To Johannes Mayr, whose Grace, Heart and Intelligence inspired this work ...

rayappa a. kasi an appeal to save life on earth united nations international year of biodiversity 2010 LTD Media Publications, Chennai, India © Copyright LTD Media All rights reserved. This book is printed in India. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

Contact Address: Rayappa A. Kasi, A. Kattupadi, Vellore – 632011, India. Email – [email protected] Mobile Phone - 09443537885

Earth - Designed for Biodiversity. Life will find a Way!

Day of Publication 15.8.2010 LTD Media Publication, Chennai, India

Other Publications from the Author: Earth-The Lost Paradise of Happiness, 2009 Global Warming - Everything you want to know! , 2010 Biosphere - The Fragility of Our Natural Heritage, 2010 Lithosphere - A Destructive Creator, 2010 Hydrosphere - The Giver of Life, 2010 Atmosphere – A Thin Line Between Life and Death, 2010

Front Jacket Illustration: Picture of Trilobite – Trilobites means “three lobed,” and they are extinct, exclusively marine arthropods, known fondly to everybody who has read much about fossils. In size, they ranged from a few millimeters to more than 60 cm, and are among the most common fossils— and the most distinctive index fossils—of their time. They appear suddenly in great abundance in the Cambrian, and evolved into a wonderful diversity, particularly during the Ordovician, 450 million years ago before gradually dwindling away towards extinction some 300 million years later, in the Permian. An understanding of their history is central to any hypothesis of the development of the marine biosphere during the early Paleozoic. Trilobites Symbolize the Fragility of Our Biospheric Natural Heritage.

Cover Page designed by Rayappa A. Kasi Cover Photo – Fossilized Trilobite from 350 million years ago Printed at Lokavani Southern Printers Pvt. Ltd., 122, Greams RoadChennai-600 006 Contents

The Beginning Chapter I – The Story of Life from Monday to Saturday

* Life the Wonder on Earth 3 * The Power of Creation 10 * Cell - The Cryptex of Life 11 * Fish – The Big Brother 14 * Amphibians – The Conqueror of the Land 16 * Creation of Green Color 18 * Flower – Plant’s Enlightenment 19 * Reptiles – The Most Extreme on Earth 21 * Birds – Air Force One 24 * Mammals – The Last Passenger of Earth 28 * Dream of a Penthouse 31 * Ape – Who wants be an Angel 34 * The Handy Man – Maker of Tools 40 * Homo Sapiens – Man of Wisdom 43 * Humanity in Dreamtime 46

Chapter II – The Kingdom of Life is the Kingdom of God * The Kingdom of God is All about Life and Biodiversity 51 * The Saga of Life in Ancient Thought 56 * Aristotle’s View on the Origin of Species 60 * Early Christian Reappraisals 63 * The Pyramid of Life – An Ancient Wonder of the World 66 * The Kingdom of Life – The Habitat of God 67 * The Classification of Two Organisms 70 1. The Kingdom of Bacteria:Monera – The Planetmates 71 2. The Kingdom of Protista (Protoctista or Protists) 79 3. The Kingdom of Fungi 84 4. The Kingdom of Plants (Plantae) 88 5. The Kingdom of Animals (Animalia) 92 * The Wilderness Experience – Reconnecting with Nature 95 * Rush to Riches – The War on Creation 98

1 Chapter III – Life Will Find a Way * Living Planet and the Gaia Hypothesis 104 * Resurrection – The Immortality of Life 105 * Phoenix – It shall Rise Again 107 * How to Define Earth Life? 110 * Life in Solid, Liquid, Gas – Cells 112 * Genetic Code – The Stamp of Earth Life 113 * DNA – Deoxyribonucleic Acid 115 * The DNA Record of Evolution 117 * Natural Selection – The Engine of Life 118 * Mutation – We are all Mutants 123 * Life – The Most Extreme 125 * The Bizarre Style of Life - An Eerie Contras 128 * Extremophiles – Some Like it Hot 132 * Panspermia – Astrobiology 134 * Life on Mars 136 * The New Environmental Revolution – Ecopsychology 137 * Biophilia, Biophobia and Ecopsychology 141 * The Vision of an Ecological Universe 143 * Healers or Hecklers of Biodiversity – Ecological Unconscious 145 * Things we can’t Change 149 * Things we can Change 150

Chapter IV – An Appeal to Save Life on Earth * Planet Earth is Dying – Save Planet Earth 154 * Divine Origin Makes an Appeal 158 * Human Responsibility Makes an Appeal 160 * Appeal from the Symphony of Species 163 * Protect Diversity and Habitats 165 * Save All Ecosystems 162 * Save Grassland – A Remarkable Endurance 177 * Save Rain Forests – The Green Cathedrals 182 * Save Microbes – Life Down Under 186 * Bioethical Evaluation and Principles 187 * Save Organic Agriculture and Bioethics 189 * Transgenics: Agricultural Biotechnology – Save us from Evil 191 * Bioethical Determinants 193 2 Contents

* Our Food is not “Natural” 194 * Changing the Nature of Creation 196 * Addendum: 7 Principles of Human Sustainable Organic Agriculture 196 * Save Humanity from Spiritual Corruption 198 * An Appeal to Pontiffs to Save Life on Earth 203

Chapter V – Planet Earth is Designed for Biodiversity * Deciphering the Design of Biodiversity 206 * Species Design – How Many Species? 211 * Biosphere – The Fragility of our Natural Heritage 213 * Free Services from Nature – The Life Sustaining Matrix 218 * Biosphere is Designed for Biodiversity 219 * Humus: Detritus – Resurrection Factory 224 * Magic Kingdom of Marine Biodiversity 228 * Terra Incognita and Vita Incognita 232 * Estuaries and Wetlands – Biodiversity’s Nightmare 236 * Biodiversity – The Apex of Evolution 238 * Sociobiology of Edward O. Wilson 239 * Sacred Depths of Nature is Designed by God 240 * Awareness and Consciousness – The Latest Designs of Biodiversity 244 * Race - Designed by Natural Selection 247 * The Credo of Continuation – We are Designed to Believe 251 * Ethical Argument – Advocate for Biodiversity 254 * New Design – A New Heart and a New Soul 256

Chapter VI – War on Biodiversity and Extinctions * Man has Declared War on Biodiversity 259 * Extinctions Cascades – Old and New 260 * The Five Mass Extinctions 262 * Quaternary-Holocene Mass Extinction – Right Now 267 * Extinction – A Destructive Creator 268 * A Voice of Doubt on an Alliance of Hope 270 * Biodiversity Loss – Quick Facts 272 * Marine Over-harvesting – The Massacre of the Innocents 281 * Mysterious Disappearance of Amphibians 282 * Frog – A New Canary in the Coalmine 284 3 * Habitat Loss and Extinction 286 * Gaia – The Mother Earth: The Long Road Ahead 289 * Can Evolution Account for Ethics? 290 * World’s Most Important Unknown Target 293 * Climate Change and Water Stress 294 * Water Danger Zones 295 * Bees and Cellphones – The Compass Awry 297 * 35 Hotspots – Nature’s Gift to Future Generations 300 * The Good Samaritan 302 * Sacrifice – The Key to Conservation 304 * Conservation – A Good Investment 305

Chapter VII – Life Yet to Come * Extinction – The Creator of Future Life 309 * Are we still Evolving? 311 * The Future of Evolution 312 * Eight Pillars to be Defended 315 * Old Age – When Natural Selection Retires 317 * Future World is Opaque 321 * Biodiversity Crisis – Six Undeniable Facts 323 * Three Urgent Options and Three Useful Strategies 328 * Man in the Future – War with Ants 332 * Human Population – The Human Juggernaut 335 * Environmental Despair 337 * Restoring Habitats, Communities and Relationships 338 * Love for Life in Ancient India – Sangam Literature 339 * Seven Sacraments of Ecology 345 * Top Ten Reasons to Care for Creation 347 * Man – The Avatar for Conservation 349 * Faith as Guiding Light 349 * Our Aspirations for Future Life 350 * Sermon on the Mount – Magna Carta on Sustainable Development 351 * The Real Stewards of the Earth – Microbes 355 * Finally … 357 Bibliography 359 Index 367 4 The Beginning

Are you aware that the planet is dying? We all are equally responsible for the state of the planet and equally affected by it. We must become more aware. And contribute that awareness rather than our denial to the stream of human consciousness. We must become part of the solution rather than part of the problem. What is the responsibility of a person on a dying planet? Physician, heal thyself! We could heal the wounded planet, if our disposition is that of a Good Samaritan! The wounded man from the Bible was saved, because “someone, a Good Samaritan cared.” “If you want to Cultivate Peace, Protect Creation,” wrote Pope Benedict XVI. Today, as desert sands advance across Africa like conquering armies, India and China with their rising human populations like desert sand, and the Biodiversity is on the retreat in every continent, it occurs to me that the Earth is unfortunately in the advance state of exhaustion. We go to church, temple, and mosque while outside the air gets fouler and the oceans’ ecosystems break down. Meanwhile hundreds, perhaps thousands of species, have vanished forever from the Earth. Each hour 8 kilometers of rainforest are destroyed; by the end of a year, this area of destruction is the size of Sri Lanka. We are facing an unparalleled global crisis, a disaster much greater than Hitler, Stalin, or the Khmer Rouge could ever create. Open your eyes and see the situation we are in right now! I don’t see any—Good Samaritan, or redeemer, or savior coming on the way.

What is the “status quo” the “sitz im leben” or “situation in life,” in the field of Biodiversity? Let me say something about the status quo. The status quo is that the hole in the ozone layer is again under pressure. The status quo is we are crossing 7 billion human-population-mark and by the end of this century we will be 10 billion rivaling ants and termites, and definitely— we would have made planet Earth—one big anthill. The status quo is that some scientists are predicting that by the middle of this century global warming will result in most of the coastal cities around the world being below sea level, and make most of the habitats would be water-worlds, including Chennai, Mumbai, London, New York, Boston, Amsterdam, and many other coastal towns. The status quo is that acid rain, besides destroying the lakes and forests, is now considered to be the leading cause of lung cancer after cigarette smoke. The status quo is that thirty-five thousand people die of starvation every day. Also every day, two or more species become extinct, not due to natural selection but due to deforestation and pollution. By the year 2020 this is expected to accelerate to one hundred species a day. In other words: “mass extinction.” It is already upon us. What does this say to you? To me it says that the status quo is that the planet is dying! The planet is dying because we are satisfied with our limited relationships in which control, denial, and abuse are tolerated.

Laboratories around the world are experiencing a “bioexplosion,” as they busily sequence, identify, and switch genes among different species. From the creation of herbicide-resistant soybeans to the splicing of human genes into pigs and goats, new developments in biotechnology pose serious questions. How has genetic engineering put animals’ health at risk? What are the economic and biological consequences of a genetically altered future? Will this new technology mean the end of natural evolution? Definitely, a new world order—one based on genetic engineering biotechnology—will affect the course of life on Earth. The direction being taken and the whys of biotechnology in agriculture should concern us all, because we consumers are now the guinea pigs for testing the genetically engineered foods. An estimated 60 percent of processed foods now contain some genetically engineered ingredients. Why should this concern us? Because the very nature of genetic engineering is fraught with unforeseen consequences, and because the precautionary principle is not being applied by the life-science industry for reasons of cost and limited scientific ability to predict consequences. Splicing genes from one organism into another will produce changes in the complex composition of the new genetically engineered life form. When biotechnologists focus only on introducing a desired trait, such as herbicide resistance in soybeans, for example, other unexpected changes in the plant’s composition may be overlooked. These changes may come to light after more research, but because of costs, such research would be undertaken only if the new life form causes recognized consumer health or environmental problems.

Harm that is being done to farm and laboratory animals should also concern us as humanitarians and as consumers. Already, harm and risk are accepted by the biotechnology industry such that, in its quest to commoditize life, animals are being deliberately created with genetic defects that will guarantee that they suffer sometime after they are born. Thousands of varieties of mice with genetically engineered diseases have been created, further imbedding in the public mind the belief that this is medical progress and the good ends justify the evil means of deliberately creating animals that will suffer. Plants are deliberately engineered to produce toxins that kill or reduce the fertility and vitality of beneficial insects. The food industry sees organic farming as a major enemy and touts the benefits of genetically enhanced ostensibly more nutritious crops instead of first enhancing the soil organically to make crops naturally

ii healthy and nutritious. Thousands of dairy cows have been put at risk by milk producers who inject them with an engineered hormone that supposedly will make them more “efficient” and “productive”; many of these cows break down physically, become diseased and nonproductive, and are slaughtered in their prime.

What future wonderland is the genetic sorcerer creating for us? I foresee virtual-reality zoological parks with cloned and forever preserved endangered species—pandas, Siberian tigers, Nilgiri langurs—but never enough species to replenish and restore natural ecosystems. Is the death of nature, even the end of natural evolution, inevitable? Shall we accept the expropriation of God’s creation, the disenfranchisement of an omnipresent divinity that is inside all things? We have become blind to the perfection of larks, locusts, and loco weeds within healthy ecosystems in a once perpetual state of regeneration and transformation. We harm and destroy myriad interconnected species, co-evolving, co-creating, maintaining, and ever changing forest, jungle, savanna, lake, and ocean ecosystems. With, each extinction stargate closes, and a connection in the once seamless web of planetary life is severed forever. Many extinctions— genocide indeed and ecocide—are justified on the grounds of “progress” and profits, which escalate ecological imbalances. There are new weeds, plagues, and pestilences against which we wage war without understanding that they are symptoms of ecological imbalance most often caused by us. For example, we choose to raise crops in ecologically unsound ways, using synthetic herbicides and chemical fertilizers that sterilize the living soil and make plants sick and more prone to blights and pests. Because we choose to incarcerate animals in factory farms and feedlots, we release a Pandora’s box of new zoonotic bacterial diseases that cause food poisoning and death in consumers of meat, eggs, poultry, dairy products, and seafoods.

Biodiversity refers to the variety of life on Earth. It encompasses the wide array of ecosystems, ecological processes, species and genes that contribute to human health and well-being. The United Nations declared 2010 as the International Year of Biodiversity to bring greater attention to the importance of Biodiversity and efforts to reduce the current rate of Biodiversity loss. UN International year 2010 was negotiated in response to the world-wide species’ extinctions, including trees, insects, animals, aquatic life and natural organisms. Biodiversity loss is one of the most significant threats facing the global environment. This year is dedicated to celebrating the world’s Biodiversity and making progress on the UN Convention on

iii Biodiversity, which was established at the 1992 Rio “Earth Summit.” The Convention on Biodiversity, which has been signed by almost every country in the world, has three main goals:

1. To conserve Biodiversity.

2. The use of Biodiversity in a sustainable fashion.

3. To share the benefits of Biodiversity fairly and equitably.

The parties to the Convention decided to make 2010 their deadline for achieving a “significant reduction of the current rate of Biodiversity loss,” and so this year was declared the International Year of Biodiversity. As a Catholic priest, I naturally couldn’t let this international year go by without putting together a reading challenge for it! By learning more about Biodiversity—we can better appreciate its value and—do more to ensure its protection at home and around the world. To that end I’ve put together a selection of reading challenges for this year and future.

In this book, we begin with origin of life. The fundamental similarities of all living things point to a single origin of today’s life on Earth, which means we are kith and kin to crabs and cacti. The tree of life is no longer a metaphor, but a genealogy of all living things that even now is being built from clues to ancestry hidden in the genetic code of every living thing. Darwin guessed that the human species had evolved in Africa, and the fossil evidence now shows that he was right about that too. Darwin was mocked for suggesting that humans have apes for ancestors, but every scientific advance in the study of life in the last 150 years has confirmed the reality of evolution. We share about 99% of our DNA with chimps and this common ancestry has the deepest implications for how we see ourselves. If one thing sets us apart from our primate relatives, it is our minds. He also wrote that it was difficult to imagine how structures as complicated and sophisticated as eyes could have evolved by gradual steps through natural selection, but in “body building” we discover that it was easier than anyone imagined. Just as revelatory is the unfolding story, illustrated by recent fossils and genetic studies that chronicled how whales and dolphins evolved from terrestrial ancestors.

Concerns about genetic pollution, loss of wildlife and Biodiversity, and disruption of ecological and evolutionary processes will be also discussed in this book. Concerns and conclusions are supported with documented research reports and expert opinions. My major concern, which I hope

iv readers will thoroughly consider, is the state of mind or worldview that is behind the development of a new industry and world order based on genetic manipulation, control, and monopoly. Most of these developments in genetic commerce have been in a virtual ethical vacuum, often in secrecy. And as many critics point out, government oversight has been minimal and public involvement precluded. Human civilizations through the ages will be characterized by a particular worldview or state of mind that is an amalgam of various beliefs, values, and aspirations. The worldview of biotechnology and the new “life-science” industry that it has birthed is an outgrowth of the dominant worldview of industrial civilizations and is not, contrary to its claims, based on either sound science or objective reason. This is the central concern, therefore, of this book, because in the wrong hands, and with this dominant worldview driving biotechnology, our newfound power over the genes of life will do more harm than good, and in cause and effect will amount to a new world disorder.

When the ability to crack and rearrange the genetic code, imprinted into the double helix, was discovered, the paired spiraling molecules of DNA became the next frontier of nature to be exploited. The new life- science industry, served by a scientific priesthood of genetic engineers, is changing what some theologians call God’s words, encoded in the DNA of all living beings, into their own lexicon of useful and profitable market products. Applied with a very different worldview, one of great caution and humility, which sees every creature and creation as the word of God, this newfound power over creation and evolution could produce great good. There must be reason within reason as well, knowing that we do not know enough to guarantee that genetic engineering will have no harmful consequences. Many people have become aware recently of the social and ethical problems associated with changing the human genome by genetic engineering, and with the specter of cloning people. But these issues are not the most serious ones in biotechnology at present. The same bioethical constraints that will help maximize the medical benefits of biotechnology are those that most urgently need to be applied in the now global expansion of producing genetically engineered crops and foods. We cannot yet create life or stop death forever with biotechnology, but we can and do control and alter much of life on Earth already to serve our own pecuniary ends. The biological, ecological, evolutionary, ethical, and social consequences of genetically altering life cannot be ignored.

v Evolution is a fact, beyond reasonable doubt. The evidence for evolution is at least as strong as the evidence for the Holocaust, even allowing for eye witnesses to the Holocaust. Evolution means change through successive generations. It is the plain truth that we are cousins of chimpanzees, somewhat more distant cousins of monkeys, more distant cousins still of aardvarks and manatees, yet more distant cousins of bananas and turnips … continue the list as long as desired. As we begin to look at all of our personal concerns from a global perspective, we could see that the patterns of control, denial, and projection that sabotage intimate relationships are the very patterns that endanger the world. To change these patterns is to change not just our social lives but our relationship to the planet. Viktor Frankl in his book—”The Unheard Cry for Meaning,” cites his own experience as an inmate in Auschwitz and Dachau, and his work with prisoners of war, he asserts that the will to meaning has survival value; that those most likely to survive were those who were oriented toward something outside themselves, a meaning to be fulfilled: “In a word, existence was dependent on self transcendence.” A transcendence of sorts is necessary if we are to meet the challenge of the global crisis— a transcendence of who we are in relationship to the human community and to the planet.

Some people still believe that it’s not their responsibility. Some people convince themselves that “it’s not happening.” Or that “it’s not my planet.” If this is not my planet, whose is it? If this is not my family, whose is it? If not my responsibility, whose? I am both the victim and the victimizer. I am the cause and I am the cure. When I act out of this realization, I act not out of guilt but out of self-love, a love that includes my family, which includes my planet. Planet Earth is wounded and bleeding in front of you. Many of us don’t give a damn about it, leaving the planet nonetheless vulnerable, still waiting for the Good Samaritan. You are the Good Samaritan! When I look, I see. When I educate myself, I break through my denial and see that humankind is facing an absolutely unprecedented crisis. When I act from this knowledge, I act not out of obligation or idealism, but because I live in a straw house and I smell smoke. I realize the truth that, in Dr. Krishnamurti’s words—”You are the world, and the world is on fire.” Perhaps it is time for another leap. It is time to begin to go beyond our individual families to attend to the human family. Of the thirty- five thousand people who die of starvation each day, the large majority are children. Whose children are these? If we are the human family, these are our children, pure and simple. These children don’t have to die of hunger.

vi Planet Earth has enough resources to feed everybody. But greed and geographical national borders pose an obstacle in the middle. The first is the sharing of natural resources. Arab countries happen to be in the place where fossil fuel deposits are plentiful. This doesn’t mean they belong exclusively to those countries. Those natural resources belong to humanity of today and tomorrow. They are God’s gift to humanity not to any one nation, but to all nations. Likewise, all the natural resources irrespective of the country of their origin, they belong to present and future humanity. The second is on responsibility for oneself and each other. There is a recognition that we are all in this together. One generation sacrifices, in limiting their consumption of natural resources for the sake of next generation. In the natural world one species sacrifices its life for the sake of another. All religions believe in the power of sacrifice, and in Christianity it becomes the core message of the mission to the world. If humanity understands the importance of sacrifice and if every individual can do this, we can create new possibilities for our planet and Biodiversity.

What does the future hold, not just for us, but for the other species with which we share our evolutionary history and this planet? It may seem like an overstatement to assert that the integrity and future of creation is threatened more by these new technologies than by any other past human invention or activity, including nuclear fission and the development and release of petrochemicals into the environment. But by the end of this book I believe that the evidence presented will have convinced even those who are enchanted by the promises of genetic engineering biotechnology that it is already dangerously on the wrong path. There is a right path. Critics who dismiss these concerns are living in denial. Those responsible for the creation of altered life must also be responsible for the future integrity of the natural world, for public health and safety, and for the socially just and equitable use of life’s genetic resources. These issues should concern and involve us all. We must ensure that our power over the genes of life and the future of creation is tempered by reason and compassion to improve the human condition and enhance the life and beauty of the natural world. Man may die and disappear, so did the dinosaurs and TRILOBITES. But Life is here to stay forever and Life is immortal! We read in the ancient sacred text: (Brihad-Aranyka Upanishad 1. 3. 28): “From the unreal lead me to the light. From darkness lead me to light. From death lead me to immortality.”

