Biodiversity Day!

Well, quite a while since this blog last received some attention...

No better way to get back up and running with a guest blog from Kew's biodiveristy expert Oliver Whaley on Biodiveristy Day (22nd May 2015).

Biodiveristy Day (and Sustainable development)

When you mention biodiversity to a non-biologist, eyes can glaze, brows can furrow and to some it's not a washing powder they recognise. As the word becomes ever more ubiquitous and a victim of its own success, one wonders whatever happened to the good old ‘nature’ – nature studies from a dewy beetle on a nature book to the smell in the spring sun. Around 30 years ago, just as the molecular lid lifted and beguiling tech and cyberspace begun to suck us in, Natural science and Nature got a facelift and since then, the contraction ‘biodiversity’ has inspired and exasperated and sadly even alienated - not least kids under five.

But to most scientists even the word biodiversity was, and still is, ever mind expanding (as far as a recycling leaflet) ever embracing through scales: from panda to beetle, beetle to thrip; from a bitterling fish (that uses a mussel to conceive), from cuticle to gene, from the gene to histone code and cosmic gene switching, to a fly filled Rafflesia humming warm below a canopy that is seeding intercontinental spores to make yesterday’s raindrop on your nose – yep biodiversity says it ALL, and it all depends on plants - (well most of it). 

And so here we are again, biodiversity day, a chance to celebrate the wonderful inexplicable vast and exuberant life explosion in which we all find ourselves existentially as one slightly guilty component species of.  Actually wrong, the vast bit was a scale thing, as we know now with ever bigger stratospheric probing, we are on a tintsy little earth, stuck in its fragile shell, (sun loving biodiv. bit) and realise our big heads got the better of us. And there is likely to be nothing else like it anywhere, ever. And that biodiversity; the embroidery holding together the fabric of our existence, the warp and weft of life is our life - the only life.

Alfonso Orellana García has a prickly encounter with the a species from Peru, where Kew Gardens works in collaboration with local groups to monitor and protect the amazing plants of this region

So you would think at least by now we would make conservation of biodiversity a governmental and business priority if not obligation. But the tragic truth (as halls of the biologist continue to sigh) is that today the explosion of life has been curtailed and instead nature - that over millions of years gave rise to every drop of blood, every gene and every breath we take - is being crushed, extinguished, eradiated, stamped out - just look down or look it up.  And we, that have come so far, have become so from far from nature, ever more ignoring of its soft whispers as our gaze is blocked by screens.

And this is why biodiversity day was born and conceived by people, not to celebrate, as much as to scream, and to say wake up! this is amaaaazing and please let’s stop destroying, it is really, really, really useful, it’s all we got, no got more anywhere, ‘nada mas’, ‘nicht mehr’, ‘pas plus’ and to destroy it, is, - and yes I guess you know the ending – is to destroy ourselves (the earth that might be OK) and the important bit - this is a soul destroying process.

Lomas desert vegetation of coastal Peru

As the theme this year is biodiversity and sustainable development there are a few projects below that are helping to sustain and rebuild biodiversity – a drop or two in the ocean yes - but if everyone joined in and enjoyed being in nature as part of biodiversity…..well, we would be all right.