during the same period, biodiversity was mentioned just 115 times.
Well lots of important things get mentioned even less than biodiversity. It's just an indication of what stories the mainstream media wants to push, or not. Gardiner's line seems to be that if only the biodiversity crowd were better at marketing and spin then the world would be a better place. Unfortunately, although the article sets out the usual complaints of the biodiversity crowd (and it's pretty amazing to find an MP coherent enough to even do that), Gardiner doesn't offer any solutions except the usual platitudes that biodiversity should be treated more seriously. Well, any solution almost certainly involves a reduction in human population, which nobody wants to talk about (this certainly rates no mention in the article, but again, he doesn't make any real suggestions at all, so this is not surprising).
_________________________________________________________
All material not included from other sources is copyright cambridge2000.com.
For further information or questions email: info [at] cambridge2000 [dot] com
(replace "[at]" with "@" and "[dot]" with ".").