I thank Bishop Soundararaju. SDB, Fr. Inniah Mangarpu, Fr. S. J. Anthonysamy, Fr. Cruz Hieronymus, Fr. R. Antonysamy, Fr. Raja SJ,

vii Fr. Chinnadurai SJ, Fr. John Samala SDB, Fr. Lawrance Varam SDB, Fr. Chinnappa OMI, Fr. Augustine Sellam SDB, Fr. M. Charles, Fr. M. Johnson, Fr. Christian, Fr. D. F. Bosco, Fr. Paul Ring, Fr. James Flavin, Fr. Paul MacDonald, Fr. John J. Shea, Fr. Bill Schmidt, Fr. Mario Origgo, Fr. Stephen Pillai, Fr. A.C. Savarimuthu, Fr. Roy Lazar. Fr. Henry George, Fr. Joseph, Fr. Susai Regis, Fr. Gnana Jyothi, Fr. Albin Justus, Fr.Jeyaseelan, Fr. Kulandesu, Fr. Berchamans SDB, Fr. Charles SDB, Fr. Y. Arockiasamy, Fr. Martin, Fr. Arulsamy, Fr. Brian Smith, Fr. Brian Flynn, Fr. Joemics, Fr. James Vincent, Fr. Wilson, Fr. Manohardoss, Fr. Samuel, Fr. S. Lourdusamy, Fr. Joe Lourdusamy, Bishop Christopher Kakooza, Bishop Brian Finnigan, Emmanuel Cardinal Wamala, Fr. Ian Wren, Fr. Ken Howell, Fr. D. Maria Joseph, Fr. Chitrarasu SDB, Fr. Patrick Joji SDB, Fr. Arulraj Kasi SDB, Fr. Sagayaraj Kasi SDB, Fr. Ernest Pathy SDB, Fr. Praveen Samala SDB, Fr. Marianna Michael Samala, Fr. Luisiba Stephen, Fr. Arasu SDB, Mrs. Francine Bell, Theresa Moses, May Brophy, Kevin Brophy and the Brophies of Brockton, Tom Sheen, John and Lorraine Breithaupt, C. Chitra, Sivagami, Lilly and George Madathill, Vahini, Vanitha, Kanimozhli, Juliana Jacintha, Sathiaseelan, Amalorpavados, Sr. Baby Victoria, Sr. Veda, Sr. Fatima, Sr. Auxilia, Sr. Leonie, Sr. Alphonse FMA, Sr. Margaret Pathy FMA, Sr. Amala FMA, Sr. May FMA, Sr. Felix, Sr. Eugene FMA, Maria und Johann Mayr, Uli and Gottfriet, Fransciska, Maria and Christian Auer, Alois and Heidi, Grossmutter, Aruldoss and Stella Mangarpu, I thank Mrs. Sumathi Mathews for the expert advice on Ancient Sangam Literature of Tamil Country, India. I thank in a special way to Sagayam Deva and Josephine for their dedication to ecology, for publishing this book through their LTD Media Publication. Last but not the least, I thank to my mom Balamma Kasi and to all my brothers and their families for their understanding of my passion for ecology and Biodiversity. They brand me in their own way that I am crazy!

Fr. Rayappa A. Kasi A. Kattupadi Post Vellore – 632 011 India. Email : [email protected]

August 15th, 2010 – Independence Day of India Feast of Our Lady of Assumption

viii Chapter I

The Story of Life from Monday to Saturday “Then was neither non-existence nor existence: there was no realm of air, no sky beyond it. Death was not then, nor was there anything immortal: no sign was there, the Day’s and Night’s divider. Darkness there was: at first concealed in darkness this All was indiscriminated chaos. All that existed then was indiscriminated chaos. All that existed then was void and formless: by the great power of Warmth was born that One.” Rig Veda, C1500 BCE The essence of faith begins in the words “I believe in God the Father Almighty, Creator of heaven and Earth.” Most of the religions view the process of creation as belonging to the distant past and God created everything out of nothing. God’s total creative activity could be compressed in six days from its start on Monday to its completion on Saturday. In the first three days the Earth was “formed,” and in the second three days, it was “filled.” Days, one, two, and three move creation from a formless to a formed state. Days, four, five and six move creation, from an empty to a filled state. Order and Biodiversity form the thrust of God’s creative work. The phrase “heaven and Earth,” functions much like the English idiom “A to Z” or in Greek “Alpha to Omega,” or “top to bottom.” It is a phrase that covers not only the “heaven” and the “Earth,” but everything in between as well. God designed Planet Earth exclusively for life and life in abundance, known as “Biodiversity” in modern biology. Creation story is the story of “Biodiversity.” Edward O. Wilson of Harvard University is one of the best indefatigable ant specialists and evolutionary biologists in the world. Wilson was the first to publish the word “BIODIVERSITY” in the 1988 proceedings from a conference organized by W.J. Rosen, who originally coined the term. Biodiversity refers to the totality of diverse species and the myriad interconnections of those species. When it first appeared in print, the word was recondite, even esoteric. Now it is common parlance for scientists, environmentalist, economists, and policy makers. The mark of history that shaped the present-day planetary biota and its diverse species—the source of food, medicine, materials, and aesthetic pleasures so important to human lives—is indeed a profound one. When we think of evolution, we think of the Phanerozoic1 history of life—the familiar progression from spore-producing to seed-producing to flowering plants, from animals

1Phanerozoic means “visible life,” since it was believed that the start of this eon marked the first signs of life. History of the Earth is divided into three eons. Two of these, the Archean eon and Proterozoic eon, are collectively referred to as the Precambrian. The Phanerozoic, the third and the present eon, began approximately 500 million years ago. Phanerozoic eon is further subdivided into three eras: the Paleozoic era, Mesozoic era, and Cenezoic era.

1 Earth - Designed for Biodiversity. Life will find a Way! without backbones to fish, land-dwelling vertebrates, reptiles, then birds and mammals. Yet, Phanerozoic rocks are like the tip of an enormous iceberg for they record only a brief—one-eight—of a very much longer evolutionary story. The story of life on Earth is written in fossils a record that nevertheless extends back through some 3.4 billion years of our planet’s history, and becomes more tangible with the rise of multi-cellular life in the 600 million years.

But fossilization requires special circumstances, and the exquisite preservation of soft tissues that can reveal life’s most intimate secrets is even more demanding. Despite these problems, there are some localities that stand out as jewels in the intermittent fossil record, often because of their exceptional quality, but sometimes just because they offer our only brief glimpse of a major development in life’s history. More than four billion years, Earth’s landscape was void of visible life. But slowly and surely life’s long, slow fuse was burning away. The rock record preserves life as far as 3.5 billion years ago, while the first visible traces of life are strange, laminated, sedimentary structures called stromatolites1, which grew in the warm, shallow tropical seas of Paleoarchean times, 3.4 billion years ago. Stromatolites were produced by the interaction of microbial life and sedimentary deposition, a process that continues today in the coastal waters of Western Australia and the Caribbean. Photosynthesizing “microbial mats” growing on the seabed are covered in sediment as the current washes over them. To reach the light, the algae and cyanobacteria2 grow up through the sediment and form new surface mats. As the process repeats, it produces laminated structures with varying shapes modified by water and the shape of the seabed. Some claim that stromatolites can be produced by inorganic processes, but the stromatolites of Western

1 In shallow tropical waters, cyanobacteria formed mats that grew into humps called stromatolites. Fossilized stromatolites have been found in rocks in the Pilbara region of western Australia that are more than 3.4 billion years old and in rocks of the Gunflint Chert region of northwest Lake Superior that are about 2.1 billion years old.

2Cyanobacteria are photosynthetic microorganisms that contain chlorophyll. Formerly considered blue-green algae, but actually closely related to bacteria, cyanobacteria are of special importance in the balance of nature. Cyanobacteria were the earliest oxygen-producing organisms on Earth and were responsible for converting Earth’s non-oxygen atmosphere to oxygen. Cyanobacteria are found in water and soil and can tolerate great ranges in salinity and temperature. Some species of cyanobacteria convert atmospheric nitrogen to compounds of nitrogen used by plants. Other species of cyanobacteria are grown commercially as a protein-rich human food supplement.

2 The Story of Life from Monday to Saturday

Australia’s 3.4 billion year-old Strelley Pool Chert1 provide convincing evidence for their organic origin. Life the Wonder on Earth

What is life? This, seemingly straightforward, question has plagued biologists, philosophers and theologians for centuries. It is mindlessly easy to discriminate between what is alive and what is dead. Tigers, teaks and mushrooms are obviously living. Some life is recognized on a different time or size-scale. Watched over a long period, lichen, the colored crusts on old stone walls, can be seen to grow and develop; a chemical test of the air around them would tell you they were indeed photosynthesizing. Magnified fifty times through a microscope, a drop of pond water teems with minuscule organisms. On the other hand, rocks, fires and clouds are clearly non-living. However, simply providing a list of things which are alive is not the same as being able concisely to define what are the properties of life? Schoolchildren are often taught that life is defined by a checklist of seven characteristics: that living things eat, excrete, move, grow, reproduce, respond to changes in their environment and maintain a constant internal state.

Some non-living entities satisfy a few of these attributes; fires grow and spread, self-sustaining from a flow of energy, consuming fuel and excreting waste products by the same oxidation reactions that run a cell and the ordered pattern of atoms in a crystal is able to reproduce itself. Equally, some living things do not tick all of the boxes: mules are sterile and unable to reproduce; although each of its component cells is alive, the whole animal fails the seven-part test. We need a more sophisticated definition. One attempt to characterize life is known as the “Darwinian definition.” First, this states that life must contain a description of itself; an operating manual or set of instruction on how it can be rebuilt. Crystals are thus excluded, as they do not contain true description of themselves but grow only because their structure organizes free units onto an existing pattern. Second, it states that the individual must be able to carry out the instructions on its own and so self-replicate. That rules out viruses, as they

1The rocks of the Strelley Pool Chert in Western Australia, preserve an environment that existed 3.5 billion years ago, including several kinds of fossils called “stromatolites.”

3 Earth - Designed for Biodiversity. Life will find a Way! reproduce by hijacking the molecular machinery of the host cell they have infected. All life on Earth has its operating manual: its text, a set of genes within the DNA1 molecule. A huge array of proteins translates and performs the instructions, known as RNA2. This type of classification is therefore also known as a genetic definition. Third, it states the system must be capable of evolution by natural selection.

This implies that the method of duplicating genetic information should be inaccurate, so that errors or mutations are introduced, creating random variation within the population of replicators3, ensuring that when faced with environmental stress only, some survive to reproduce. This is the mechanism of Darwinian evolution; over time the replicators adapt to become better suited to their surroundings. This process honed the abilities of the first replicating molecules to produce cells, animals and eventually, almost four billion years later, the self-aware species that we are. It is often said that the human body is nothing more than an elaborate organic robot, solely designed to aid the replication of our DNA. The Darwinian definition prescribes that life need only possess a system of information storage and transference—transmitting the genetic instructions to the next generation. Life is defined by what it does, not what it is made of. This classification is much less restrictive than others and includes “non-biological” life. The development of artificial or A-life, is a burgeoning field: many different systems have been built with, for example, replicating computer code replacing organic polymers and hard discs the primordial soup. The processes of mutation, competition, death and evolution are the same, only the supporting medium is different.

A second definition for life specifies that in addition to information transmission, the system must extract energy to maintain itself. The problem

1DNA-Deoxyribonucleic acid is found humans and almost all organisms. DNA contains the genetic instructions in our body and they are in our cell’s nucleus. Our DNA is made of four different bases: Adenine, Thymine, Guanine, and Cytosine. 99% of our DNA are the same with most humans.

2RNA is the abbreviated form of Ribonucleic acid. DNA remains in the nucleus, but in order for it to get its instructions translated into proteins, it must send its message to the ribosomes, where proteins are made. The chemical used to carry this message is Messenger RNA.

3Replicators are newly divided cells and genes. Replication is not perfect, and there are many opportunities for variation or mutation in pronunciation.

4 The Story of Life from Monday to Saturday is that a self-replicating system demands an extraordinary level of complexity. Complex organizations are very improbable—there are vastly more disordered ways to arrange a cloud of atoms than ordered into a functioning cell. Everything in the universe naturally deteriorates from a state of high order to more disarrayed. In technical terms, systems fall down the entropic gradient, from an ordered state of low entropy, to an equilibrium level with greater entropy. Life constantly fights this trend towards degeneration, keeping itself far from equilibrium. It does this by pumping in energy—it takes work to maintain an ordered state. Energy can be extracted from something as it degenerates; for example that heat given off by an ordered wooden log as a rush of oxidation reactions reduces it to ash and hot gas. Effectively, life allows one system to slide down the slope of organization to push another uphill. A fungus sprouting from a tree stump survives by extracting the same energy as a fire but in a carefully controlled manner. Life requires a constant energy flow and can only survive where there is an external gradient.

Modern terrestrial life performs these functions elegantly. It holds a complete description of itself as well as an elaborate network of chemical reactions which release energy, harnessing it to build useful molecules and maintain its own complexity. An army of proteins oversees this metabolic network and provides the machinery to carry out the instructions contained in the DNA and to copy it for the next generation. A third attribute of terrestrial life is that it is contained within an enclosed space. All life on Earth is cellular; bound by a membrane which physically separates the inside from the outside, preventing the different components from simply drifting apart, allowing control over the internal situation, the import and hoarding of valuable nutrients, the exclusion of waste products and the creation of chemical gradients to allow energy generation.

Scientists Oparin and Haldane from England suggested that the early atmosphere would have been very different from the present one. In particular, there would have been no free oxygen, and the atmosphere was thus—as chemists mysteriously call it—a “reducing” atmosphere. We now know that all the free oxygen in the atmosphere is the product of life, especially plants—obviously, not a part of the antecedent conditions, in which life arose. Oxygen flooded into the atmosphere as a pollutant, even a poison, until natural selection shaped living things to thrive on the stuff and, indeed, suffocate without it. The “reducing” atmosphere inspired the most famous experimental attack on the problem of the origin of life,

5 Earth - Designed for Biodiversity. Life will find a Way!

Stanley Miller’s flask1 full of simple ingredients, which bubbled and sparked for only a week before yielding amino acids and other harbingers of life.

Let me take you back, deep in time to witness that wonder! The Earth is one billion years old. A chill is in the air, for the sun is a young and relatively weak star, radiating only half the heat and light that it will produce later when man walks on the Earth. The sky seems familiar; its color is a deep blue, spotted by puffs of white cloud. But its gases are strange; in place of oxygen, the atmosphere contains pungent fumes of ammonia, the odorless menace of methane, and traces of hydrogen. A shallow sea covers the surface of the planet. Its waters are sterile; life will flourish in them later, but has not yet appeared. The continents do not yet exist; they will appear later also. In a few places, islands of black volcanic rock break the surface of the clear water. The islands are bleak and unfriendly; no touch of green relieves the eye.

Gradually the interior of the Earth grows hotter; its surface seethes with volcanic activity; new islands form; the observer of today, transported back to that plutonic scene, is deafened by the sudden roar of a violent outburst. The ground shakes beneath his feet. A fountain of rock and scalding water rises two thousand feet into the air above a cauldron of lava in the central crater of a nearby volcano. On the slopes of the volcano, at some distance from the crater, hot springs bubble out of the cracks in the still cooling lava; here and there, a fumerole spurts steam into the thin air, and poisonous gases enter the atmosphere. Now a thunderstorm lashes the surface of the planet. The panorama is illuminated sporadically by flashes of lightning; in each electrical discharge, the gases of the atmosphere—methane, ammonia, water, and hydrogen—fuse together to form strange new combinations of atoms, not previously seen on the Earth.

1American chemists Stanley Miller and Harold Urey tested part of Oparin and Haldane’s hypothesis in the early 1950s by simulating conditions of the early Earth. In what has become known as the Miller-Urey experiment, the two scientists connected two flasks with a loop of glass tubing that allowed the gases to pass between the flasks. They filled the upper flask with methane, ammonia, and hydrogen— components thought to have been in the early atmosphere. They filled the lower flask with water. The scientists then, applied electric sparks—the equivalent of lightning on the early Earth—to the gas mixture. After less than a day, the water in the lower flask contained a variety of amino acids and other organic molecules—the building blocks of life. The Miller-Urey experiment showed that it was possible to form organic materials from inorganic components on the early Earth.

6 The Story of Life from Monday to Saturday

Those groups of atoms are the molecules known as amino acids and nucleotides. The appearance of amino acids and nucleotides marks the first step along the path to life. These molecules are the building blocks of living matter. Later, put together in different combinations like the parts of an erector set, they will make up every variety of organisms of the Earth—a tree, a germ, a mouse, a man. But those forms of life are not yet present; at this point, only the building blocks are here.

Gradually, the amino acids and nucleotides drain out of the atmosphere into the oceans, creating a rich soup of organic matter, like a chicken broth but more concentrated. Now and then, collisions occur between neighboring molecules in the broth; in some collisions, two small molecules stick together to form a larger one; then another small molecule collides and sticks, and still another … In this way, during the course of a billion years, every conceivable size and shape of molecule is created by random collisions. Some molecules are in the shape of long, thin strands; others are wound up into tight clumps of matter, still others are twisted into spirals. Eventually, after countless millions of chance encounters, a molecule is formed that has the magical ability to produce copies of itself. The magic molecule consists of two long strands of nucleotides side by side. The two strands are fastened together down the middle like a zipper. The molecule unzips; each unzipped half attracts new nucleotides from the water around it, and fastens them to itself; then, forces of attraction between adjoining atoms zip the pieces together. Now there are two giant, zipper-like molecules, where before there was one. The molecule has reproduced itself.

The original molecule was the parent; the copies are its daughters. The daughter molecules unzip, divide, and reproduce again; soon their offspring are very numerous. In a short time they dominate the population of molecules in the waters of the young Earth. Today the descendant of those self-reproducing molecules is the double strand of nucleotides called DNA, which lies in the center of every living cell. Whenever a cell divides, the DNA molecule, unzipping just like that first parent molecule, becomes two complete copies, each in the center of its own cell. DNA is the essence of life. Without DNA or a molecule like it inside a cell, the cell could not divide; without cell division, an organism could not grow. When the first DNA-like molecule appeared in the waters of the Earth, the threshold was crossed from the non-living to the living worlds. The earliest forms of life were simple, and scarcely more than the nonliving molecules that preceded them. The

7 Earth - Designed for Biodiversity. Life will find a Way! only property they possessed that could be called life was the ability to divide and reproduce. During the billions of years that followed, these simple, self-reproducing molecules evolved into the variety of plants and animals that now populate the Earth. Today the land is carpeted with many shades of green; one hundred thousand kinds of fishes swim in the seas; a carnival of animals plays across the continents.

According to this story, every tree, every blade of grass, and every creature in the sea and on the land evolved out of one parent strand of molecular matter drifting lazily in a warm pool. What concrete evidence supports that remarkable theory of the origin of life? There is none. If science could find a remnant of the chemical reactions that occurred during the first billion years in the Earth’s history—some complex molecule, lying on the threshold between non-life and life—the proof of the theory would be in hand. Suppose a scientist discovered a rock formed when the Earth was a billion years old, and that rock contained a fossilized strand of molecular matter that looked like DNA but another rock, formed later, with a fossilized molecule that was closer in its structure to the modern DNA. Placing the two ancient molecular fossils on the table in front of him and comparing them with the modern DNA, he would see before his eyes the metamorphosis of a nonliving molecule into a living organism.

However, that is not likely to happen. Those earliest fossils have not been found, because the rocks that might have contained them have been pulverized, and their dusty residue has been spread over the surface of the Earth. Powerful forces have erased the record of the period when life began on the Earth; erosion by wind and running water have worn down the oldest rocks on its surface, and washed their remains into the oceans; volcanic eruptions have flooded the planet repeatedly with fresh lava and covered over the remaining materials. No trace is left of events that took place during the first billion years of the Earth’s existence—the magic period when life appeared here. When the fossil-hunter picks up the trail of life, more than a billion years have passed, and the fragile remains of the first organisms have disappeared. The earliest indications of life he finds are blurred outlines of microbes and simple plants. They must have evolved out of even simpler kinds of life, but the scientist can find no hint of those. By the time the fossil record begins, the molecular strands of matter that were supposedly the start of it all have vanished; the planet teems with microscopic but fully developed forms of life, and all chance has been lost of finding out how that life came to be here.

8 The Story of Life from Monday to Saturday

Frustrated in his hopes of finding evidence in ancient rocks, the scientist turns to the laboratory for clues to the origin of life. Can he devise a series of experiments that will display the steps by which simple molecules turned into living organisms? Some progress has been made along these lines. In one experiment, scientists duplicated the primitive atmosphere of the Earth by mixing the gases methane, ammonia, hydrogen, and water vapor in a flask. The bottom of the flask was covered with liquid representing the Earth’s ocean. Then an electric spark, imitating a stroke of lightning in an early thunderstorm, was discharged through the mixture. Soon the reservoir of water at the bottom of the flask turned a light pink; after a week it became dark red in color. The color came from the presence of enormous numbers of the molecular building blocks of life. This pool of water was filled with amino acids—one of the main ingredients of living matter. In other experiments performed later, nucleotides—the building blocks of the DNA molecule—also were produced in the laboratory.

Those experiments fire the imagination of the scientists. He sees the lightning and hears the thunder of a storm in the Earth’s primordial atmosphere; he smells the pungent mixture of ammonia, methane, and water. Nature’s experiment is unfolding; the elements of life are accumulating in the waters of the Earth; soon the first living organisms will emerge … But they never do; at least, not in the laboratory. The scientist’s experiment always stops short of its goal; the elements of living matter accumulate in his flask, but no life climbs out. His experiment shows how the building blocks of life could have been produced in nature, but the next step—the construction of a living organism—eludes him. Why does the experiment fail? The answer is that it lacks one ingredient; the missing ingredient of “TIME.” Nature required several hundred million of years of ceaseless, random experimentation to discover the chemical pathways to life on the Earth, and the scientist’s ingenuity has not been equal to the task of imitating her in a week, or even a lifetime. Many chemists have tried, and their results shed some light on the problem, but the gap between non-life and life remains. At present, science has no satisfactory answer to the question of the origin of life on the Earth.

