Safeguarding Biodiversity

How can we safeguard our planet's Biodiversity?

Deforestation is rapidly destroying the amount of biodiversity necessary to sustain the Earth's ecosystem. Unfortunately, the self-absorbed, seeking-nature of the human race continues to pulverize trees, plants and animals into gold-plated dust meant to support shopping malls, hotels and human greed. Although a vast store of researched information and statistically significantly facts concerning biodiversity loss and its permanently negative affects on the human race has existed for decades, dramatics changes in the natural habitat of millions of animals, from the smallest insect to the largest sea creature, continues to occur at rates that should be making even the most unconcerned global citizen feel great sadness and despair over the lives of future generations.

What can be done to stop deforestation and urbanization? Would providing more education about the importance of biodiversity as it pertains to each individual and animal living on Earth help to make people realize that safeguarding biodiversity means safeguarding a plentiful and comfortable existence? Fortunately, biodiversity restoration is possible at this point in time before the soil covering deforested areas or areas of desertification is rendered dead or toxic to the essential building blocks of life.

Necessary to a thriving ecosystem is the ability for several elements to experience a naturally facilitated interconnectedness that is conducive to maintaining populations--bacteria and molds for decomposition, insects, vegetation and animals. When one of these elements is eradicated, biodiversity no longer exists. Consequently, without biodiversity, humans will no longer exist. Without viable populations of animals contributing to the ecology of a specific area (by "viable", ecologists mean the existence of approximately several hundred individuals capable of reproducing), the finely tuned web of life dissolves into a cacophony of the howls, screeches and growls emitted by the last remaining members of a wildlife community.

Preserving or restoring biodiversity involves taking swift and aggressive action emphasizing methods of addressing the needs of the largest population of humans that has ever lived on Earth which do not depend on the destruction of ecosystems provided by heavily forested areas. To address the reliance of people on forests for their livelihood, regulators will need to invest in biodiversity "interventions" consisting of replanting, re-nourishing and re-populating areas of deforestation and desertification while restricting the continued desecration of land and implementing reserves to safeguard the viability of species considered endangered or potentially endangered.

Other methods for maintaining biodiversity include ecoforestry, the "greening of businesses, carefully planning land use by developing environmentally friendly strategies designed to reduce urban sprawl and assisting local peoples in accessing employment opportunities that do not include destroying forests and obliterating biodiversity. With Madagascar losing nearly 90 percent of its rainforests in the eastern portion of the country and Haiti now possessing only about one percent of the lush forests that once covered the majority of the island, preserving our environment should not be the passion of a few but the passion of an entire race - the human race.