Perhaps the appearance of life on the Earth is a miracle. Scientists are reluctant to accept that view, but their choices are limited; either life was created on the Earth by the will of a being outside the grasp of scientific understanding, or it evolved on our planet spontaneously, through chemical reactions occurring in nonliving matter lying on the surface of

9 Earth - Designed for Biodiversity. Life will find a Way! the planet. The first theory places the question of the origin of life beyond the reach of scientific inquiry. It is a statement of faith the power of a Supreme Being not subject to the laws of science. The second theory is also an act of faith. The act of faith consists in assuming that the scientific view of the origin of life is correct, without having concrete evidence to support that belief. The Power of Creation

Creation is nothing but an “Orgasm” (eros). When you write a book, you create, you experience intense pleasure. When you paint, you create, you enjoy. When you sculpt, you create, you feel excited. When you have sex, you create and you experience orgasm. God created everything out of love (eros), each one in creation is considered to be a masterpiece and each one in creation is born out of God’s orgasm, as all our existence is the result of an intense orgasm. We came into being out of intense pleasure. Bible describes this experience as “God saw everything good that he has created.” A billion years passes like a day in the story of creation. The Earth has seen its first billion years go by; now, in the second day of its life, the sleeping planet stirs restlessly. Its body, warmed by radioactive heat, rises and falls in slow rhythm. The intensity of the movement increases; soon the depths are wracked by convulsions, and the tops of the first continents rise above the level of the sea. The continents grow larger; they divide the waters of the Earth. In this way the second day ends, and the third day begins. Now the planet swarms with tiny bits of living matter. Their origin is a mystery. The Earth has yielded up their remains, preserved in a few widely scattered places where ancient rocks are found. Some of these early fossils resemble microbes; others look like simple plants called blue-green algae. They are unsophisticated individuals; each one is composed entirely of a single cell.

Most modern forms of life are more than billion cells in its body, and the body of a man is made up of ten trillions of cells working together in subtle harmony. Yet a single cell already represents a very advanced stage in evolution. Cells are exceedingly complex chemical factories, in which the basic ingredients of life are assembled into DNA and other giant molecules. A cell is a hallow object, with a thin wall or membrane enclosing its watery contents. The membrane is porous; it has many small openings by which the molecular building blocks of life can enter. These openings are like doors in a factory, through which raw materials are brought inside to be manufactured into the finished product. The raw materials are small molecules, such as amino acids; the finished products are extremely large

10 The Story of Life from Monday to Saturday molecules, such as DNA and proteins. The openings in the outer wall of the cell, while large enough to admit the raw materials, are too tiny to allow the DNA and proteins to escape. These giant-sized molecules are imprisoned within the cell, captives, feeding on the materials that enter.

No one knows precisely how the cell evolved, for those early forms of life were delicate, and no trace remains of their existence. Laboratory experiments, however, give a clue to this important evolutionary advance; they show that when amino acids are heated and then immersed in water, they swell into hallow spheres that resemble cells. Sometimes the hallow spheres even divide in two, very much like a living ell. The conditions in those experiments must have been duplicated many times on the young Earth, on the flanks of erupting volcanoes where abundant heat and water would have been present. A cell, concentrating in one place all the small molecules needed for its growth, can reproduce itself in a shorter time than a free-floating strand of DNA. As soon as the cell appeared, this efficient form of life, multiplying rapidly, must have spread throughout the waters of the Earth. In the course of time, the cell came to replace all the free-floating molecular strands that had preceded it.

Cell – The Cryptex of Life1

The next great development in the history of life occurred about a billion years later, when the Earth was somewhat more than three billion years old. At this time, through a sequence of events that the fossil record does not reveal, some cells evolved a kind of brain—a small region at the center of the cell—which controlled their entire chemical machinery. All the precious molecules of DNA in the cell were concentrated in this control center. Under its direction, the buildup of new molecules within the cell was carefully coordinated, and the cell grew even more rapidly. Everything alive is made of cells, compartments that wall off the living juice of an organism from its surroundings. Cells house the bio-chemical basics of life: gene-containing chromosomes, enzymatic proteins, and the machinery of metabolism. At least, two billion years of steady evolution elapsed between the crossing of the threshold of life and the emergence of the first cells, with a control center. As soon as this sophisticated kind of life appeared, the

1It works much like a bicycle combination lock and if one arranges the rings to spell out the correct password, the rings align to unlock it, and the entire cylinder slides apart. In the inner compartment of the cryptex, this is where secret information can be hidden.

11 Earth - Designed for Biodiversity. Life will find a Way! pace of evolution accelerated, and striking changes followed one another in more rapid succession. First, the population of living cells divided into two kinds, one resembling a plant, and the other with the properties of an animal. The plant cells appeared first. These cells had acquired, by some chemical accident, the ability to make a green substance called chlorophyll, which converts sunlight into energy for life. Cells with chlorophyll were able to live solely on sunshine, air, and water; combining those elements with salts and other simple ingredients dissolved in the sea, they made all the molecular building blocks needed for their growth.1

In the process of growing, the plant cells produced oxygen as a waste product. Since oxygen was a lethal poison to the plant cell, it had to get rid of the noxious element by exhaling it to the atmosphere. In this way, substantial amounts of oxygen were added to the Earth’s atmosphere for the first time. After a time, another kind of cell evolved, with a completely different chemistry from the plant cell. The new cell was able to absorb the poisonous oxygen and put it to good use. In this cell, oxygen replaced sunlight as the principal source of energy. The oxygen-breathing cell was the ancestor of the first animals on the Earth. Why did an oxygen-breathing kind of life evolve? Why does life on the Earth not consist solely of plants? The answer is that oxygen is a very potent source of energy; a cell can obtain energy much more quickly by absorbing this gas than it can by basking in the sun. Thus the animal cell, taking in oxygen, could be more active than its plantlike neighbors, and could move more rapidly in seeking food and retreating from danger. Even more important, the extra energy yielded by oxygen stimulated a new line of evolution that led to intelligent life. Thought requires a great deal of chemical energy; a cell in the human brain, for example, consumes ten times more energy than an ordinary cell in the body. Only oxygen can supply the needed power. That is why plants cannot think.

The appearance of oxygen in the atmosphere created the necessary conditions for the evolution of the higher forms of life. Still, life was far from its present perfection. The next great improvement involved the

1At the one-celled level the distinction between plants and animals is blurred. Some one-celled creatures exist today—and probably existed at that earlier time—that have the properties of both; an example is a creature called a flagellate, which propels itself rapidly through the water like an animal, by means undulating, snakelike appendages; but at the same time it contains chlorophyll, a substance as characteristic of plants as blood is of animals.

12 The Story of Life from Monday to Saturday outer membrane of the cell. In some way, certain cells acquired membranes that were sticky; as a result, these cells became glued to other cells nearby and formed clumps or colonies. The cells that first struck together may have been neighbors drifting in the water; or they may have been the daughters of one parent cell, which stayed in contact with each other after the parent cell divided, instead of drifting apart. The strength of the single cell had been its chemical efficiency, bit its weakness was its vulnerability to damage; if the outer membrane of the cell was punctured, for example, it died immediately. A colony of cells was much less vulnerable to such dangers; one cell might die, but the colony would live. The survival prospects of the colony were greatly increased by this circumstance, and once the tendency to form colonies of cells appeared, the new kind of life spread rapidly through the waters of the Earth.

How did cells first acquire the stickiness that caused them to clump together? This property, which turned out to be so valuable in the struggle for survival, must have been the result of an accident in the chemical machinery of a few cells, one of many such accidents that have provided the raw materials of evolution throughout the long history of life on the Earth. These accidents occur all the time in living organisms. Sometimes, they are produced by cosmic rays, for example, that crash through the cell and alter its molecular structure; or they may result from simple errors that occur when the cell duplicates itself, just before dividing. Usually the accidents have a deleterious effect; the organism is weakened, and it does not live long. But now and then their effect is desirable, because it increases the organism’s chance of survival. When this happens, the favored organism is more likely to live to a ripe old age; it leaves behind more offspring than other, less favored individuals; its descendants multiply and spread throughout the population; gradually they replace the forms of life that existed previously. In this way, nature uses random accidents as the means of improving the design of living organisms.

The success of the colony of cells opened the way to another refinement. Soon after the appearance of the first colony, a division of labor took place among its individual members that led to a new and much more complicated kind of organism. This development started when a few cells—again by some accident of their chemical machinery—became slightly more effective than their neighbors in performing particular tasks. For example, some cells developed more efficient ways of breaking down food and digesting it; these cells became the gut of the new organism. Other cells acquired a harder-than-average outer membrane; they made

13 Earth - Designed for Biodiversity. Life will find a Way! up its protective casing or skin. And still other cells became exceptionally sensitive to light, or vibrations, or small traces of chemicals in the water; those cells formed rudimentary organs of sight, hearing, and smell; they could alert the organism to attack or guide it toward food. The division of labor among the cells in a colony was one of nature’s greatest inventions. A colony fortunate enough to include cells that could act as sense organs, or contribute to its survival through any other specialized talents, was much more likely than its neighbors to avoid danger, find food, and grow and reproduce. As a result, these complex creatures multiplied more rapidly than ordinary colonies of cells, and in a relatively short time they became the dominant forms of life on the Earth. Fish – The Big Brother

Some 570 million years ago, the newly developed process of photosynthesis made oxygen available to creatures that lived in the sea, and in the relatively short geologic space of a few million years, all sots of invertebrate animals arose to share in what was to become the Cambrian Explosion1. Trilobites2 appear fully formed in the fossil record, with their incredibly complex and efficient compound eyes. The oldest sedimentary rocks are about 3.9 billion years old, and because their formation requires liquid water, it is clear that water was upon the Earth less than a billion years after the planet was formed. Life began in the ocean perhaps 3.8 billion years ago, and remained submerged until around 360 million years ago, when the first tetrapods3 The evolution was likely the transition from fin to fin like appendage to appendage. Emerged to take up a terrestrial existence, and lead the invasion of the land. For more than 2.5 billion years in the history of

1 The Cambrian “explosion” is a unique episode in Earth history, when essentially all the animal phyla first appear in the fossil record. A variety of environmental, developmental (genetic), and ecological explanations for this complex and somewhat protracted event are reviewed, with a focus on how well each explains the observed increases in disparity and diversity, the time of onset of the radiation, its duration, and its uniqueness.

2Trilobites (pronounced TRY-lo-bites) are extinct crustacean-like animals that were one of the most numerous and successful marine creatures of the Palaeozoic Era, between 545 and 251 million years ago (mya).

3 A tetrapod, literally four legged creature, the major separation that I can think of that separates them from fish is that they have legs with fin like appendages (when dealing with water) whereas Fish literally have fins. Fish also have much thinner skeletal structures because most weight is supported by water. They also tend to have massive heads to body ratios.

14 The Story of Life from Monday to Saturday life on Earth, all living things on Earth were under water. Throughout the next several hundred million years, the many-celled creatures continued to evolve and flourish. The remains of many kinds appear in the fossil record. Most were built according to one of two familiar plans. In the first plan, the cells were arranged in a circular pattern, forming an animal that looked like a jellyfish. The record of the rocks shows traces of several kinds of circular animals that appear to be variations on that theme.

In the second plan, the individual cells were strung end to end to make a long, thin organism like a worm. Well-defined worm burrows are the earliest indications in the fossil record of the presence of these creatures; still later, clean imprints of flatworms appear, ranging from a fraction of an inch in length up to two feet. In another billion years man would appear, evolved out of those primitive, wormlike creatures. It is interesting to note that nature required nearly three billion years to produce the worm out of the first forms of life, but only an additional billion years to produce man from the worm. Several billion years have gone by since the first chapter was written in the history of life, and still the seas contain only soft bodied animals; as yet, no creature possesses the hard exterior that can protect it during its lifetime, and preserve its remains after it has died. For this reason, the record of life in that early period is quite sparse. But six hundred million years ago, the first animals with external skeletons appeared, and the fossil record exploded into a variety of forms—corals, starfish, snails, trilobites, sea scorpions, and many others. The appearance of this profusion of armored animals suggests a sudden need for protection, in a world in which a growing population of hungry animals had heightened the intensity of the struggle for survival.

Although the armored animal was less vulnerable than his soft-bodied predecessors, he paid a penalty for his security in clumsiness and loss of speed. Soon another form of life appeared in the oceans, possessing little or no external armor, but equipped instead with an internal skeleton and a backbone. The backbone had many joints or hinges, and combined flexibility with a stiff support for the muscles of the body. Animals with the new kind of body architecture could be supple and yet strong; they mage up in speed and maneuverability for their lack of bodily protection. The backboned animals were fast, agile swimmers, more effective than their neighbors in pursuing their prey and escaping from danger, and their numbers increased rapidly. They were the first fishes. The streamlined shapes and versatile fins of the early fishes—used for propulsion, steering, and braking—gave these animals an unmatched command of their

15 Earth - Designed for Biodiversity. Life will find a Way! medium, and they darted through the water as the swallow flies through the air. The fishes continued to evolve for many generations; they prospered in the aquatic life of our planet from the depths of the ocean to the smallest mountain stream. Yet the fishes were not destined to become the highest forms of life on the Earth. They lived in a watery world that hardly ever changed, and when they reached a state of near perfection in that world, they ceased to change also. But early in the history of the fishes, long before they reached their present perfection, some individuals crawled out of the water and became the vanguard of a new development in the evolution of life. Most fishes stayed in the water at that time; only a few left; but those few had begun a line of evolution that would lead to them. Amphibians – The Conqueror of the Land

As the continents rose and the sea drained away, glistening areas of new land were exposed. Moist air struck the flanks of the young mountains and heavy rains fell, carrying away the salty sediments of vanished oceans. The freshly washed, barren land lay ready, awaiting the invasion of life from the seas. These changes took place inside the Earth and on its surface about three hundred and fifty million years ago. For one hundred million years prior to that period, the interior of the Earth had rested quietly; the continents were submerged, and water covered nearly all the planet. Now, as the land rose above the level of the water, a new environment was created for living organisms, and the stage was set for the first phase in the conquest of the land. Tentatively at first, and then with more assurance, the teeming animal life of the seas began to probe the alien world of the shoreline, seeking a toehold, always driven by the competition for food in the oceans and drawn by the newly available food on the land. In the next several million years many forms of life became established on the fringes of the new territory. Among these were the fishes1. They migrated inland from the shores, and spread out across the continents until they were established in every freshwater pond and stream. The geological record reveals that during the period in which these changes were taking place, the climate of the Earth began to deteriorate. A long interval of seasonal drought set in, and created the pressure for a new wave of migration of the fishes, this time from the streams and ponds out onto the surrounding dry land.

1The fishes first had evolved in freshwater streams, but at a very early stage in their development they had migrated from the sea.

16 The Story of Life from Monday to Saturday

The details of the story are lost, but the record of the rocks provides enough information to reconstruct its essential features. Each year the rains filled the ponds; each year the dry season returned, and the ponds shrank to small, stagnant pools. The supply of oxygen was frequently inadequate in those shallow bodies of water. In response to the need for oxygen, the freshwater fishes developed lungs for gulping air at the surface, in addition to gills for absorbing it from the water. In the beginning, the ability to breathe air must have been an unusual talent among the freshwater fishes, possessed by a few individuals as a result of minor variations in their normal body structure. But whenever the drought persisted and the level of water in the streams and ponds dropped to an unusually low level, those few fishes were favored above their fellows in the struggle for survival. Where others perished, they lived, and produced progeny who inherited their unusual lung capacity. Through these circumstances, the number of fishes with lungs gradually increased until, after many generations, many fishes that lived in ponds and streams had well-developed lungs to supplement their gills. This is always the way in which nature creates new forms of life. First, accidental variations from one individual to another provide the raw ingredients for evolutionary progress; then, a pressure exerted by the environment determines the direction in which the evolution will proceed.

The first animals to walk on land were probably primitive amphibians known as labyrinthodonts1, named for the complex folding of the dentine layers of the teeth. The first known beachhead for terrestrial vertebrates is in Australia. In the Devonian sandstones of the Grampians in Western Victoria, a fossil trackway more than 400 million years old shows where a labyrinthodont amphibian trudged along in mud that would eventually turn to sandstone. We do not know what prompted these creatures to abandon an aquatic for a terrestrial environment, but the reason could have been an occasional escape from predators, or perhaps the colonization of a new and unoccupied ecological niche where competition was nonexistent. Frogs, toads, salamanders, and caecilians, a little-known amphibian group, are legless, burrowing creatures that resemble earthworms. They have vertebrate characteristics like jaws and teeth, and range in size from 7 inches to 4 feet. Their bodies are ringed, but the skin contains scales, a primitive amphibian trait, represent the class Amphibia today.

1Labyrinthodonts are early types of amphibians. Most labyrinthodonts date to the Triassic, 240 million years ago, but specimens have been found in Australia from the Jurassic and Early Cretaceous.

17 Earth - Designed for Biodiversity. Life will find a Way!

The first frogs appeared in the early Triassic, about 200 million years ago, and the first urodeles1. Their limbs are similar in form and function to other vertebrate limbs that cannot regenerate. such as newts and salamanders are found in somewhat later Jurassic rocks. Today some amphibians lay their eggs on land, or even in trees, but most lay them in the water. In some cases the young undergo a metamorphosis in the egg and emerge as miniature adults, but most amphibians pass through a legless, larval (tadpole) stage in the transition from a water-breathing juvenile to an air-breathing adult. Adult amphibians differ from reptiles in having moist skins and either no scales at all or tiny scales embedded in the skin. The newts and salamanders most closely resemble their ancestors in that they are long-tailed and four-legged. Some, like the hellbender and the Japanese giant salamander reach sizes large enough 3 and 5 feet respectively, to give us an idea of what the prehistoric amphibians might have looked like. Frogs and toads (anurans), by far the predominant amphibians, are usually smallish; the body of the largest one, the goliath frog, “Gigantorana goliath,” is less than a foot in length. Frogs and toads all have muscular hind legs for jumping, and some have developed a completely arboreal habitat, some incubate their eggs on their backs, and others are brightly colored to advertise their poisonous skin glands. It is almost miraculous that marine creatures were modified to emerge from the sea and take up residence on land. Creation of Green Color

Evidence of fossil spores and estimates from the molecular clock suggest that plants first appeared on land about 490 million years ago in the Ordovician. A molecular phylogeny of the land plants shows liverworts, which reproduce by spores, to be a sister group to all other land plants. All land plants protect their eggs and resulting embryos within the tissues of the mother plant. But not all land plants have freed themselves from other aspects of dependency upon water. Though they protect their embryos successfully, ferns, mosses and liverworts all require an environment that is wet enough at some point during the life-cycle to enable sperm to swim through a film of moisture to the eggs. These plants are like amphibians in the animal kingdom, able to survive on land but dependent upon wet conditions for reproduction. However, seed plants, which include cycads, ginkgos, conifers, and flowering plants, have

1Urodoles are amphibians. Urodeles, commonly called salamanders, are the only vertebrates that are able to completely regenerate limbs as adults.

18 The Story of Life from Monday to Saturday overcome this limitation and are fully land-adapted. The earliest fossil seeds date from near the end of the Devonian, 365 million years ago. The seed is definitely terrestrial innovation, although its derivation from aquatic ancestors can be seen in how the eggs of the most primitive extant land plants, cycads and ginkgos, are fertilized. These plants have mobile sperm that swim the last part of their journey between the pollen grain and egg through a fluid medium by synchronized lashing of numerous hair-like flagellae (singular: flagellum). Marine algae either float free or, like the familiar seaweeds of the seashore, attach themselves to tocks by a structure that is appropriately named a “holdfast.”

Only land plants have true roots that take up water and nutrients from the soil as well as providing anchorage. The roots of nearly all land plants have a symbiotic relationship with fungi that is crucial to their nutrition. Most of the mushrooms and toadstools you see growing on the ground in woods and fields are part of fungi that are symbiotic with trees or other plants and betray the presence below ground of a dense, pervasive web of fungal threads. These so-called mycorrhizal fungi help supply mineral nutrients and water to their host plants and may also help protect them from infection by harmful bacteria and other pathogens. Mycorrhizal associations between land plants and fungi appear to be other ancient. Liverworts, sisters to all other land plants, are mycorrhizal. The association with fungi may therefore have been instrumental in helping the green algae colonize land. The most diverse of land plants are the flowering plants (angiosperms), of which at least 250,000 species are estimated to be living today. The actual may be nearly twice as many. Flowering plants evolved from other seed plants called gymnosperms (More in Chapter 2). The group of about 700 living species includes the conifers, the cycads, the ginkgos, and some others, but it seems likely that the closest gymnosperm relative of the angiosperms is extinct. If so, the lack of information about its genes would explain why it has proved difficult to date the split between the gymnosperms and angiosperms using a molecular clock. Most such estimates date this divergence to between 346 and 367 million years ago, although the true date may be more recent than this. Flower – Plant’s Enlightenment

Writing to the botanist Joseph Hooker, Charles Darwin called the origin of the angiosperms “an abominable mystery.” The earliest evolution of the angiosperms is still a matter of conjecture, but giant strides have been

19 Earth - Designed for Biodiversity. Life will find a Way! made in the last fifteen years in understanding how the flowering plants evolved after they had split from gymnosperm ancestors. Indeed, thanks to spectacular success in the use of DNA sequences in tracing how the green branches of the tree of life are connected, the angiosperms are the first major group of organisms to be re-classified using this evolutionary evidence. Though the date at which the angiosperms split from some unknown gymnosperm ancestor is not precisely known, there is better evidence for later events. Much of the diversity in the eudicots1, between 142 and 65 million years ago, including the orchids the most species-rich group among the monocots and the largest of all flowering plant families, containing at least 17,500 species. Orchids display to perfection the most significant feature of the angiosperms, their seemingly unlimited evolutionary potential to modify the flower. Flowers vary extravagantly in shape, size, color and odor and attract as pollinators an equally rich variety of animals. Practically anything that moves rapidly, especially by flying, bats, birds, beetles, bumblebees, other bees and butterflies has been recruited by one flower or another to transport pollen, while the oblivious visitor flits from plant in search of rewards such as nectar or even, as in the case of bee orchids, the illusory promise of a mate.

There can be little doubt that the capacity for flowers to evolve is the key to the astonishing diversity of angiosperms. A new species can only arise when some barrier prevents a population from breeding with its progenitors, thus isolating it genetically. Therefore, anything that selects for evolutionary change in the characteristics of a flower, such as a change in a pollinator, may simultaneously create a reproductive barrier, creating the conditions necessary for a new species of plant to evolve. You might say that what was most significant about the initial evolution of the flower was its own evolvability. Many of the insect groups that pollinate flowers diversified during the Cretaceous, apparently in parallel with flower evolution. Plants are prey to many insects as well as being pollinated by some of them. In many butterflies and moths, the adults are pollinators while the caterpillars are plant-eaters. The leaf beetles are a group of specialist plant-eaters containing more than 38,000 species. For every plant, there are tens-to-hundreds of insects and larger herbivores, including browsing mammals, that eat them and for each of these, there are numerous

1Eudicots and Eudicotyledons are a type of flowering plant. There are one of the two major clades. A few examples of eudicots are forget-me-not, cabbage, apple, dandelion, buttercup, maple and macadamia

20 The Story of Life from Monday to Saturday parasitic and predatory insects that attack the plant-eaters. Thus the rise of the angiosperms created an ecological feast upon which insect diversity gorged and multiplied. And, of course, one day humans would also exploit this diversity of plants. Reptiles – The Most Extreme on Earth

After fifty million generations and a like number of years, still another creature appeared, evolved out of the amphibian but now with a tough hide that preserved the water in its body. And an egg encased in a firm, leathery shell that retained moisture and provided the embryo with its private pool of fluid. This creature was completely emancipated from the water. It was the first reptile. With the appearance of the reptiles, the conquest of the land was complete. Quickly they developed into a great variety of forms. Nearly every animal with a backbone that lives on the Earth today is descended from reptilian stock; some branches of the early reptiles gave rise to the snake, lizard, and turtle; other branches produced the crocodile and the alligator and their cousin, the dinosaur, (Greek for “terrible lizard.”) still others produced the birds, the mammals—and man. The reptiles gained their full strength two hundred million years ago, just as the world was emerging from one of the greatest ice ages in its history. Glaciers retreated and vanished, even the north and south poles lost their covers of ice, and warmth spread over the globe. Palm trees grew as far north as Alaska and Greenland; humid jungles and swamps covered large parts of North America and Asia; and Europe lay under a warm sea dotted by green islands and coral lagoons. Even the interior of the Earth grew quieter; volcanoes erupted less frequently; mountain-building movements subsided; and jagged ranges that had been thrust up in past eons were worn down to gentle, rolling hills. Tranquility prevailed everywhere.

It is not surprising that the reptiles flourished during that pleasant period in the history of the Earth. The reptile is a cold-blooded animal; his body temperature is nearly the same as the temperature of his surroundings. When the air is cold, his blood cools and he becomes sluggish and torpid, because all the chemical reactions in his body slow down. When the air is hot, his body has no way of throwing off the excess heat, and he cooks to death. The reptile is at his best in a mild climate, neither too cold nor too hot. In the long, serene interval that followed the great ice age, the climate was ideal for his development. For more than one hundred million years the Earth enjoyed weather of unparalleled warmth, and the reptiles luxuriated in their paradise. They displayed extraordinary vigor and

21 Earth - Designed for Biodiversity. Life will find a Way! flowered into a variety of creatures that ruled over the air, the sea, and the land. It was a time of giants on the Earth. Flying monsters soared and glided, ready to swoop down on smaller prey; some had wing spans as great as fifty feet—the size of a small aircraft. Forty-foot crocodiles with jaws six feet long lurked in the waters; fourteen- foot turtles weighing three tons paddled across the inland seas; enormous marine creatures of terrifying appearance battled for supremacy in the oceans.

Most of the giants among the reptiles lived on the land. Some dinosaurs were peaceful vegetarians; others were fierce carnivores. A titan among the dinosaurs was Brontosaurus, a plant-eater. This ungainly swamp reptile was as much as seventy feet long and weighed up to forty tons. Twenty times larger than an elephant, Brontosaurus stood on four stout pillars, partly submerged in water, nourishing its huge bulk by the consumption of masses of soft, aquatic plants. Now and then the animal raised its head, mounted at the end of a tapered neck two stories high, and from that swaying perch far above the surface of the water, it surveyed the horizon for signs of danger. The small, thick skull enclosed an even smaller brain about the size of an apricot. A second, rather larger nerve center located in the rear, issued commands to the hind legs and tail of the behemoth. Brontosaurus, like the elephant, was protected by his bulk from most predators. The only enemies he feared were the meat-eating dinosaurs, who customarily made their meals of the flesh of Brontosaurus and his relatives. These carnivores were far more formidable than their equivalents among the mammals, such as the saber-toothed tiger or the grizzly bear. Tyrannosaurus Rex, the largest carnivorous dinosaur and the fiercest land- living predator the world has ever seen, grew to a length of fifty feet and a weight of ten tons. His jaws were four feet long and filled with dagger- like teeth.

Imagine the fearsome reptile as he stalks Brontosaurus at the edge of the swamp: his quarry is near; the huge skull splits wide as the horrifying jaws open; with a roar the monster falls on his victim … When tyrannosaurus and his kin were at the zenith of their power, no other animal could compete with them. But seventy five million years ago, the dinosaurs began to die out. Within ten million years, they had vanished from the face of the Earth. The disappearance of the dinosaurs was a dramatically sharp event when viewed in the four-billion-year perspective of the history of life on this planet. The dinosaurs had ruled the land for one hundred million years; they were the most successful animals the world had ever seen. Why did they disappear in a moment of the Earth’s history? The probable

22 The Story of Life from Monday to Saturday reason is that conditions changed on our planet and the dinosaurs were unable to change with them. Throughout the long reign of the giant reptiles, the world had known a mild and constant climate; on every continent the eye met gentle landscape of low relief, with shallow seas and vast areas of swampland and tropical forest. The elements of that world were in perfect balance; the clement, moist weather supported a lush growth of vegetation; the plant-eating dinosaurs fed on the vegetation, and the meat-eating dinosaurs fed on the plant-eaters. Strife and violence marked the relations between the meat-eaters and the plant- eaters, but as a group they were in harmony with nature, and their life was stable.

During tens of millions of years of mild and unchanging climate, the stability of the dinosaur’s world was undisturbed, and nature worked without interruption, steadily refining the form of each dinosaur to fit its particular place in that stable world. In every generation, the reptiles with traits suitable for the climate of the times survived and prospered, and those with unsuitable traits were weeded out. Slowly, over many generations, this process improved the bodies of the dinosaurs, strengthening some characteristics while it eliminated others. At the end, nature had created Brontosaurus, Tyrannosaurus, and their relatives—each a highly specialized machine, completely different from the others, yet designed to perfection for its place in the economy of nature. But they were unintelligent machines; their actions were automatic, and lacking in the flexibility needed to cope with unfamiliar situations. Flexibility means intelligence, and the dinosaurs had little. Their small brains held a limited repertoire of behavior, with no room for varied response. The brain of the dinosaur was devoted mainly to the control of his huge bulk; it served simply as a telephone switching center, receiving signals from his body and sending out messages to move his head and limbs in unthinking reaction. In the eye of Tyrannosaurus registered a moving object, he pursued it; but his hunt lacked cunning. If the eye of Brontosaurus registered movement, he fled; but his flight was mechanical and mindless. And some other dinosaurs were still less intelligent; Stegosaurus, a ten-ton vegetarian, had a brain the size of a walnut.

Dinosaurs were stupid animals; incapable of thought, moving slowly and ponderously, they waded through life as walking robots. Their mechanical responses were sufficient for coping with the familiar problems of their serene, friendly environment. There was no need for greater intelligence in their lives, and therefore it never evolved. But seventy-five million years ago, the world began to change. This was the

23 Earth - Designed for Biodiversity. Life will find a Way! challenge that the inflexible dinosaurs could not overcome. Surprisingly, the forces of change that led to their destruction did not originate on the surface of the Earth, but deep inside it. Once more the interior of the planet, which had been quiet for millions of years, began to stir, and great masses of molten rock moved upward to the surface. Volcanoes erupted in repeated upheavals of the Earth’s crust, and dust and ashes filled the atmosphere, shielding the Earth from the sun’s rays. The climate grew cooler and drier, and the even succession of the seasons gave way to the chill of autumn and the bite of winter. The giant ferns and tropical evergreens of the previous era were replaced by gingkos and other deciduous trees. Leaves fell at summer’s end, and for the first time the ruling reptiles experienced the pinch of hunger.

The restless movements of the Earth continued. The continents moved apart, and new mountains were created; the Alps and the Rocky Mountains were among the great ranges formed at that time. The upward thrust of huge rock masses, in turn, disrupted the flow of currents of air around the globe, leading to a further deterioration of the pleasant climate to which the reptiles had not become accustomed. As the lands were lifted up and the mountains grew, the swamps and marshes began to drain; the soft, lush vegetation disappeared; the food chain of the great reptiles was broken— and the thread of the dinosaur’s existence was snapped. The fossil record does not reveal the detailed circumstances in which the dinosaurs disappeared; we know only that when the climate began to change the dinosaurs diminished in number, and after several million years they were gone. Stegosaurus was the first to go; he became extinct ten million years before the rest. Perhaps the reason was that in a legion of small-brained animals, he was one of the smallest-brained of all. After Stegosaurus, the monsters of the seas and the birds were next, and then Brontosaurus and Tyrannosaurus and the other giants of the land. Last to disappear were the horned and armored dinosaurs; they closed the books on the history of the ruling reptiles. Birds – Air Force One

The sight and sound of wings are so much part of our everyday experience that we tend to take for granted anything in the air from dancing gnats to supersonic fighters. Indeed, it is difficult to imagine what it would be like to have no wings about us, to look up into a sky empty of

24 The Story of Life from Monday to Saturday insects, birds and airplanes; yet up to a time unimaginably distant, the sky was a lifeless silent void. Then, from the dense undergrowth of steamy swamps and from the edges of lagoons and lapping seas anonymous insects began their first tentative flights—flights even more momentous and crucial for the destiny of life on this planet than those at Kitty Hawk1 and Cape Kennedy2 some 350 million years later. At the time of this evolutionary breakthrough, the Erath had already been supporting life in various forms for more than 1,000 million years. Flightless insects had been sharing fern-pond and mud-flat with scuttling millipedes, spiders and scorpions for perhaps 25 million years; but with the arrival of the flapping wing, insects gained an advantage over all other creatures which was to lead to a species and population explosion unmatched in size and duration. Unquestionably, the aerial performance of insects is quite spectacular by any standards, yet far less if known about their flight than that of birds or airplanes. Moreover, until recently even the fundamental laws of aerodynamics appeared to break down when insect flight was considered.

The evolution of these first wings took place at about the same time as the first amphibians abandoned the water for a life on land. Insects and other established earthbound creatures probably were a convenient source for the newcomers, and so it is quite possible that the amphibians provided the insect with the evolutionary challenge which led to the development of wings. There are no fossil records of flying insects until the late Carboniferous period, about some 270 million years ago; the details of their wing evolution before this time cannot be accurately traced, partly because early insects were particularly fragile creatures and disintegrated before becoming fossilized. Although there are other theories, insect wings are generally thought to have evolved from lateral extensions at the top of the thorax wall, appearing first as shallow flaps which may have served as stabilizers as they jumped out of harm’s way. Important supporting evidence comes from one of the earliest fossils,

1 Birth place of airplane Wilbur and Orville Wright successfully flew a glider in 1901, Kitty Hawk, in the state of North Carolina, USA.

2Cape Canaveral, promontory, eastern Florida, on a barrier island, occupied on the cape area and a part of nearby Merritt Island by a space center operated by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). The center is called the John F. Kennedy Space Center and is the principal United States launching site for earth satellites and space flights.

25 Earth - Designed for Biodiversity. Life will find a Way! which actually exhibits two small lobes on the first segment of its thorax, in addition to the two pairs of fully developed wings on the other two segments. With time, the fliers became big and elegant!

Man has always been more intrigued by the flight of birds than by that of any other creature. The perfect harmony of their form and function has captivated men through the ages, although the subtle blend of innumerable elements which go to make up bird flight has long eluded scientific analysis. Birds are the largest class of vertebrates living today, having diversified into some 8,500 species, compared with the 4,000 species of mammals. The only other living vertebrate to acquire the power of true flight is the bat, although flying fish, a few rodents, marsupials and a lizard are capable of gliding in a comparatively crude manner. Second only to insects, the highest class of invertebrates, birds are the most biologically successful group of animals that have ever existed, and, like the insects, owe their success almost entirely to their ability to fly. Wings and feathers have given birds the power to rise into the air, move rapidly from one place to another, travel long distances, find food not available to other animals, escape from enemies and rear and tend their young in high safe places.

Of all the classes of animals, birds are the easiest to recognize simply because of their feathers. This characteristic has meant that birds, like mammals, are homothermic, or uniformly warm-blooded, which has given them a major advantage over most other creatures. Warm-bloodedness allows an animal to maintain a relatively constant body temperature, usually higher than that of the surrounding air; the blood temperature of birds average about 5 degrees Celsius higher than that those of mammals, including man. In contrast, cold-blooded creatures, such as reptiles, depend entirely on the environment for their body temperature and, although lively enough when warm, the cold makes them too lethargic to hunt for food or escape from enemies. Warm-bloodedness in both birds and mammals is accompanied by a four-chambered heart which allows fresh oxygenated blood to circulate round the body uncontaminated by “tired” blood, as in fishes, amphibians and reptiles. Birds can, therefore, maintain the high rate of metabolism so necessary for intense activity, particularly flight, and because they are able to withstand different climates, can explore all parts of the globe from the Polar Regions to the equator.

The evolutionary change from cold to warm-bloodedness is at the heart of the question of how birds first came into existence. It seems difficult to believe that birds, whose movements are freer than all other

26 The Story of Life from Monday to Saturday animals, could have descended from the traditionally ponderous and cold- blooded dinosaurs, and yet there is now widespread support for such an ancestry. The earliest fossil, which bears any resemblance to a bird, is “Archaeopteryx.” It was unearthed in lithographic limestone by workmen in Bavaria in 1861 two years after Darwin had shocked the world with the publication of his “Origin of Species.” Up to this time few people had taken his theory of evolution seriously, but the discovery of this most famous of missing links proved almost beyond doubt that birds had in fact descended from reptiles, or at least reptile-like animals. Archaeopteryx lived about 150 million years ago in the upper Jurassic Period, during the age of the “terrible lizards” or dinosaurs, and bore little resemblance to the birds of today. It had many reptilian features, such as a long bony jointed tail and claws on its wings, and instead of a beak it had lizard-like jaws with sharp teeth. As its breastbone had no keel to which powerful wing muscles could be attached, it is generally assumed that the creature was only capable of gliding or at most a feeble flapping. But, in other respects, Archaeopteryx was like a bird; it was about the size of a crow, had bird like feet and was covered not with scales but with feathers which were structurally indistinguishable from those of present day birds.

Unfortunately, in the 70 million years immediately succeeding Archaeopteryx, only a handful of birds are known to have any fossil remains. Most of these were seabirds, whose chances of fossilization were much better than those of landbirds; the two best known being “Hesperornis,” a six-foot long flightless driving bird with teeth, and “Ichthyornis,” a tern-like bird which had a well developed keel on its breastbone and was therefore most probably a good flier. Fossilized birds become increasingly most common in the Eocene epoch 54 to 38 million years ago; the remains of flamingos, rails and game birds have been found in the Paris basin, and the bones of vultures, herons and kingfishers have been dug up in the London clay. One group of fossilized birds found in great number was the giant flightless species, such as the extinct elephant birds and moas from the Eocene, Oligocene and Miocene epochs 54 to 7 million years ago. These, together with such extant birds as the ostrich, kiwi, rhea and emu, lacked a keel on their breastbone, and so were all considered to represent a stage of development before flight was learnt. At one time all these birds were believed to be closely related, and so were placed in a separate sub-class known as the “ratitae” to distinguish them from the keeled birds. Today it is understood that they are not related to one another at all, but are the result of convergence; that is, where

27 Earth - Designed for Biodiversity. Life will find a Way! evolution produces similar characteristics within various unrelated species. Each order of these “ratites”1 as they are now called has developed independently in the part of the world where it is found, and probably stopped flying when there was no further need to escape from enemies or obtain food. With disuse their wings and flight muscles gradually atrophied and their keels disappeared. Mammals – The Last Passenger on Earth

As the population of the dinosaurs dwindled, the busy forests grew quiet. Now a furtive, rat-like animal came out of his burrow and surveyed the desolate scene. The lowly mammal had inherited the Earth. The first mammals had evolved more than one hundred million years earlier, at about the same time as the dinosaurs. During the long interval that followed, they had remained subordinate to the dinosaurs—tiny, furry animals, hiding during the day when the dinosaurs were active, and foraging in the cooler nights when the reptiles were torpid and their movements were slow. Now, with nothing to fear but their own kind, the mammals grew bolder. Quickly they spread out across the continents and occupied all the places the reptiles had left vacant. Some stayed on the ground; others went up into the trees; still others returned to the water. In a relatively short time, the basic mammalian stock evolved into an amazing assortment of creatures—forebears of the elephant, monkey, whale, and other animals that populate the Earth at the present time. Within twenty million years, the Age of Reptiles had given way to the Age of Mammals. Why did the mammals succeed in adapting to conditions in the new world when the reptiles had failed? One reason may be that mammals are warm- blooded, and better able to survive in a cool climate. When the temperature of the air is low the fine network of blood vessels under the skin of the mammal contracts, reducing the blood to the surface and cutting down the loss of body heat. When the temperature is too high, the blood vessels expand, increasing the loss of heat from the skin and cooling the body.

Many other traits contribute to warm-bloodedness; for example, an insulating coat of fur replaces the naked skin of the reptile and keeps a mammal warm when the air is cold, and the involuntary act of shivering

1“Ratite” is the name of a birds group, “Ratit” name was taken from Greek, “Ratitae” which means “unflyable” birds. This birds group was named “Ratit” because they can’t fly. They can’t fly because their wings are too small to help them to fly. Beside that, they have a large body which may reach 4 meters high and have 300 kilograms weight.

28 The Story of Life from Monday to Saturday also warms him then, while sweat glands cool his body by evaporation when the temperature is high. How did the mammals come to acquire these advantageous traits? According to one theory, the ancestors of the mammals were small reptiles that began to explore the possibilities of a nocturnal life. The dinosaurs were most active during the day, and competition between the two groups of animals for food was undoubtedly very keen in the daytime hours. The night offered the chance of finding food while the dinosaurs were drowsing. It also offered safety to a tiny animal whose normal fate was to provide a snack for his larger cousins. As soon as nocturnal activity had become an established way of life for this group of small reptiles, nature set to work to modify their traits so that they could be more effective at night. Since the nights were cooler than the days, one desirable trait for a nocturnal animal was warm-bloodedness. Accordingly, the inexorable law of the survival of the fittest began to act on the population of the night creatures, preserving the individuals that happened to have the desirable attribute of warm-bloodedness in some degree, and weeding out those who lacked it. If one nocturnal animal had a better control of body temperature, or a slightly greater resistance to the cold than the average for the group, that animal could be more active at night, and would be better able to find food or escape from its pursuers. Such animals survived and passed on their advantageous traits to their offspring. Animals lacking those traits were more likely to perish, and gradually their genes were eliminated from the population of the nocturnal reptiles.

The changes, imperceptible at first, added up over many generations, until finally the nocturnal reptile was transformed into a completely warm- blooded animal—the ancestral mammal. The dinosaurs may also have had some traits of warm-bloodedness; coats of fur have been suggested for them, but those traits must have been much less important to giants like Brontosaurus and Tyrannosaurus, because bulk sealed in their body heat. Modern mammals possess other characteristics, in addition to warm- bloodedness, which distinguish them from their reptilian forebears. One of the most important among these is a very effective means, unique to mammals, of caring for their young. Reptiles lay their eggs and commonly display no further interest in the fate of their progeny, except sometimes to eat the newly hatched young; but the mammalian mother protects the developing embryo against the hostile forces in the environment by nourishing it inside her body with her own blood; after birth, she feeds her young with milk secreted by the glands which have given mammals their

29 Earth - Designed for Biodiversity. Life will find a Way! name; and she continues to care for the young a long time thereafter, until they are able to fend for themselves. Mammals make more effective provisions for the survival of their young than any reptile, thereby securing a great advantage in the competition for the propagation of their species. Mammals have still other advantages traits. For example, the jaw of the mammal has a set of grinding teeth, or molars, at the side, for chewing and cutting food down to a smaller size. No true reptile has teeth like this. Quick replenishment of energy and a high level of continuous activity are possible with such teeth, in contrast to the postprandial stupor of the reptile that has swallowed his prey whole.

But the most valuable characteristic of the mammal is his superior intelligence. The fossil record shows that this trait developed in the primitive mammals very early; almost from the start, they were brainier and more flexible than the giant reptiles. When the world began to change, their traits of flexibility became highly advantageous. This circumstance may explain the fact that in proportion to body weight, the brains of the early mammals were three times to ten times larger than the brains of the ruling reptiles.1 The pint-sized mammal was the intellectual giant of his time. Why were the ancestral mammals brainier than the dinosaurs? Probably because they were the underdogs during the rule of the reptiles, and the pressures under which they lived put a high value on intelligence in the struggle for survival. These little animals must have lived in a state of constant anxiety—keeping out of sight during the day, searching for food at night under difficult conditions, and always outnumbered by their enemies. They were Lilliputians in the land of Brobdingnag2. Small and physically vulnerable, they had to live by their wits. The nocturnal habits of the early mammal may have contributed to his relatively large brain size in another way. The ruling reptiles, active during the day, depended mainly on keen sense of sight; but the mammal who moved about in the dark much of the time, must have depended as much on the sense of smell, and on hearing as well. Probably the noses and ears of the early mammals were very sensitive, as they are in modern mammals such as the dog. Dogs

1The actual size of the brain of the dinosaur was greater, but nearly all this brain was needed to control his enormous body. The mammal was much smaller, and a correspondingly smaller part of his brain was needed for body control.

2BROBDINGNAG, a country of enormous giants, to whom Gulliver was a tiny dwarf. They were as tall “as an ordinary church steeple,” and all their surroundings were in proportion. Gulliver’s attitude and size changes when he travels from Lilliput to Brobdingnag. Irish-born Jonathan Swift wrote the novel “Gulliver’s travels in 1726.

30 The Story of Life from Monday to Saturday live in a world of smells and sounds, and, accordingly, a dog’s brain has large brain centers devoted solely to the interpretation of these signals. In the early mammals, the parts of the brain concerned with the interpretation of strange smells and sounds also must have been quite large in comparison to their size in the brain of the dinosaur.

Intelligence is a more complex trait than muscular strength, or speed, or other purely physical qualities. How does a trait as subtle as this evolve in a group of animals? Probably the increased intelligence of the early mammals evolved in the same was as their coats of fur and other bodily changes. In each generation, the mammals slightly more intelligent than the rest were more likely to survive, while those less intelligent were likely to become the victims of the rapacious dinosaurs. From generation to generation, these circumstances increased the number of the more intelligent and decreased the number of the less intelligent, so that the average intelligence of the entire population steadily improved, and their brains grew in size. Again the changes were imperceptible from one generation to the next, but over the course of many millions of generations the pressures of a hostile world created an alert and relatively large- brained animal. Among the generally intelligent mammals, one group became even more intelligent than the rest. This group lived in the trees. They had climbed up from the forest floor at least sixty million years ago, seeking food as well as protection from their enemies. The early tree dwellers were small animals with pointed faces and long tails, similar in appearance to the modern tree shrew of Borneo. The squirrel-like creature lives in the mountains of northern Borneo, where it is attracted to the moist, mossy conditions which the Nepenthes Lowii thrives under. This plant, which is found in Borneo, is the only one in the world that collects the droppings of animals and uses them to produce a sugary substance, which the shrew then eats. Dream of a Penthouse

Some of the early mammals did not like the terrestrial habitats and dreamed of a penthouse. These unimpressive creatures were singled out, by the circumstances of their tree-dwelling existence, to be the ancestors of man1. At first the tree dwellers were identical in form to their cousins who had remained on the floor of the forest, but nature set to work quickly to shape their bodies into a form better suited for survival in the new 1The tree dwellers described here were the forerunners of the primates. Modern arboreal animals include other mammals such as squirrels.

31 Earth - Designed for Biodiversity. Life will find a Way! environment of the treetops. Gradually, the pressures of that environment weeded out the animals that were least fitted for life in the trees and increased the number of those that were best fitted. The traits needed for survival in the trees were different from those needed on the forest floor. In the new life, the greatest danger came not from other animals—for the high branches offered a safe haven from most predators—but from the risk of falling to the ground. Two physical attributes were required to reduce that risk. First, the tree-dwelling mammal needed a hand, rather than a paw, with fingers that could be curled into a tight grip around branches; second, it needed binocular vision, to judge distances in leaping from branch to branch. The tree-dwelling mammal who lacked these attributes was likely to fall to his death and leave no survivors; the one who possessed them was more likely to live and produce offspring. Through successive generations the desirable traits of a well developed hand and keen, binocular vision, passed on from parents to progeny, came to be possessed by an ever larger part of the population, and the traits themselves were refined and strengthened.

In the course of time the paw of the original tree-dwelling animal was transformed into a hand, with supple fingers and an opposable thumb; while the eyes, originally set at the sides of the head, moved around to the front to create the overlapping field of view needed for stereoscopic vision. Color vision was also a valuable aid to the tree dweller. Among the modern mammals, only descendants to the original tree dwellers have this marvelous ability developed to a high degree. We think of color mainly as an esthetic sense, but it is easy to understand why it would have had considerable survival value for the tree dweller. With a good sense of color he could see brightly colored fruits, otherwise invisible against the leafy background, and was a better nourished animal. Color vision also helped him to pick out well-camouflaged predators—for example, the spotted leopard—who were difficult to see in the dappled shadows of the forest. A better brain was also required for survival in the trees, in addition to the improvements in eye and hand. When the tree dweller jumped from branch to branch, he needed a fast, accurate computer in his head to combine the factors of distance, wind speed, movements of branches, and balance of his body. The computation had to be done in a split second, with death or serious injury the penalty for any mistake. This natural computer—the brain—had to have a large memory capacity for storing the results of past experiences with aerial maneuvers; it also needed complex mental circuits to perform the necessary calculations; and it had to do its work rapidly.

32 The Story of Life from Monday to Saturday

The predecessor of the tree dweller, living on the forest floor, had possessed a simple brain without these remarkable qualities. But now, once again, the law of the survival of the fittest took effect. By virtue of the small variations from one individual to another that occur in every population, some animals possessed a slightly better brain than others; these animals were more likely to survive, passing on their superior brainpower to their offspring; those less well endowed with the necessary mental traits tended to perish at an early age, and their genes disappeared from the population. Thus, under nature’s pruning action, the brain of the tree dweller improved in quality and size; at the same time, his dexterity and keenness of vision continued to develop. After thirty million years of continuous improvement of body and brain, the descendants of the tree dweller had become another kind of creature. The new creature was a monkey. The remains of the first monkeys appear in the fossil record in rocks about thirty five million years old. These ancestral monkeys were far more intelligent than any other animal in their time; in hand, eye, and brain they had started along the road to man; but they did not proceed very far. Some millions of years after their appearance, their descendants diverged from the human line of evolution and branched off onto a side spur. There they have remained, secure in their treetop environment, down to the present day. Not long after the first monkeylike creatures appeared, a few of their number developed a novel pattern of behavior that was to lead them and their progeny directly to man. The unusual behavior involved the way in which these animals traveled in the forest. Then, as now, most monkeys moved through the trees by running along the tops of branches on all fours; but in this particular troop, some individual discovered the trick of hanging by his arms and swinging from branch to branch, and even from tree to tree.

Hurtling through the forest canopy, the innovative monkey could travel more rapidly than his cousins who ran along the branches. And the new method of travel had another advantage; a tree dweller accustomed to swinging by his arms fell easily into the habit of dividing his weight among several branches, hanging from one overhead branch while standing on two others below. In this way he could climb farther out on small branches, reaching out with his free hand to gather fruits and nuts inaccessible to other animals who had not learned this strategic trick. Before that time, the danger of a branch breaking under the animal’s weight had placed a severe constraint on the size of the tree dwellers; that is why monkeys were small when they first evolved, and are still small today. Now, with

33 Earth - Designed for Biodiversity. Life will find a Way! smallness no longer as essential trait for survival that innovative troop of monkeys, swinging through the forest, could evolve into larger animals. The fossil record reveals the result. Starting with the ancestral monkeylike creature who lived about thirty five million years ago, the remains of the unusual group of tree dwellers show a steady progression in size during the next twenty million years. At the end of that time, the little monkey had been transformed into a heavy-bodied animal, weighing as much as two hundred pounds, with long arms and powerful shoulders, developed for ease and speed in swinging from one branch to another. But an animal with these traits of body and behavior was no longer a monkey; he was an ape. Ape – Who Wants be an Angel With an appearance of the apes fifteen million years ago, the long saga of evolution among the tree-dwelling mammals neared its end. Another ten million years would elapse, and all the modern branches of the family of the apes would be present: first, the agile gibbon, gymnast of the forest, a true ape of the trees, who has refined the arm-swinging mode of travel of the ancestral apes to an extraordinary degree; then the orangutan, larger and heavier than the gibbon, but still primarily a tree dweller, who occasionally descends to the forest floor; next, the chimpanzee, bright, curious, spending much of his time on the ground, but at home in the trees and an agile arm-swinger; then the gorilla, a peaceful vegetarian of fierce-some aspect, weighing as much as 250 kilos, who rarely goes up into the trees; and last, a new creature, the ape man, more intelligent than any ape, but not yet human. A small animal, in size and appearance like a pygmy chimpanzee and yet curiously unlike in his posture, emerged from the forest and paused at the edge of the clearing. The skin of the animal was dark and relatively hairless. His nose was flat; he had no chin; the cheek bones were prominent; the eyes were set under a massive ridge of bone. Large, powerful jaw muscles and projecting lips and teeth combined to make a face that sloped forward and outward, giving his expression an apelike cast; but the hint of a forehead above the strong eyebrow ridges suggested a glimmer of intelligence.

This was the ape man. His full name was Australopithecus1. His ancestors split off from the main stock of the African apes about fifteen million years ago. For many millions of years there-after the record of human origins is 1Australo means “southern”; pithecus means “ape.” As Australia is the southern continent, Australopithecus is the southern ape. It was given this name by Dr. Raymond Dart, because he found the first Australopithecus fossil in South Africa.

34 The Story of Life from Monday to Saturday nearly blank. The trail reappears in rocks about five million years old, which contain the fossilized remains of Australopithecus—a creature more than ape but less than man. Bent at the knee, slouched over, with head hunched into his shoulders and arms dangling nearly to the knees, the animal at the edge of the clearing presents an unimpressive silhouette. Cautiously, he straightens to his full height of four feet and scans the horizon. Behind him lies the refuge of the forest, ahead the dangers of the open savanna. He sees no sign of the big cats that compete with the ape men for food and sometimes dine on them. Australopithecus indicates the all-clear to his fellows with a grunt, a soft hoot, or a movement1. Moving across the grassland, the band discovers the remains of a partly consumed antelope, killed a few days earlier by one of the roving cats. Raw meat, tenderized by two or three days of putrefaction, must have been a treat. A little later, they see a wounded buck some distance off, lagging behind the grazing herd moving across the savanna. Quickly, the ape man picks up a stone, runs after the animals, and hurls the weapon. His aim is fair. Then thousand generations later, it will be better. The passage of time discriminates against the hunter with poor aim. A bad marksman fails to bring home the bacon; his offspring are poorly nourished; his genes disappear from the stock.

Ten million years earlier, the ancestors of Australopithecus, living in the forest, would have been unable to combine the simple acts of running and throwing at all, because they walked and ran on all fours. The forest apes of that time walked like the chimpanzee and the gorilla today, with the full weight of the body resting on foot and hand, the stance only slightly more erect than that of a dog. In the intervening millions of years, the forebears of Australopithecus changed from a four-legged to a two- legged posture. What circumstances created this family of two-legged apes? The record of ancient climates in Africa provides a clue to the answer. It shows that conditions become progressively drier during the course of millions of years, and, as the rainfall gradually diminished, patches of broken woodland and savanna appeared here and there in the tropical forest. An abundance of animal life flourished in the forest, including a large population of apes. Around fifteen million years ago, a sharper

1Although the brain of Australopithecus seems to have been big enough to form some of the abstract thoughts of language, his fossil remains suggest that Australopithecus lacked the curved vocal passage needed for forming the clear sounds of the spoken word. Perhaps he communicated by a hand sign drawn from a repertoire of gestures.

35 Earth - Designed for Biodiversity. Life will find a Way! change to dry weather occurred in this region. At that time, according to the fossil record, the ancestors of man split off from the four-legged forest apes and followed a separate evolutionary path. The timing of these two events could have been a coincidence, but a study of the fossil record shows that it probably was not; the dry climate actually created the split between the forest ape and his two-legged relative. To understand the reasoning behind this conclusion, consider the course of events during many generations in the history of those apes that lived in the forest.

Every year, because of the decrease in rainfall, the forest retreated and the area of the savanna expanded. As the land had opened up to the fishes more than three hundred million years ago, now the savanna opened to the forest apes. With an increasing expanse of open grassland before them, some apes wandered across the boundary between the familiar forest and the new environment; once on the savanna, they found new foods not available in the forest. At first, the apes kept to the fringes of the open land; later they wandered farther. When they began to spend a large amount of time in the open, their behavior changed. Existence had been secure in the forest life; few predators prowled through the dense brush, and on the rare occasions when danger was close, the nearest tree offered a quick escape. But tree cover was scarce on the savanna, and the big cats roamed everywhere. Survival in the open required an erect posture nearly all the time, as the ape reared up and peered anxiously across the plain in a continual watch for his natural enemies. If he dropped back on all fours, the world disappeared from his view, and he became easy prey for the cat lurking in the tall grass1. On the savanna, the ape had to stay erect to stay alive. Yet he was not comfortable in that position. An ape on two legs is still an ape; his body is an ape’s body. He tries to stand straight, like the gorilla, but his body is bent at the hip and knee. The awkwardness of the gorilla’s two-legged posture is evident; his bones and joints are not built for an upright stance.

Every bone in the lower body of the savanna ape had to change before he could stand at ease on two feet. The pelvis, thigh, leg, and foot acquired completely different shapes. The shape of the foot is a clear example. In the ape, the foot looks something like a hand, and its big toe resembles a thumb; it is relatively short and angled out to the side. The fossil remains of the ape man, however, show that his big toe was large and pointed

1Other factors, such as freeing the hands for tool use, also favored an upright stance.

36 The Story of Life from Monday to Saturday forward, like the big toe of a man. It acted as a lever to provide a powerful forward thrust for the manlike stride of the two-legged animal. The skull provided an even more dramatic sign of the transformation from a four- legged stance to a two-legged stance. Every animal with a backbone has a conspicuous opening in its skull, through which the nerves of the spinal cord pass on their way to the brain. In man, whose backbone is vertical, the spinal cord enters the head from beneath, through an opening in the bottom of the skull. In a four-footed creature like the dog or cat, whose backbone is horizontal, the spinal cord enters the skull through an opening at the rear. The fossil record shows that in the skull of the forest ape, the opening for the spinal cord was also at the rear; but in the skull of the ape man it had rotated to a position almost directly underneath, and close to the location of this opening in the human skull. The position of that opening is clear proof of the ape man’s erect posture.

What altered the skeleton of the ancestral savanna ape, so that he could stand erect? An animal can build up his muscles by running; he can force himself to adopt a strained posture; but he cannot change his skull and bones by trying. Yet the fossil record shows that the forms of animals do change. The giraffe developed his long neck; the elephant grew his trunk; and the four-legged forest ape changed into the two-legged ape man. How did this happen? How does one kind of animal become transformed into another? The idea of animals changing their forms is very strange; it seems more reasonable to assume that each creature on the Earth appeared here in its present form. Yet the fossil record tells a different story. According to that record, animals as different as the elephant and the whale evolved from a ratlike ancestor during the course of millions of years. How can a ratlike animal turn into an elephant or a whale in any length of time? This transformation seems miraculous, but Darwin’s theory explains how the struggle for survival can continually create new kinds of animals out of older ones. The key to Darwin’s explanation is time, and the passage of many generations. Forty million years elapsed from the time of the ratlike animal to the appearance of the ancestral whale and elephant. Darwin wrote in the “Origin of Species,” “The mind cannot grasp the full meaning of the term of even a million years; it cannot add up and perceive the full effects of many slight variations, accumulated during an almost infinite number of generations … We see nothing of these slow changes in progress, until the hand of time has marked the lapse of ages, and then … we see only that the forms of life are now different from what they formerly were.”

37 Earth - Designed for Biodiversity. Life will find a Way!

Darwin’s critics were not accustomed to thinking in terms of millions of years; they accused him of proposing that nature could convert “an oyster into an orangutan” or “a tadpole into a philosopher”; they taunted him with his inability to supply the missing link—the animal caught midway in the transition from one species to another. The fossil record was very fragmentary in Darwin’s time, and he could not oblige his critics by producing evidence of the transformation. Yet his theory was very solid; it rested on an obviously true statement about living creatures, and a straight-forward chain of reasoning. The statement is that although all animals of a given kind resemble one another, no two individuals in the world are exactly alike. Usually the variations from individual to individual are small. Brothers and sisters tend to resemble one another; all elephants look more or less like other elephants; all apes look more or less like other apes. But Darwin asserted, these small, accidental variations from one individual to another are critically important, because in the struggle for existence the creatures distinguished from their fellows by special traits— giving them an advantage in the competition for food, or in the fight against the rigors of the climate—those creatures are more likely to survive, more likely to reach maturity, and therefore more likely to produce offspring. The favored individuals may be few in number at first, but in each generation they produce larger families than their less favored neighbors; by the laws of inheritance, their offspring also tend to possess the favorable traits; therefore, they, too, produce larger-than-average families. From generation to generation, the individuals with the desirable traits always multiply faster than their fellows; their numbers increase relative to the numbers of the less favored; and eventually they become the majority. In this way, an advantageous characteristic spreads through the entire population1.

1The advantage need not be overwhelmingly great. If the favored individuals have families that are only a few percent larger, after one hundred generations they will be far more numerous than the others. And not only does natural selection increase the number of individuals with a favorable trait as the generation s pass; in addition, it increases the intensity of the trait in these individuals. For, by the laws of inheritance, the offspring of the favored individual are likely to possess the advantageous characteristic also; and some will possess it to an even greater degree than their parent. Those individuals are more likely to survive and produce offspring. After many generations, the characteristic—which may have been present in a very small degree at first—becomes very pronounced in the descendants of the individuals who first possessed it.

38 The Story of Life from Monday to Saturday

The process by which the pressures of the environment prune a stock, strengthening some traits while they eliminate others, is called natural selection. Darwin wrote, “Natural selection is daily and hourly scrutinizing, throughout the world, the slightest variations, rejecting those that are bad, preserving and adding up all that are good …” “Good” and “bad” sounds like moral judgments, but in fact Darwin’s theory has no moral implications. A “good” trait does not imply nobility of character; a “bad” trait is not an evil one; and in the phrase “survival of the fittest,” the fittest are not necessarily the noblest or the best. The terms “good” and “fit” only mean a better chance of surviving the hostile forces of the environment long enough to produce progeny. When the environment changes the definitions of good and bad also change in Darwin’s theory. Now consider the application of Darwin’s ideas to the forest apes who emerged onto the savanna millions of years ago. When these apes first came out of the forest, some had a bodily structure that enabled them to stand erect more easily than others; a few for example, possessed a knee joint that was unusually supple, just as some humans are double-jointed; others possessed a thigh bone and leg slightly longer than the average, giving them a larger stride, a greater speed in running, and a greater chance of catching prey or escaping from their enemies; still others possessed a foot—and especially a big toe—shaped better for that forward push that gives the walk of the two-legged ape its power.

These traits of the anatomy were favored or “good” characteristics under the pressures of life on the open savanna. The ape who walked and ran erect more easily than his fellows had a strong advantage in the competition for food and the flight from the natural enemies of his species. This ape was more likely to survive to maturity on the savanna; therefore he produced more offspring. The offspring were likely to inherit the favorable bodily traits from their parents, and thus more likely to survive and produce offspring of their own. In each generation, the apes with an erect posture left behind more progeny than their less favored neighbors; in the course of many generations, their progeny became very numerous; in time the entire population walked erect. The process was imperceptible from one generation to the next; its influence was not felt in one individual or in his immediate descendants, but eventually the succession of many small changes made a new animal out of the old. From the time the apes left the forest, fifteen million years ago, until the time when the remains of Australopithecus were left in the dust of Africa, natural selection worked its slow effect. During that long interval of many millions of years, the

39 Earth - Designed for Biodiversity. Life will find a Way! entire skeleton of the forest ape was transformed. By the time his descendants lived on the African plains, the metamorphosis from the four- footed ape to the two-legged ape man was complete. The Handy Man – Maker of Tools

Now the time is three million years ago, the two-legged animals has come far since his ancestors left the forest. He walks with a manlike stride; he runs fairly well; his forelimbs are free for throwing stones and carrying food; he has a degree of manual dexterity; and he is accustomed to using his hands. He has another human trait as well: he has learned the use of the club as a weapon. Tools found on his living floors attest to that. Campsites of Australopithecus in South Africa contain dozens of skeletons of baboons, and the majority have their skulls bashed in. the campsites also contain six skulls of Australopithecus himself, all fractured. In several cases, the fracture looks as though a blow had been delivered to the head by a stone or a club. Strangely, many of the depressions in the baboon skulls consist of two dents side by side. This fact reveals the nature of the weapon probably used in the attacks. The thighbone of the antelope has a heavy double knob at one end. If this thighbone is broken in two, the shaft of the bone, capped by the heavy joint, makes an excellent club; and the double-knobbed shape of the joint just matches the double dent in the baboon skulls. The evidence seems convincing; like modern man, Australopithecus often bludgeoned his prey to death. In addition to the skeletons of baboons and antelopes, the campsites contain the bones of many other animals of all sizes—mice, rabbits, porcupines, warthog, and even very large animals such as the giraffe, rhinoceros, and elephant. The sites also have the remains of birds, lizards, snakes, and the shells of freshwater crabs and turtles. Clearly, Australopithecus had a taste for meat; it was not his entire diet, but it must have been an important part of it.

This meat eater ran with the other carnivores of his time; he was one among many kinds of animals that preyed on the grazing herds scattered across the plains. He was an active and competent hunter, and he held his own against fearsome predators like the lion, the dagger-toothed cat, and the giant hyena. Yet he was a puny creature, slight in build, four feet tall at most, weighing perhaps thirty kilos and no match for his competitors in physical prowess. Every other carnivore had natural weapons—great strength, size, claws that ripped, or slashing, stabbing fangs. The ape man had none of these. But his weaknesses were balanced by the strength of his intellect. The actual size of the ape man’s brain was not impressive; it was

40 The Story of Life from Monday to Saturday about as big as a fist, and not much larger than the brain of the chimpanzee. But in proportion to body weight, the brain of the ape man was twice as large as the brain of the ape. Every animal uses a part of its brain as a telephone exchange, receiving signals from the body and sending out messages in return; but Australopithecus, with a body considerably smaller than the ape’s, required fewer brain cells for this purpose, and had more gray matter available for the storage of experiences from the past and the contemplation of actions in the future. Elaborate kits of tools fashioned from bone demonstrate the superior intelligence of Australopithecus. The bones of the antelope, found in abundance on his living floor, seem to have been the most important source of materials for his workshop. The antelope thighbone served as a club; fragments of the antelope jaw, with teeth forming an abrasive edge, served as scarpers; horns became picks useful for extracting bone marrow; large bones were broken in two and hallowed out at one end to form a scoop.

Australopithecus achieved this level of technology three or four million years ago, about ten million years after his ancestors had moved out onto the savanna. Thereafter, he changed no further, either in brain size or in bodily form. Like many forms of life before him, the ape man had reached an evolutionary dead end; he had become a living fossil. Between 1 to 2 millions years ago, he became extinct. Well before Australopithecus vanished, another two-legged, intelligent animal appeared in Africa. The new animal was also descended from the forest apes; he was a relative of Australopithecus, with similar bodily traits; but his brain was considerably larger. Australopithecus and his large-brained cousin lived on the same continent for more than two million years. Throughout that long interval, while the intelligence of Australopithecus remained unchanged, the brain of the other animal continued to grow. The fossil record has not revealed why one cousin became more intelligent than the other; we only know that by the time Australopithecus disappeared, his relative had acquired a brain nearly twice as large as the brain of the ape man. The intelligent creature was the first true man; he was the first animal to merit the designation “HOMO1”. Signs of the superior intelligence of Homo appear

1Until recently, Homo was thought to be no more than two million years old and probably descended directly from Australopithecus. However, discoveries made since 1972 —initially by Richard Leakey, son of Mary and Louis—indicate that true man— Homo—existed three million years ago, and may be a separate line of descent from the population of ancestral apes. These recent findings make Homo the cousin to Australopithecus rather than his direct descendant.

41 Earth - Designed for Biodiversity. Life will find a Way! clearly in the fossil record. Mary Leakey and Louis Leakey unearthed evidence indicating that as early as two million years ago, Homo was the master of a tool-making technology more advanced than the technology of the ape man. Stone was the material used in this industry.

The earliest stone tools made by Homo were very crude, just pebbles broken in two to form a sharp edge. Later ones had nicely chipped edges produced by a dozen well-placed blows, and made fine clean edges and look hardly used; in others, the cutting edge is battered and blunted by the wear and tear of heavy use. Tools that look cleavers, chisels, picks, and awls are also abundant. Finally, there are small, carefully rounded stones that fit into larger ones with hollow depressions; these may have been hammer and anvil combinations, or perhaps they were mortar and pestle sets for pounding grains and roots. The variety of tools found by Dr. Leakey is impressive. Even more impressive is her discovery that the materials used by early Homo in his tool- making industry were not available in the campsites of these early men; they were a particularly hard kind of rock that was carried there from other places, in some cases as far as 17 km away1. Apparently, Homo scoured the neighborhood for miles around in his search for these stones. When he found them, he brought them home to his workshop. The implication is that Homo had developed an industry. He thought out his needs in advance; he gathered his materials; he worked on them from day to day; and after he had fashioned his tools, he saved them and used them repeatedly. Until recently, the ability to make tools was considered one of the characteristics that distinguished man and his ancestors from all other animals. In 1964, Dr. Jane Goodall shattered this belief when she observed that chimpanzees in the African forest frequently make simple tools for catching termites. The ape first looks for the right materials; he carefully selects a twig with the correct size and shape; then he works on it, stripping off the leaves. Now it is ready; he inserts it into a hole in the termite nest. Pulled out, the twig is covered with delectable insect morsels.

Dr. Goodall also observed that this tool-making technique is passed on from generation to generation among the chimpanzees. The young ones watch their elders and try to imitate them, clumsily at first and with

1The rocks found in the campsites were pieces of granite or sedimentary rocks like slate. These are too soft to make good cutting tools. The desirable rocks for tool-making were quartz and lava, which form sharp, hard edges when broken. In that locality, quartz and lava were found in stream beds located several miles from the campsites.

42 The Story of Life from Monday to Saturday greater skill later on. If apes make tools, why are the tools of early man so remarkable? One reason is that his chipped rocks, which seem so primitive to us, are finely crafted instruments in comparison to the ape’s termite stick. Another reason is that the ape takes his tools only from the materials at hand, and only for immediate use; he does not plan for the future. No chimpanzee has ever been observed to collect twigs on Monday, prepare them for termite fishing on Tuesday, and use them on Wednesday and Thursday. The contrast with the behavior of Homo is evident. Homo was a bright animal two million years ago, and a determined one. His tool-making industry, judged in the context of the time, represented a level of organization and planning comparable to landing a man on the moon; in intellect, he was superior to all other animals in his day; yet nature’s work on his brain was far from complete. He was a nearly finished creature from the neck down, but his small skull held a brain half the size of the brain of modern man. Homo sapiens - Man of Wisdom Starting about one million years ago, the fossil record shows an accelerating growth of the human brain. It expanded at first at the rate of one cubic inch1 of additional gray matter every hundred thousand years; then the growth rate doubled; it doubled again; and finally it doubled once more. Five hundred thousand years ago the rate of growth hit its peak. At that time the brain was expanding at a phenomenal rate of ten cubic inches every hundred thousand years. No other organ in the history of life is known to have grown as fast as this2. At that time the world began its descent into a great Ice Age, the first to afflict the planet in hundreds of millions of years. The trend toward colder weather set in slowly at first, but after a million years patches of ice began to form in the north. The ice patches thickened into glaciers as more snow fell, and then the glaciers merged into great sheets of ice, as much as two miles thick. When the ice sheets reached their maximum extent, they covered two-thirds of the North American continent, all of Britain and a large part of Europe. Many mountain ranges were buried entirely. So much water was locked up on the land in the form of ice that the level of the Earth’s oceans dropped by three hundred feet.

1One cubic inch is a heaping tablespoonful.

2 If the brain had continued to expand at the same rate, men would be far brainier today than they actually are. But after several hundred thousand years of very rapid growth the expansion of the brain slowed down, and in the last one hundred thousand years it has not changed in size at all.

43 Earth - Designed for Biodiversity. Life will find a Way!

These events coincided precisely with the period of most rapid expansion of the human brain. Is the coincidence significant, or is it happenstance? The story of human migrations in the last million years provides a clue to the answer. At the beginning of the Ice Age Homo lived near the equator, where the climate was mild and pleasant. Later he moved northward. From his birthplace in Africa1 he migrated to across the Arabian Peninsula and then turned to the north and west into Europe, as well as eastward into Asia. When these early migrations took place, the ice was still confined to the lands in the far north; but eight hundred thousand years ago, when man was already established in the temperate latitudes, the ice moved southward until it covered large parts of Europe and Asia. Now, for the first time, men encountered the bone-chilling blasts of freezing winds that blew off the cracks of ice to the north. The climate in southern Europe had a Siberian harshness then, and summers were nearly as cold as European winters are today. In those difficult times, the traits of resourcefulness and ingenuity must have been of premium value. Which individual first thought of stripping the pelt from the slaughtered beast to wrap around his shivering limbs? Only by such inventive flights of the imagination could the naked animal survive a harsh climate. In every generation, the individuals endowed with the attributes of strength, courage, and improvisation were the ones more likely to survive the rigors of the Ice Age; those who were less resourceful, and lacked the vision of their fellows, fell victims to the climate and their numbers were reduced.

The Ice Age winter was the most devastating challenge that Homo had ever faced. He was naked and defenseless against the cold, as the little mammals had been defenseless against the dinosaurs one hundred million years ago. Vulnerable to the pressures of a hostile world, both animals were forced to live by their wits; and both became, in their time, the brainiest animals of the day. The toll-making industry of early man also stimulated the growth of the brain. The possession of a good brain had been one of the factors that enabled Homo to make tools at the start. But the use of tools became, in turn, a driving force toward the evolution of an even better brain. The characteristics of good memory, foresight, and innovativeness that were needed for tool-making varied in strength from one individual to another. Those who possessed them in the greatest

1Until recently, the consensus among anthropologists placed the origin of man in Africa. However, some recent evidence suggests that Asia may have been his birthplace.

44 The Story of Life from Monday to Saturday degree were the practical heroes of their day; they were likely to survive and prosper while the individuals who lacked them were more likely to succumb to the pressures of the environment. Again these circumstances pruned the human stock, expanding the centers of the brain in which past experiences were recorded, future actions were contemplated, and new ideas were conceived. As a result, from generation to generation the brain grew larger. The evolution of speech may have been the most important factor of all. When early man mastered the loom of language, his progress accelerated dramatically. Through the spoken word a new invention in toll-making, for example, could be communicated to everyone; in this way the innovativeness of the individual enhanced the survival prospects of his fellows and the creative strength of one became the strength of all. More important, through language the ideas of one generation could be passed on to the next, so that each generation inherited not only the genes of its ancestors but also their collective wisdom, transmitted through the magic of speech.

A million years ago, when this magic was not yet perfected, and language was a cruder art, those bands of men who possessed the new gift in the highest degree were strongly favored in the struggle for existence. But the fabric of speech is woven out of many threads. The physical attributes of a voice box, lips, and tongue were among the necessary traits; but a good brain was also essential, to frame an abstract thought or represent an object by a word. Now the law of the survival of the fittest began to work on the population of early men. Steadily, the physical apparatus for speech improved. At the same time, the centers of the brain devoted to speech grew in size and complexity, and in the course of many generations the whole brain grew with them. Once more, as with the use of tools, reciprocal forces came into play in which speech stimulated better brains, and brains improved the art of speech, and the curve of brain growth spiraled upward. Which factor played the most important role in the evolution of human intelligence? Was it the pressure of the Ice Age climate? Or tools? Or language? No one can tell; all worked together, through Darwin’s law of natural selection, to produce the dramatic increase in the size of the brain that has been recorded in the fossil record in the last million years. The brain reached its present size about one hundred thousand years ago, and its growth ceased. Man’s body had been shaped into its modern form several hundred thousand years before that. Now brain and body were complete. Together they made a new and marvelous creature, charged with power, intelligence, and creative energy. His wits

45 Earth - Designed for Biodiversity. Life will find a Way! had been honed by the fight against hunger, cold, and the natural enemy; his form had been molded in the crucible of adversity. In the annals of anthropology his arrival is celebrated by a change in name, from Homo erectus—the Man who stands erect—to Homo sapiens—the Man of wisdom. Humanity in Dreamtime

Many Christians find themselves somewhere between conservative and a broad chronology for man’s origin. Yet in spite of individual preferences, one must give assent to God’s creative work in producing man in order to think biblically about man. Man is not only God’s creation but also the pinnacle of his creative effort. Long before modern precision in such things, the ancients were aware of man’s anatomical similarities with members of the animal kingdom. Yet despite these similarities, the biblical viewpoint never places man on the same level as animals—man is distinct, the high point of God’s creative work, the apex of his handicraft. The progression of the created things in Genesis Chapter one, is climatic; all of God’s created work culminated in his fashioning man. The distinct behavioral characteristics of man include language, toolmaking, and culture. Distinct experiential characteristics include reflective awareness, ethical concern, aesthetic urges, historical awareness, and metaphysical concern. These factors individually and collectively separate man from other forms of animal life. Man is far more than the “naked ape” of some modern evolutionary theories. But sociology alone does not suffice to explain the full nature of man. That is the subject of divine revelation.

In Australian Aboriginal culture “Dreamtime” means “Deep time.” Humanity in Dreamtime means “human history in the deep time, far back into geologic time-scale”. Most of us can name our grandparents, many our great-grandparents, and some our great-great-grandparents. Beyond that, we enter a dark and mysterious realm known as history, through which we can only navigate with hesitant steps, feeling our way with whispered guidance. Who were the people that came before? Where did they live? What were their lives like? Answers to these questions can be found in our genetic code, which makes us uniquely human—but also makes us unique individuals. Our DNA carries, hidden in its string of four simple letters1, a historical document stretching back to the origin of life and the first self-replicating molecules, through our amoebic ancestors, and down

1Four letter are: A-Adenine; C-Cytosine; T-Thymine; G-Guanine.

46 The Story of Life from Monday to Saturday to the present day. We are the end result of over a billion years of evolutionary tinkering, and our genes carry the seams and spot-welds that reveal the story.

It is not the code itself that delivers the message, but rather the differences we see when we compare DNA from two or more individuals. These differences are the historical language of the genes. In the same way that you wouldn’t include “water-dwelling” in a classification of fish, because all fish live in water, the identical bits of our genetic code tell us nothing about our history. The story is in the differences, and this is what we are supposed to study. This study is about the journey we have taken as a species, from our birthplace in Africa to the far corners of the Earth, and from the earliest evidence of fully modern humans to the present day— and beyond. The argument pursued throughout is that genetics provides us with a map of our wanderings and gives us a rough idea of the dates— and it is up to us to reconcile this data with the archaeological and climatological record in order to fill in the picture. Of course, every journey must have a beginning, and this one is no exception. It begins with the scientific effort to make sense of human diversity, which leads us to the birthplace of our species. The methods we use to infer our African origins are the same ones we then use to trace humanity’s global journey. It is the journey itself that is the main focus, and for this reason most of the details of our hominid ancestors have been left out.

The journey we trace is primarily one made by men, because it is the Y-chromosome, inherited from Adam down the male line, which gives is our keenest tool for deciphering the journey. The Y helps to place the stones, bones and languages in context better than any other part of our genetic code, and ultimately gives us the genetic answers we are looking for. Of course, in order to leave descendants, these early human groups must have included women; while the journey we follow may leave out some female- specific details, the resolution we can achieve only by following the male lineage is worth the omission. What follows is a scientific detective story guided by the temporal order of events. We begin with a deceptively simple question: how do we decide if the concept of human “race” has any validity? Are we indeed all one species, or are there discrete divisions among human groups? After all, we appear to be so different from one another. The answer to this question, first provided by PhD adviser at Harvard, Richard Lewontin, gives us a clue about the journey—but it doesn’t reveal the crucial details.

47 Earth - Designed for Biodiversity. Life will find a Way!

The second main question concerns our geographic distribution. How did we come to occupy every corner of the globe? The DNA markers are able to provide us with the details. The method for doing this, was developed over the course of half a century, have been greatly influenced by Luca Cavalli-Sforza. It was Luca’s insight, as a geneticist with a passion for history and a talent for mathematics, which provided us with a time machine capable of resurrecting the stories of the past from people living in the present. One of the most compelling things about being on an archaeological dig is the sense that you are actually seeing and handling implements that were last touched by human hands hundreds or thousands of years ago. Often the sense is so great that a feeling of déjà vu comes over you, and it seems as though you have somehow been transported back in time. When, I saw the Tutankhamen1 exhibition in 1993, in Cairo National Museum, Egypt, I was struck by the combination of modern skill and ancient subject matter. It seemed as though the pieces, although fabulously exotic, could have been made the week before by a skilled craftsman. The fact that they were nearly 4,000 years old was extraordinary, and sparked in me a curiosity for the past that has never diminished.

Genetics, at least the branch of it that informs the subject of human origins and migrations, is necessarily less visually compelling than archaeology, despite the fascinating stories it tells. Every one of us carrying his or her personal history book around inside us—we simply need to learn how to read it. The Australian Aborigines maintain their sense of connection to their ancestors and their homeland through a musical story—some people call it “a song-line.” These song-lines reflect the actual journey taken by their ancestors during the Dreamtime, a period in the distant past, before collective memory. In a sense, this is precisely what we are trying to do with our studies of DNA—resurrect a global song-line for everyone alive today, describing how they reached their current location and what the journey was like. As secular Westerners we have lost our traditional song-lines to a greater extent than other peoples around the world, so it is perhaps appropriate that Western science has developed the methods for rediscovering them.

1Tutankhamen (reigned 1333-1323 BC), Egyptian Pharaoh of the 18th dynasty, the son-in-law of Akhenaton, whom he succeeded, and possibly his son by a mirror wife. He became Pharaoh at about the age of 9 and ruled until his death at about the age of 18.

48 The Story of Life from Monday to Saturday

Today we are in many ways the same Paleolithic species that left Africa only 2,000 generations ago, with the same drives and foibles. It is ironic the final Big Bang of human history, which has given us the tools to “read” the greatest history book ever written—the one hidden in our DNA—has also created a cultural context where it is becoming increasingly difficult to carry out this work. The genetic data, science has glimpsed shows unequivocally that our species has a single, shared history. Each of us is carrying a unique chapter, locked away inside our genome, and we owe it to ourselves and to our descendants to discover what it is. Since our ancestors came down from the trees, we have used our intellect to explore outward and extrapolate into the future. Over the past few thousand years we have changed our world—and our place in it—for ever. With the development of agriculture, and the cultural chain reaction it ignited, we gained the power to choose our own evolutionary trajectory. With this power, though, came increased responsibility. One responsibility that we neglect at our peril is that of self-discovery. Once the document of our journey has been lost, it will be like the footprints of our ancestors as they left Africa to colonize the globe, would be gone for ever.

49 ChapterEarth - Designed II for Biodiversity. Life will find a Way!

Kingdom of Life is the Kingdom of God “The Kingdom of God is like a treasure buried in the field, which a person finds and hides again, and out of joy goes and sells all that he has and buys that field. Again, the Kingdom of God is like a merchant searching for fine pearls. When he finds a pearl of great price, he goes and sells that he has and buys it. Again, the Kingdom of God is like a net thrown into the sea, which collects fish of every kind. When it is full they haul it ashore and sit down to put what is good into buckets. What is bad they throw away” (Mathew 13:44- 46).

Planet Earth is a complete living, breathing, swarming, thriving system. Planet Earth is a gift from God to all biotic and abiotic worlds. Planet Earth is a treasure house with minerals, water, air, rainforests and its Biodiversity, oceans and its fish. Scientists call this world “Kingdoms of Life” and in fact Jesus was the first one to call this phenomenon as the “Kingdom of God.” Creation myths can be found at the core of all religions. Ancient view on origin of life suggests the necessity and dependency of life on god; Bible speaks about the creation; Hinduism points out the “cosmic dance of Shiva1”; and Mythology narrates thousand of bizarre stories on creation of life. The theory of evolution holds that all organisms are the result of descent and modification, from a simple, and undifferentiated primordial substrata. Although it is customary to credit the inception of this theory to Charles Darwin and his immediate predecessors, a rudimentary form of this notion can be traced back to the beginnings of written history itself. In fact, the belief that life had its origins in a single basic substance is so widespread among the various peoples of the world, primitive or civilized, that it can be considered one of the few universal themes in the history of ideas. Two consecutive phases in the development of this conception can be distinguished. The first involves the mythical interpretation of natural phenomena; the second, the rational or philosophical. This dichotomy, however, is made only by our modern-day historians. The ancient chronicler perceived no such finite classification. “Even a lover of myth,” wrote Aristotle “is in a sense a philosopher.”

1Hindu God Shiva performing the Cosmic Dance, symbolizing creation and the rhythmic beat of time. The image appears in South Indian bronzes dating from the 10th century to the 14th century, the most famous example being the bronze image in the temple at Chidambaram, in South India, also known as “Nataraja” in Tamil language.

50 The Kingdom of Life is the Kingdom of God

The Kingdom of Life is divided into different levels and Swedish Carolus Linnaeus (1707-1777) is often considered the father of taxonomy. The principles he developed for classifying living things hierarchically still permeate the field today. Linnaeus grouped similar species into a larger group, called a genus. Then, he grouped similar genera into families, and so on. In all, he designated seven levels: kingdom, phylum, class, order, genus, and species. At the species level, there are a few species that share many traits. In a kingdom, there are many species that share a few traits. A common mnemonic device to remember the groups, from largest to smallest, is: King Philip Came Over for Great Spaghetti.

Most of the great religions talk about triadic concept of the divinity. In Christianity they call “one God and three persons.” Three Persons suggest Theodiversity in the realm of divinity, as we see “one Life and biodiversity” in the natural world around us. Biodiversity suggests variety of organisms from one life. The Kingdom of Life is divided into different categories. Biologists commonly classify living things into five kingdoms, or large-scale units. The kingdoms are Prokaryotes, Protists, Fungi, Plants, and Animals. This division has not gone undisputed: Some argue that there are six kingdoms, with Prokaryotes divided into two distinct kingdoms, Archaea and Eubacteria. Overall, the division into kingdoms, and into the finer categories of phylum, class, order, family, genus, and species, has proved useful. It offers a guide to distinguish living things—for example, noting that spiders and flies are from the same phylum (arthropods) but different classes (respectively, arachnids and insects). It also helps in understanding their evolutionary relationships. It is not chance that puts oaks and cacti in the same kingdom of plants, but the fact that the two are more closely related to each other than either is to any animal, such as a spider or fly. The Kingdom of God is All about Life and Biodiversity

Although the kingdom of God does not appear on any map, it is a real place. The whole world is the kingdom of God, comprising the biotic and abiotic world, from tiniest of atom to the sun. Religions offer a very anthropocentric view of the natural world, concerning mostly about human needs and lives, excluding all other biotic and abiotic strata. For example, when we say “we are Catholics,” we automatically exclude Hindus, Jews, Buddhist, animals, plants, bacteria, soil, air, water and other worlds. On the other hand Kingdom of God offers a more comprehensive view of life; it includes everything in the created universe, excluding none. For example, when we say “Kingdom of God,” we include everything, all

51 Earth - Designed for Biodiversity. Life will find a Way! religions, animals, plants, soil, air, water and other worlds. In short, the Kingdom of God is all that was created by God. It is a place where God’s will is fully accomplished. It is perfect, and it is peaceful. We come across this concept of “Kingdom of God,” in the Bible; Jesus Christ was the proponent of this new vision for the universe. Christians believe that Jesus Christ first brought his kingdom to light when he came to Earth as a man. He healed the sick. He raised the dead. We will see and understand his kingdom to light when he comes again in glory. Jesus Christ will reign in an everlasting kingdom. He will destroy Satan and sin forever.

No matter what version of Jesus you accept, the goal of a Christian life is to reach the Kingdom of God. There is just as much evidence in the gospels that reaching the Kingdom of God means arriving at a higher level of consciousness. Only inner transformation could bring about Christ’s vision of the Kingdom of God on Earth, which was the Messiah’s ultimate mission. As is so often the case, you can read scripture many ways. But I think the argument for higher consciousness is by far the most persuasive. Christian tradition paints the Kingdom of God as paradise, a place of sharing between humans, animals and plants; a banquet hall for the starving presided over by a smiling Father; in mundane terms, it’s the warm home that the master welcomes his workers into after a hard day tending the vineyard; modern life may be more comfortable, but still we yearn for this place of refuge and rest. Also, Christianity has always focused on the weak and poor whose longing for rest and relief certainly hasn’t changed since Jesus’ time. In his 1894 manifesto, “The Kingdom of God is within you,” Tolstoy proposed creating such utopian communities without waiting for the Second Coming of Christ. Tolstoy took Christ personally, seeking him through a simple, literal adherence to his teachings. When Jesus said that the Kingdom of God is within, he meant within everyone, biotic and abiotic world; God in all and All in God. I think the only way to solve the riddles posed by the Kingdom of God is to say that God exists in different place depending on your level of consciousness. It is our ability to recognize God in everything we see. So God’s presence could be seen in all the five kingdoms of life, Bacteria, Protoctista, Fungi, Plantae and Animalia, and this is the Jesus’ vision of “Kingdom of God.”

The key to understanding the Kingdom of God is to understand the original statements about it. The basic meaning of the Greek word “basileia” along with the Hebrew “malkut” is rule, reign, and dominion. When “malkut” describes God, it almost always refers to his authority or

52 The Kingdom of Life is the Kingdom of God to his rule as the heavenly king over the created universe. “They will talk together about the glory of your kingdom; they will celebrate examples of your power … For your kingdom is an everlasting kingdom; your rule generation after generation” (Ps 145:11-13). According to the testimony of the first three Gospels in the Bible, the proclamation of the Kingdom of God was Jesus’ central message. One of the writers in the Bible, Mathew summarizes the Jesus’ ministry in Galilee with the words “Jesus traveled throughout Galilee teaching in the synagogues, preaching everywhere the Good News about the Kingdom” (Mt 4:23). The Sermon on the Mount concerns itself with the righteousness that qualifies people to enter the Kingdom of God (Mt 5:20). The collection of parables in Mathew 13 and Mark 4 illustrate the mystery of the Kingdom of God. The Lord’s Supper looks forward to the establishment of the Kingdom of God (Mk 14:25). People will be gathered from all corners of the Earth to sit at a table in the Kingdom of God. All of these metaphors picture the restoration of communion between God and Creation. It is not about future kingdom but the present salvation Jesus offers, here and now.

The Kingdom of God is not something “up there”, or “out there”, or beyond the beyond; a release into an eternity, or as the ancient sages experienced, a merging into the transcendence. The possibility that it is “right here” was taught by Jesus in the parables of the Kingdom of God. “The Kingdom of God is not coming with things that can be observed; nor will they say, ‘Look, here it is!’ or ‘Look, There it is!’ For, in fact, the Kingdom of God is among you!” (Lk 17:20-21). Now we know the Kingdom of God is right here, planet Earth and its systems, and if we want to experience the Grace and Power, we have ample opportunity to practice it while fully engaging in the details of our lives with biotic and abiotic neighbors. All we have to do is to realize that the whole Kingdom of God is built on relationships. We are all with the nature not above or over or out of the nature. In fact, more and more we are compelled to do so because the human mind alone can no longer resolve the ever more complex problems of the world, because our state of the mind is connected with the state of the natural world, through the power of the Spirit. Spirit can however, because it is capable of moving in multiple directions simultaneously attracting instantaneous positive results, abridging space and time, and defying normal causality and possibility. In that way, Spirit is the ultimate problem solver in the new world of Kingdom of God. The end result of this movement is that we are all moving to a new stage of human development and consciousness.

53 Earth - Designed for Biodiversity. Life will find a Way!

First, we have arrived at the first great point in our ascent; to mentality and rationality, which is an enormous development and sign of human progress. This has particularly been the case in the last 50 years. Then we move higher to the next pinnacle of consciousness and discover and utilize the power of the spiritual force that is there in the atmosphere, especially so in recent decades. We then apply that power to the details of life perfecting and divinizing it. As more and more individuals take to this approach, we see the first signs of a new type of existence emerging; a first glimmer of a new spirit-influenced and oriented society: the Kingdom of God. It is the ultimate destination in our ascent to the Heights as a human species. Remember nothing is excluded from the Kingdom of God, from atoms to stars, the whole Creation. This is indeed a radical departure in spiritual history. It is no longer a life apart from life, or eternal life after death, but the emerging of Divine Life right here on Earth, leading to the culmination in Heaven. In the interim, we are taking intermediary steps to raise our consciousness and arrive at the realization of our image of God. Higher attitudes, purifying and perfecting our behavior, emerging higher personal values, a mind that embraces all sides of an issue, and the ability to open to the spiritual force are several of the bridging steps to the collective emergence of the Holy Spirit.

Eventually, these individuals can become the ultimate evolutionary personality and being. These become the transformed Gnostic individuals, filled with the Divine aspects and powers, living life for a Divine Purpose and unfolding in creation. They act with a spiritual orientation and purpose, bringing this Spirit to bear in all activities in life. He is infinitely creative, dynamic, releasing the infinite potential of life into every moment by bringing the Being, the Spirit into the becoming of every moment of our existence. If a number of such divine-like humans emerge, then there is the possibility of the development of a community of such individuals, living within the greater community of society. Such individuals may come together to help from a new social and collective order and existence, culminating in the possibility of the emergence of a divine life on Earth: the Kingdom of God.

The Kingdom of God is the great theme of the scriptures. God is the eternal King who rules now and shall rule in the future. It is in the Kingdom of God that the purposes of God are fulfilled. And since the term “Kingdom of God” is an important concept, it is important to define the term and note the distinct ways it is used in the scriptures. To get a clear picture of

54 The Kingdom of Life is the Kingdom of God the Kingdom of God, a large number of scripture verses needs to be studied. When we speak of a “Kingdom” certain elements are included in our understanding of the term. The normal use of the term kingdom expresses a dominion or physical sphere of a rule involving a ruler, a people who are ruled, and a physical territory where the rule takes place. As it is used in the scriptures, the term “Kingdom of God” refers to the rule of the sovereign God over his creation. In both the general concept of a kingdom and in the biblical idea of the Kingdom of God, three essential elements are found. In a Kingdom of God on Earth, the old ways of life would disappear, such as mental idols, constructed principles and systems, religions and conflicting ideals. There would be an end of war, political strife and all the negatives that issues from it. Jesus came to Earth to establish his Kingdom, the Kingdom of God. The Kingdom of God is what the Bible is all about. Notice that Jesus mentions it here in Mk 1:14-15, at the start of his ministry.

Psalm 95:3-7 read, “For the Lord is the Great God, the great King above all Gods. In his hand are the depths of the Earth, and the mountain peaks belong to him. The sea is his, for he made it and his hands formed the dry land.” In the gospel of Mathew, the Kingdom is mentioned 55 times and it is a revolutionary teaching brought by Jesus, “Repent, for the Kingdom of God is at hand,” announces the Baptist, and repeats Jesus (Mat 3:3, 4:17). The Kingdom is never defined in the Gospel rather they present it as “riddle.” It is something “so big” that the whole world can enter into it… each one of us has to enter into it (Jn 3:3-5, Matt 18:3). But it is “so small” that he enters into each one of us, it is within us (Lk 17:21, Matt 6:10). It is so big, that it is the “mystical body of Christ,” his Church… and it is something so small, that it is the same Jesus in our hearts. The “Kingdom” and the “Church” are considered the same thing in Mat 16:17-18… and this is why the apostles never mentioned the Kingdom after the Gospels, because when they mentioned the Church, or simply Jesus Christ, they were preaching the Kingdom, their task (Matt 10:7, Lk 9:2). Jesus is the King and the Kingdom. Jesus not only came to show us the Way, but he himself is “the Way” (Jn 14:6). The Kingdom of God is sanctified from the outer world of existence. Entrance into the Kingdom is through the love of God and love of the natural world (Neighbor), through detachment; through holiness and chastity; through truthfulness, purity, steadfastness, faithfulness; through loving, caring, saving life; through preservation, conservation of biotic and abiotic world. The Kingdom of God brings peace, love, grace and

55 Earth - Designed for Biodiversity. Life will find a Way! liberation to all Creation. “If you want to Cultivate Peace, Protect Creation” (Pope Benedict XVI). Therefore, Planet Earth is the Kingdom of God. The Kingdom of Life is the Kingdom of God. The Saga of Life in Ancient Thought

Life and mythology evolve together and they complement each other. Mythology is a kind of history book about god and life. In general, myth conveys the impression of a story invented “ex nihilo,” a story describing the irascible and typically irresponsible actions of various divine malcontents. But these deities are not simply malevolent gods capriciously toying with mankind. They are actually personifications of Nature, and their activities, predictable and unpredictable, determine what life will be like on Earth. For example, the Greek god Apollo, or his Egyptian counterpart, Amon Re is at once the sun and the unfathomable divinities who cause the Earth to be lighted by driving their blazing chariot across the skies. It may have been naïve to attribute the sun’s movements to unseen powers, but the superstition did not prevent men from making accurate and precise records of these divine activities. And after all, precise observation is the beginning of science. The actual distinction between the mythical and scientific approach to Nature lies not in the observations upon which they are based, but in the interpretation of these observations. It has already been noted that the concept of life emerging from a single substrate is a notion held by many of the primitive peoples of the world. As such, it was also one of the most recurrent themes in the myths of antiquity. Every nation and city-state had such a myth, and every society claimed that its ancestors were the first humans to have appeared in the world. Even the Greeks believed that they were autochthonous, even though they were fully aware that the civilizations in Egypt and Mesopotamia predated their own by more than a thousand years. But even though this belief in universal in its distribution, the observations that prompted the idea remains a mystery for all but a few civilizations fortunately, Egypt is one of these exceptions. In the first century B.C the Greek historian, Diodorus of Sicily, visited the country and he recorded that Egyptian soil was so rich that it could generate new life. Thus the conviction that life had initially emerged from the soil was based on certain evidence to this effect that was still observable in the first century B.C. when the Egyptians saw what appeared to be the autochthonous

56 The Kingdom of Life is the Kingdom of God emergence of animals from the Earth, it is not surprising that they concluded that their own ancestors had also emerged from the soil.

The earliest testimony to this belief comes from an Egyptian bas-relief dating from about 1400 B.C, which depicts the god Khnum1 sitting at a potter’s wheel upon which stand two children. The idea that man was originally fashioned out of clay—an idea that in the seventh to sixth century B.C was expressed in writing with the declaration that “man is clay and straw and god is his builder.” The god Khnum had modeled man’s body upon a potter’s wheel and had placed the prototype in the soil. Then, when it was time to appear, man simply emerged from the Earth just as did the other creatures. In Babylonia, man was also thought to have been fashioned out of clay, but coupled with this belief was the impression that the gods had had a special purpose in creating man, namely to provide themselves with servants. For example, in one myth the Mother Goddess, Lullu, is ordered to create a being to serve all of the gods, and to build him out of clay. Similarly, in the creation myth called the “Enuma Elish,” the god Marduk declares that he will bring together blood and bones and from these he will create a “savage,” which shall be named “man.” This savage will be burdened with serving the gods so that the deities will be able to live leisurely existences. The explanation for this self-denigrating attitude is readily apparent when one recognizes that life in Mesopotamia involved a yearly struggle for survival against the elements. Unlike the Nile, the Tigris and Euphrates rivers were not predictable in their actions. Without warning they might crash down from their sources in the Armenian mountains. The Mesopotamian plains would be suddenly inundated, the crops destroyed before they could be harvested. The inhabitants lived at the very mercy of the rivers, despite the elaborate network of canals that they build to check and distribute these waters. The uncertainty of day-to-day life engendered a sense of despair and fatalism. It is no wonder then, that these people saw themselves in the role of the oppressed slaves. By contrast, Egypt was a country that was relatively free from natural

1Khnum, in Egyptian mythology, one of the four principal creator gods, the others being Amon-Ra, and Ptah. Khnum was envisaged as a potter who molded deities, humans, and animals from clay on his potting wheel, and then breathed life into them. He was usually depicted as a man with the head of a ram, his sacred animal and a symbol of male creative power. Khnum was believed to control the rising waters of the Nile, an annual phenomenon crucial to the fertility of the land.

57 Earth - Designed for Biodiversity. Life will find a Way! catastrophes. The Nile flooded the land with dependable regularity and men had only to plant their seeds to be assured of food. This sense of security was reflected in a feeling of confidence and optimism on the part of the Egyptians, and it enabled them to devote more of their time to further technological mastery over the environment.

The remaining myth of creation indigenous to the Near East is found in the Old Testament. Actually, there are two independent narratives contained in these writings; the older of the two myths was written some time between 900 and 500 B.C and begins at Genesis 2:4b, while the second, written about 500 B.C runs from Genesis 1:1-2:4a. The older story is called the Yahwist account1, because in it God is addressed as Yahweh. The beginnings of the universe are completely ignored by the chronicler. Instead, the story commences with Yahweh fashioning “man of dust from the soil.” Yahweh then said, “It is not good that man should be alone. I will make him a helpmate.” So, from the soil God fashioned all the wild beasts and all the birds of heaven. Since the origins of the Hebrews are rooted in both Egypt and Mesopotamia, it is a moot point whether the writer borrowed or conceived on his own the idea that God had fashioned man out of clay. Such myths can be found throughout the inhabited world so there is no reason to assume that the Yahwist historian was simply repeating a foreign myth of the creation. Whatever the source, it is to be noted that man and the animals share a common beginning in this particular version, each having been brought to life from dust by Yahweh’s own hand. Also worth noting is the sequence of appearance: man first, then the animals. While the second account, called the Priestly source2, is essentially a commentary on the Yahwist story, it does introduce a few rather significant additions and changes. For one thing, it begins with the formation of the universe and it implies that there was a preexistent watery state from which land was made to appear. From this land arose vegetation and “every kind of living creature.” As his final act, God creates man “in the image of himself.”

1The Biblical sources differ in vocabulary, literary style, and theological perspective. The oldest source is the Jehovistic, or Yahwist, abbreviated as “J” from its use of the divine name Jahwe —modern Jehovah—or Yahweh, commonly dated in the 10th or 9th century BC.

2Abbreviated “P” for Priestly source, “P” is known for its emphasis on cultic law and priestly concerns, dated in the 6th or 5th century BC. There are also other sources known as “Elohist-E” and “Deuteronomy-D.”

58 The Kingdom of Life is the Kingdom of God

Two changes have thus been made in the original narrative. Man is now depicted as having been created after, rather than prior to the animals, suggesting perhaps that man represents the height of God’s magnificent accomplishments. Second, while the other forms of life are commanded to appear by fiat, the Priestly source states that man was personally fashioned by God’s own hand. Although often venerated for their rationality, during their early history of Greeks also held a credulous belief in the existence of inscrutable and progenitive gods. According to the poet Hesiod, who lived around 800 B.C Hephaestus had been commissioned by Zeus to “mix Earth with water and to put in it the voice and strength of human kind.” Four successive but discontinuous creations of this sort were envisioned. After the first, called the, “golden race of mortal men,” there appeared the silver and then the bronze—the men who settled in Greece around 2000 B.C. After these came the race of men to which Hesiod himself belonged—the race of iron. In a later cycle of myths, the Titan god Prometheus1 is venerated as the benefactor of mankind for having created man out of Earth and water and for presenting him with fire, a gift that he stole from the Olympian gods. Enraged by the theft, Zeus had the Titan chained to a cliff where he was visited daily by a monstrous eagle that tore at his liver. Other Greek legends assert that during an abortive rebellion against Kronos, man arose from the blood of the slain Titans. In a still later story, Prometheus is said to have been freed and to have had a son named Deucalion who wedded Pyrrha, the daughter of Pandora, the first woman to have been created. The two are warned by Prometheus that Zeus is going to destroy mankind because of its wickedness, and like Noah of the Old Testament, the couple build an ark and ride out the flood that Zeus sends.

When the rains finally cease and the ark comes to rest on dry land, Deucalion disembarks and sacrifices to Zeus. Zeus is appeased and as a token of good will he declares that he will grant Deucalion any wish that he might have. Deucalion’s immediate request is for companions. Zeus realizes his mistake but it is too late: his promise has been given. Deucalion and his wife are told to throw the “bones of their mother” over their shoulders and his wish will be fulfilled. At first Pyrrha is disquieted at the order, but Deucalion comforts her with the explanation that Zeus means the “bones of Mother Earth.” Each then picks up a number of stones. Those

1Greek god Prometheus and his brother Epimetheus were given the task of creating humanity and providing humans and all the animals on Earth with the endowments they would need to survive.

59 Earth - Designed for Biodiversity. Life will find a Way! thrown by Deucalion become men, while those thrown by Pyrrha appear as women. Thus, mankind once again is made to rise from Mother Earth and this is the reason that these creatures are called “laos” (people), for they came into being from “laas,” the Greek word for stone. It should now be apparent that the belief in the autochthonous origins of mankind was not confined to any one area of the ancient world, but was shared by many early civilizations, among them the Egyptians, Babylonians, Hebrews, and Greeks. In the Near East this idea was accepted as incontrovertible, owing to the religious endorsement that it received. In Greece, however, the only religious requirement confronting the Greek was that he recognizes the existence of the gods. Following this, he was free to say or write whatever he thought about them or their actions. Given this religious freedom, the Greeks eventually began to ask themselves questions that either did not arise in these other societies, or if they did arise, were quickly suppressed by the powerful priestly classes. Aristotle’s Views on the Origin of Species Few individuals can be compared to Aristotle in terms of his influence on Western thought. He was the first great encyclopedist and his observations, real or imagined, stamped the course of Western science for hundreds of years after his death. Born in 384 B.C., at Stagiras, a Macedonian city about 200 miles north of Athens, Aristotle was introduced to court life at an early age, since his father was personal physician to Amyntas, the king of Macedonia. Following his father’s death in 367 B.C., Aristotle made his way to Athens to further his education. There he fell under Plato’s spell and he studied at the Academy for the next twenty years of his life. In 347 B.C., Plato died and Aristotle left Athens to take a position with Philip of Macedon as personal tutor to the king’s son, Alexander soon afterwards embarked upon his conquest of the known world. In 342 B.C., Aristotle was back in Athens and this time he founded his own academy, the Lyceum. Here he remained until 323 B.C., the year in which Alexander died. The great conqueror had made enemies of many of the inhabitants of Greece and because of Aristotle’s association and friendship with Alexander the resentment that the latter had created was turned against those who had been partial to him. Accused of impiety, the same charge that the earlier Athenians had used to eliminate Anaxagoras and Socrates, Aristotle fled for his life to Chalcis in Euboea. Shortly thereafter, he died a quiet death. Although Aristotle never went into the question of evolution with any clarity, he did clearly side with Anaxagoras against Empedocles and the Atomists in arguing that there was purpose in nature. This purposefulness could be seen in the gradual

60 The Kingdom of Life is the Kingdom of God progression of life from plants through animals to the ultimate biological specimen—man.

The attainment of this end was the main plan in nature. Plants and animals, like women and monsters, were simply failures that had come about because nature had to contend with “slipshod” working material. Aristotle’s thoughts on the evolution of these imperfect forms caught up in his treatment of the soul as the designing principle in nature. Although these notions regarding the influence of the soul were radically different from Plato’s, the influence of teacher on pupil is readily apparent. The form of an organism and the functions that that organism would be capable of performing were determined by the type of soul contained within it. Observation of the behavior of the various forms of life indicated that there were three basic types of soul. The most primitive and therefore that shared by all life forms was the nutritive-generative soul. This was the soul possessed by plant life and, because of its qualitative simplicity, the only movement available to plants was upward and the only method by which they might reproduce was by seed. But from whence did these primitive forms arise? They were preexistent, according to Aristotle. Life containing matter did not develop from lifeless matter but was present within it from the beginning of time. It had required only moisture and a suitably high temperature to make it appear.

The second and more highly developed type of soul was that which imparted sensation. Possession of this soul in addition to the nutritive- generative soul of the plant world was the distinctive feature of the animal world. A body with such a soul was one that could move in its environment so as to change the pattern of sensations to which it might be exposed. A body with this type of soul meant that it could interact with other bodies and hence sexual reproduction was possible among animals. But though animals shared the nutritive-generative soul with plants and though they resembled plant life during their own embryonic stage, Aristotle did not regard animals merely as highly developed plants. Nature proceeds little by little from things lifeless, to animal life in such a way that it is impossible to determine the exact line of demarcation. But this is not to be taken as evidence that one evolved from the other. Just as plants had come into being, so too animals had spontaneously erupted from “putrefying Earth or vegetable matter, as was the case with a number of insects while other are spontaneously generated in the inside of animals out of the secretions of their internal organs.” But not only did insects appear in this way. Aristotle also

61 Earth - Designed for Biodiversity. Life will find a Way! adduced as evidence a rather common observation among naturalists, namely, “that certain fishes come spontaneously into existence, not being derived from eggs or from copulation,” a reference, no doubt, to that class of fish known today as mouth-breeders. The remaining animals that did not emerge spontaneously and fully grown from lifeless matter arose from eggs and then grew into their eventual natural forms. But from their very moment of existence, each possessed a characteristic soul that would determine its development and behavior.

The ultimate attribute that a soul could impart was reason. This characteristic was possessed by man alone, in addition to the sensitive and nutritive-generative souls of the other forms of life. Man was thus the most highly developed being, since his body, and his alone, contained the type of soul that conferred wisdom. Since Aristotle saw reason as the function that rendered man the supreme creature, one may infer that he regarded the attainment of reason as the goal toward which life was directed. While man represented the apogee in the progression from non reasoning to reasoning matter, there was still one step beyond even this level, and that was pure reason—Aristotle’s concept of God. For Aristotle, pure thought was God. It could be no less. To think of man—his accomplishments, his motives, his goals—this was the realm of man. But to think about thinking—that was God’s domain. And this “thinking about thinking” was Aristotle’s idea of God. As such, God had no form, nor could God enter into any activity outside the realm of thought. God was a self- contained entity, totally aloof from life on Earth. Hence, God could not have had a hand in the appearance or the development of life.

Plants and animals had sprung from the Earth. Where did man come from? Did he develop from the other forms of life? Apes and monkeys, he noted, shared some of man’s nature: “as regards man and animals, certain psychical qualities, e.g., cunning, courage, timidity, etc. are identical with one another, while others resemble and others are analogous to each other.” Furthermore, “psychologically, a child hardly differs for the time being from an animal.” Had man therefore evolved from a form of animal? Aristotle’s answer was that he had no. man had always been man. “That which comes into being is eternal,” not as an individual, but as a species. “This is why there is always a class of men and animals and plants.” There may have been a time when man was “ordinary and even foolish” as when he was still a barbarian, but man had never been anything except what he was at present. Like the plants and animals, he too had been preexistent and, like them, he too had sprung from the lifeless matter in which he had

62 The Kingdom of Life is the Kingdom of God once been buried. At no stage in his career did Aristotle appear to have comprehended the evolutionary doctrine that species are neither fixed nor immutable. While there was a unity in nature and while there was a progression of life forms in stages so minute that the line of demarcation from one to the next was impossible to perceive, the stages of development were not continuous but discrete. The seeds of each form of life were fixed from the beginning and hence were immutable. Change from one to another was an impossibility. The only possibility of change was that which occurred within the individual. Epigenetic evolution was the only type of evolution Aristotle ever countenanced. Early Christian Reappraisals

The early years of Christianity were a time of expectation. The end of the world was imminent. All thoughts were relegated to the second coming. As time passed and the universe remained intact, some of the leading Christians also found time to think about their place in the continuing world and, not surprisingly, began to puzzle over the ageless question of man’s beginnings. Within the confines of their religion, however, the alternatives were limited. Mechanistic hypotheses like those proposed by the Atomists were unacceptable, of course. Lucretius and Epicurus were vilified as idiots by Church Fathers such as Lacantius (260- 340). The only acceptable answers were those which were based on the ancient writings of the Old Testament.

Yet, there were still those within the Church who recognized certain difficulties surrounding a literal interpretation of the Bible. For example, if the biblical account of the flood were true, the presence of animals in remote geographical areas defied explanation. This was the problem that challenged St. Augustine1: ”There is a question raised about all those kinds of beasts, which are not domesticated nor are produced from the Earth like frogs, but are propagated by male and female parents, such as wolves and animals of that kind. It could be asked how they could be found in the islands after that flood in which all the animals not in the ark perished.” Evidently some Christians still believed in spontaneous generation for the lower animals, but denied the possibility for animals at a more advanced phylogenic level. “It might indeed be said that they crossed to the islands by swimming, but this could only be true of those very near the mainland,

1Saint Augustine (354-430), greatest of the Latin Fathers and one of the most eminent Western Doctors of the Church.

63 Earth - Designed for Biodiversity. Life will find a Way! whereas there are some so distant that it does not seem possible that any creature could reach them by swimming.” Unable to offer a rational explanation, Augustine turns to the irrational: “Some animals may have been captured by men and taken with them to those lands which they intended to inhabit, in order that they might have the pleasure of hunting; at the same time it cannot be denied that the transfer may have been accomplished through the intervention of angels, commanded or allowed to perform this labor by God.” Thus while Augustine recognized that the distribution of various species presented a challenge to the Scriptures, he was still unable to contemplate a solution to this problem in terms that were outside the compass of theology.

A more basic problem that sorely perplexed many theologians, however, was the apparent phenomena of spontaneous generation itself. Genesis taught that God produced all the forms of life at the moment of creation, but by 200 A.D., the list of animals still seen arising from the soil was seemingly endless. The following summary, given by Sextus Empiricus, a Greek physician living at Roe, describes these various creatures and the material from which they were seen to emerge: “as to origin, some animals are produced without sexual union, others by coition. And of those produced without coition, some come from fire, like the animalcules which appear in furnaces, others from putrid water, like gnats; others from wine when it turns sour, like ants; others from Earth, like grasshoppers; others from marsh, like frogs; others from mud, like worms; others from asses, like beetles; others greens, like caterpillars; others from fruits, like the gall-insects in wild figs; others from rotting animals, as bees from bulls and wasps from horses. Of the animals generated by coition, some—in fact the majority—come from homogeneous parents, others from heterogeneous parents, as do mules. Again, of animals in general some are born alive, like men; others are born as eggs, like birds; and yet others as lumps of flesh, like bears. It is natural, then, that these dissimilar and variant modes of birth should produce much contrariety of sense-affection, and that this is a source of its divergent, discordant and conflicting character.”

Such apparently un-controvertible evidence for the still-continuing creation of life from the soil forced in some Church Fathers a feeling of uneasiness, which resulted in their reappraising some of their theological beliefs. For instance, St. Basil1, the archbishop of Caesarea in Cappadocia,

1Saint Basil (circa 329-379), called Basil the Great, Father and Doctor of the Church, patriarch of Eastern monasticism.

64 The Kingdom of Life is the Kingdom of God argued that the statement, “Let the Earth bring forth living creatures,” could be interpreted to mean that the order had continued so that the Earth has not ceased to obey the creator. “For if there are creatures which are successively produced by their predecessors, there are others that even today we see born from the Earth itself.” As Augustine put it, God does not say, “Let the seeds in the Earth germinate the pasture grass and the fruitful tree,” but he says, “Let the Earth germinate the pasture grass sowing its seed.” In other words, “the Earth is said then to have produced grass and tree causally, that is, to have received the power of producing.” According to Augustine’s interpretation, God had given the Earth the potential for germination of plants and animals and this potential had never been withdrawn.

On the problem of spontaneous generation itself, Augustine commented, “a certain question also arises concerning some very tiny animals, namely, whether these were created in the first founding of things, or whether they result from the corruption of mortal things. For many of these arise either from the defects of living bodies, or from excrements, or exhalations, or from putrefaction of dead bodies, some also from the corrupting of trees and plants, and some from the corrupting of fruits. And we cannot rightly say that God is not the creator of all these … It would be ridiculous to say that these were created when these animals themselves were produced, if it were not for the fact that there was already present in all animated bodies a certain natural force, as it were, pre- seminated, and as it were, the primordial beginnings of the future animals which were to arise according to the genera and differences of things, through the infallible administration of the unchangeable creator who makes all things.” It may be noted that in hinting at the possibly that, in decaying, higher animals eventually give rise to various lower forms of life, Augustine is reiterating an idea previously advanced by Lucretius, a misguided pagan in the eyes of the church.

But of all the insights and statements concerning the relationship between the various species of animals, by either the early Greek philosophers or those who followed, it is actually St. Basil who first recognized that two different species might somehow be related. Beginning with the scriptural prologue, “Let the water bring forth abundantly many creatures that have life and fowl that may fly above the Earth in the open firmament of heaven,” St. Basil asked, “why do the waters give birth also to birds?” His answer, whether or not he recognized its meaning, was the first clear statement in antiquity of the theory of

65 Earth - Designed for Biodiversity. Life will find a Way! evolution. The waters also gave birth to birds “because there is, so to say, a family link between the creatures that fly and those that swim. Both are endowed with the property of swimming, their common derivation from the water has made them of one family.” In other words, a common ancestor had preceded these two different species of animals. Unfortunately, these were the final statements of any merit on a subject that had challenged the curiosity of the Western world for a thousand years. It would take another thousand years before the Western world would again be free to rationally contemplate the origins of life.

The Pyramid of Life – An Ancient Wonder of the World

Although life is different from non-life, it is not completely different. Living things exist in a nonliving universe and depend on it in many ways, from plants absorbing energy from sunlight to bats finding shelter in caves. Indeed, living things are made of the same tiny particles— subatomic particles—that make up nonliving things. What makes organisms different from the materials that compose them is their level of organization. Living things exhibit not just one but, many layers of biological organization. This tendency toward order is sometimes modeled in a pyramid of life. In the pyramid of life, each level has structures that are large and more complex than those below it. The structures on each level contain those below it. For example, an organ contains tissues, which contain cells, but organs do not contain organisms; rather, it is the organism that contains organs. So the pyramid of life is a pyramid of increasing complexity until one reaches the top, the entire biosphere, or the region of Earth that contains life. The pyramid levels are:

1. Subatomic particle – A unit of matter, such as a proton, electron, or neutron that can compose atoms.

2. Atom – A larger unit of matter that can compose even larger unit of matter that can compose even larger units called molecules.

3. Molecule – A molecule is the smallest part of a substance that still has the chemical identity of the substance. For example, a water molecule still behaves like water, but if broken into its constituents, one oxygen and two hydrogen atoms, it will not.

4. Organelle – A structure within a cell made up of molecules and having a specific task. For example, a lysosome breaks down

66 The Kingdom of Life is the Kingdom of God

food of foreign particles.

5. Cell – The smallest structure in the pyramid of life that can be called alive. It contains organelles and uses them to pursue such biological activities as reproduction, growth, and metabolism.

6. Tissue – In multicellular organisms, a collection of cells that are similar in structure and work together to perform a particular function. Xylem, for example, is a plant tissue that transports water and minerals from the soil upward from the roots.

7. Organ – A part of an organism that joins two or more kinds of tissues to perform specific functions. The human heart, the organ that pumps blood, consists of muscle as well as other tissues.

8. Organ System – A group of organs that carries out a major activity. For example, the human circulatory system, containing the heart, blood vessels, and other components, transports materials throughout the body.

9. Organism – An individual living system, such as a bacterium or a whale, capable of basic biological activities such as reproduction, growth, and metabolism.

10. Population – A group of organisms of the same species living in one area at one time. All the cats in London are its population of cats.

11. Community – A group of animal and plant populations, such as lions, antelopes, grasses, and trees, living and interacting together in the same area.

12. Ecosystem – A community and its nonliving or physical environment, including soil, water, air, climate, and energy.

13. Biosphere – The entire region on or near Earth’s surface in which life can be found. Comprising seas, caves, skies, and land, it is the sum of all Earth’s ecosystems. The Kingdom of Life – The Habitat of God

“You’ve been permitted to understand the secrets of the Kingdom of God, but others have not” (Mathew 13:11).

67 Earth - Designed for Biodiversity. Life will find a Way!

From Aristotle’s time to the middle of the twentieth century, nearly everyone classified members of the living world into two kingdoms, plant or animal. Since the middle of the nineteenth century, however, many scientists have noted that certain organisms, such as bacteria and slime molds, differ from plants and animals more than plants and animals differ from each other. There had been many proposals for the third kingdom of organisms. The boundaries of Haeckel’s1 new kingdom, Protista, fluctuated in the course of his long career, but his consistent aim was to set the most primitive and ambiguous organisms apart from the plants and animals, with the implication that the larger organisms evolved from protist ancestors. Haeckel recognized the bacteria and blue-green algae as a major group—the Monera, distinguished by their lack of a cell nucleus— within the protist kingdom. However, most biologists either ignored proposals for additional kingdoms beyond plants and animals or considered them unimportant curiosities, the special pleading of eccentrics.

The climate of opinion regarding the kingdom of life began to change in the 1960s, largely because of the knowledge gained by new biochemical and electron-microscopic techniques. These techniques revealed fundamental affinities and differences on the sub-cellular level that encouraged a spate of new proposals for multiple-kingdom systems. Among these proposals, a system of five kingdoms (plants, Fungi, animals, protoctists, and bacteria), first advanced by Robert Whittaker2 in 1959 and greatly indebted to the earlier and highly original four-kingdom (plants, animals, protoctists, and bacteria) work of Herbert Copeland3, has steadily gained support for more than three decades. With some modifications necessitated by more recent data, the Whittaker system is used in many books. Briefly, our five kingdoms are Bacteria (with its two subkingdoms, Archaea and Eubacteria), Protoctista (algae, protozoa, slime molds, and

1Ernst Haeckel (1834-1919), German biologist and philosopher, who, through books and lectures popularized Charles Darwin’s work in the German-speaking world.

2In 1959 American Robert H. Whittaker described a classification system of five primary kingdoms: plants, animals, fungi, protists, and bacteria. Because the Protista are so diverse in form, classification within the kingdom has proved difficult.

3In 1938 American biologist Herbert Copeland proposed that unicellular organisms lacking nuclei be classified in their own kingdom called Kingdom Monera, now called Kingdom Prokaryotae. All bacteria were categorized in this new kingdom.

68 The Kingdom of Life is the Kingdom of God other less-known aquatic and parasitic organisms), Animalia (animals with or without backbones), Fungi (mushrooms, molds, and yeasts), and Plantae (mosses, ferns, and other spore-and-seed-bearing plants). We group our five kingdoms into two super-kingdoms:

1. Prokarya, containing the sole prokaryote kingdom, bacteria.

2. Eukarya, containing the other four kingdoms, which encompass all the eukaryotes.

We recognize that sociopolitical terms such as kingdom, class, order, and family are anachronisms that eventually will be replaced. Yet their current widespread use makes it convenient for us to continue using them in our classification of all life on Earth. There are five kingdoms:

1. Kingdom Bacteria (Prokaryotae, Procaryotae, Monera)

2. Kingdom Protoctista or Protits

3. Kingdom Fungi

4. Kingdom Plantae

5. Kingdom Animalia

Classification of Systems - This book is about the biota, the living surface of the planet Earth. A catalogue of life’s diversity and virtuosity, Earth- Designed for Biodiversity gives the reader a manageable system of ordering living beings. We present here an internally consistent, complete classification system, one that we judge to be valid and up to date, given the varying, fragmented, and often inconsistent professional literature from which our information is drawn. Biologists, whether in the field or in the laboratory study individual organisms or parts of populations, communities, or ecosystems. These organisms are classified—on the basis of body form, genetic similarity, metabolism (body chemistry), developmental pattern, behavior, and (in principle) all their characteristics—together with similar organisms in a group called a species. Scientists estimate that at least 3 million and perhaps 30 million species of living organisms now exist. An even greater number have become extinct. The effort to discern order in this incredible variety has given rise to systematics, the classification of the living world. Modern systematists

69 Earth - Designed for Biodiversity. Life will find a Way! group closely related species into genera (singular: genus), genera into families, families into orders, orders into classes, classes into phyla (singular: phylum), and phyla into kingdoms. Here is the example of classification of two organisms: The Classification of Two Organisms

Taxonomic Level Humans Garlic Kingdom Animalia Plantae Phylum (Division)* Chordata Anthophyta Subphylum** Vertebrata Class Mammalia Monocotyledoneae Order Primates Liliales Family Hominoidea Liliaceae Genus Homo Allium Species sapiens sativum ______

* Botanists use the term “division” instead of “phylum.”

** Intermediate taxonomic levels can be created by adding the prefixes “sub” or “super” to the name of any taxonomic level.

This conceptual hierarchy grew gradually, in the course of about a century, from a solid base established by the Swedish botanist Carolus Linnaeus (1707-1778), who began the modern practice of binomial nomenclature. Every known organism is given a unique two-part name, Latin in form. The first part of the name is the same for all organisms in the same genus; the second part is the species within the genus. For example, Acer saccharum, Acer nigrum, and Acer rubrum are the scientific names of the sugar maple, the black maple, and the red maple, respectively. Groups of all sizes, from species on up to kingdom, are called taxa (singular: taxon); taxonomy is the analysis of an organism’s characteristics for the purpose of assigning the organism to a taxon. Since the time of Linnaeus, the growth of biological knowledge has greatly extended the range of characteristics used in taxonomy. Linnaeus based his classification on the visible structures of living organisms. Later, extinct organisms and their traces—fossils—were named and classified. In the nineteenth century, the discoveries of paleontologists and Charles Darwin’s revelation of evolution by natural selection encouraged systematists to believe that their classifications reflected the history of life—classifications were converted

70 The Kingdom of Life is the Kingdom of God into phylogenies, family trees of species or higher taxa. To this day, very few lineages from fossil organisms to living ones have actually been traced, yet the truest classification is still held to be the one that best reflects the evidence for relationship by common ancestry.

In the twentieth century, advances in developmental biology and biochemistry have given the taxonomist new tools. For example, phylogenies can now be based on patterns of larval development, on the linear sequence of amino acids that compose proteins, or on gene sequences—the sequences of nucleotides in nucleic acids. Techniques of electron microscopy and optical microscopy have greatly improved in recent years, enabling scientists to study the internal structure of the smallest life forms and of the constituent cells of large forms in unprecedented detail. Computers that can handle massive quantities of sequence data allow scientists to measure the relatedness of organisms by comparing their gene sequence—the procedure that underlies molecular systematics. Monera, the most primitive kingdom, contain living organisms remarkably similar to ancient fossils. Organisms in this group lack membrane-bound organelles associated with higher forms of life. Such organisms are known as prokaryotes. Bacteria (technically the Eubacteria) and blue-green bacteria (also called blue-green algae, or cyanobacteria) are the major forms of life in this kingdom. The most primitive group, the archaebacteria, are today restricted to marginal habitats such as hot springs or areas of low oxygen concentration.

Super Kingdom of Prokaryotes - Single-membrane-bounded genetic systems: nucleoids, protein synthesis on small ribosomes, DNA-level recombination only. No cell fusion; lack of nuclear and cytoplasmic fusion (that is, fertilization) implies absence of Mendelian genetics1. Display unidirectional gene transfer and, in microscopic observation, lack visible intracellular motility. Reproduction by binary fission, budding of filaments, fission of stalked sessile parent to produce flagellated offspring, polar (end-to-end) growth, or multiple fission. 1. The Kingdom Bacteria: Monera – The Planetmates

“The Kingdom of God is like yeast that a woman took and mixed with three measures of wheat flour until the whole batch was leavened” (Mathew 13:33).

1Mendelian genetics, principles of heredity transmission of physical characteristics. They were formulated in 1865 by the Augustinian monk Gregor Johann Mendel.

71 Earth - Designed for Biodiversity. Life will find a Way!

Kingdom Bacteria comprises all organisms with prokaryotic cell structure: they have small ribosomes surrounding their nucleoids, but they lack membrane-bounded nuclei. In activity and potential for rapid unchecked growth, bacteria are unrivaled among living organisms. About 10,000 different forms have been described as “species,” most of them are cyanobacteria. Their genes are easily passed from one to another; the set of genes, or genophore, is organized into thin fibrils that, when visible as a light region in electron micrographs, are called the nucleoid. The distinguishing traits of all the prokaryotes are listed and compared with those of eukaryotes. Prokaryotes, unlike all members of the superkingdom Eukarya, lack pore-studded nuclei that contain chromosomes. Prokaryotes also lack membrane-bounded organelles such as mitochondria and plastids; they did not evolve by cell symbiosis. Bacteria are the most hardy of living beings. Some can survive very low temperatures, well below freezing. For years; others thrive in boiling hot springs; and still others even grow in very hot acid or live by deriving hydrogen and carbon dioxide from rocks. By forming propagules such as spores—traveling particles of life that contain at least one copy of all the genes of an organism—many tolerate boiling water or total desiccation. Bacteria are the first to invade and populate new habitats: land that has been burned, volcanic soils, or newly emerged islands.

We dimly recognize the activities of thriving communities of bacteria as “scum,” “slime,” “gloop,” “microbial mats,” “floc,” and other derogatory terms. Prokaryotic communities of different kinds of bacteria living together survive in an extraordinary range of habitats inhospitable to protoctists, plants, animals, and fungi. The absolute requirements for growth of all of them are liquid water and sources of energy and matter (carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, sulfur, phosphorous, oxygen, magnesium, sodium, potassium, zinc, and a few others) in the appropriate form and amounts. Some bacteria survive and grow at oceanic depths or even inside granites or carbonate rocks. Others have captured in nets of stratospheric airplanes from above the atmosphere. Yet no organism—not even the hardiest of bacteria—is known to complete its life history suspended in the air or any other gas. Some other activities of bacteria are still only poorly known. The incorporation of soluble metal ions such as those of manganese and iron into rocks—nodules on lake and ocean floors—are accelerated by bacterial action. Layered chalk deposits called stromatolites are produced at the seashore by the trapping and binding of calcium carbonate-rich sediment in South African mines is found with rocks rich

72 The Kingdom of Life is the Kingdom of God in organic carbon, associated with fossil bacteria and probably of microbial origin. In Witwatersrand, the miners find the gold, deposited apparently more than 2500 million years ago, by following the “carbon leader” that leads people to the gold. Copper, zinc, lead, iron, silver, manganese, and sulfur all seem to have been concentrated into ore deposits by biogeochemical processes that include bacterial growth and metabolism. Bacteria are the only organisms that, in a process called nitrogen fixation, convert the air’s major gas, nitrogen (N2), into usable organic nitrogen.

Because of their limited morphology and the paucity of their fossil record, bacteria have evolutionary relationships that have been exceedingly difficult to ascertain. However, in recent years, advances in molecular biology, the result of detailed studies of macromolecules, have enhanced our understanding of the evolutionary relationships among the tiny but highly diverse prokaryotes. Great insights have emerged from comparative studies of the long-chain ribonucleic acid (RNA) molecules that are components of the ribosomes of all organisms. The assumptions, probably valid, on which this work is based is that changes in the sequence of units in RNA molecules reveal evolutionary histories of the modern bacteria. Because ribosomes are universally found in all organisms and are crucial for the same cell function, ribosomal RNA (rRNA) molecules are thought to have changed very slowly through evolutionary time. Small though they are, bacteria, which are extremely numerous and fast growing, are crucial to the health of digestive systems, soil maintenance in agriculture and forestry, and the very existence of the air that we breathe. Modern food processing began with an awareness of the nature of bacteria. Canning, preserving, drying, salting, and pasteurization are techniques that prevent entry by even a single bacterium or growth of the few that remain. The success of these techniques is remarkable in view of the ubiquity of bacteria. Every spoonful of garden soil contains some billion bacteria; a small scraping of film from your gums might reveal some million bacteria per square centimeter of film—the total number in your mouth is greater than the number of people who have ever lived. Bacteria make up some 10% of the dry weight of mammals. They normally cover our skin, especially on damp surfaces such as under the arms and between the toes. They line nasal, ear, and mouth passages and live in pockets in the gums and between the teeth. Most pack of the digestive tract, especially the large intestine. Most bacteria are never pathogenic.

Pathogens are simply bacteria (or, occasionally, protoctists or fungi) capable of causing infectious diseases in animals or plants. The word

73 Earth - Designed for Biodiversity. Life will find a Way!

“germ” like the word “microbe,” has no precise or specific meaning. A germ is a small living organism capable of growth at the expense of another organism; a microbe, or microorganism, is an organism so small that one needs a microscope to see it ( for example, cyanobacteria “Phylum B-5” and myxobacteria “Phylum B-3”) are microbes; thus the smaller fungi, most protoctists, and all but the largest bacteria are also called microbes. Bacteria can cure as well as cause disease. Many of our most useful antibiotics (a kind of allelochemical, a compound made by one form of life that inhibits the growth of a different, usually microbial life form) come from microbes. Of the best-known antibiotics, streptomycin, erythromycin, chloromycetin, and kanamycin comefrom bacteria, whereas penicillin and ampicillin come from fungi. Bacteria are rather simple morphologically: spherical (cocci), rod shaped, or spiral shaped. The most complex undergo developmental changes in form: single bacteria may reproduce, producing populations that metamorphose into stalked structures, grow long, branched filaments, or form tall bodies that release resistant sporelike microcysts. Some produce highly motile (swimming) colonies. Bacteria are very different from protoctists, animal, fungi, and plants. Because their differences lie chiefly in their metabolism (their internal chemistry), many kinds of bacteria can be distinguished only by the chemical transformations that they cause. Bacteria are easily grouped by cell wall properties that are distinguished by a color-staining procedure, known as “Gram Test.”

Although some very complicated molecules are made by certain plants and fungi, the biosynthetic and degradative patterns—in all plant and fungal cells are remarkably similar. Animals and protictists exhibit even less variations in their chemical repertoires. In short, the metabolism of eukaryotes is rather uniform; its patterns of photosynthesis, respiration. Glucose breakdown and synthesis of nucleic acids and proteins are fundamentally the same in all eukaryotic organisms. Bacteria, on the other hand, are not only metabolically different from eukaryotes, but also from each other. The work of most microbiologists concerns the role of bacteria in health and disease. Bacterial activities in our environment have been studied much less, but they are even more significant. Bacteria release to Earth’s atmosphere and remove from it all the major reactive gases: nitrogen, nitrous oxide, oxygen, carbon dioxide, carbon monoxide, several sulfur- containing gases, hydrogen, methane, and ammonia, among others. Protoctists and plants also make substantial contributions to atmospheric gases, such as oxygen, and ruminant animals contribute methane, but few,

74 The Kingdom of Life is the Kingdom of God if any, that differ from those of bacteria, whereas many important reactions are limited to the prokaryote repertoire.

The soil of Earth and the regolith—the loose, rocky covering of any planet—on the surface of Mars and of the Moon differ enormously. Mars and the Moon are very dry and lack atmosphere relative to Earth, but the differences extend far beyond just moisture content. The surface of Earth—its regolith, sediments, and waters—is rich not only in living bacteria, small animals, protists, yeasts, and other fungi, but also in the complex organic (carbon plus hydrogen) compounds that they produce. The less tractable substances, such as tannic acids, lignin, and cellulose, tend to accumulate, whereas much more actively metabolized organics, such as sugars, starches, organic phosphorous compounds, and proteins, are produced and removed more rapidly. All these organic compounds are—directly or indirectly— that use the products of chemosynthesis or of photosynthesis, processes that use chemical energy and sunlight, respectively, to convert the carbon dioxide of the air into the organic compounds of the Biosphere and, ultimately, into the organic-rich sediments from which we obtain oil, gas, and coal. In fact, the soil and rocks of Earth contain about 100,000 times as much carbon as Earth’s living forms do.

Chemosynthesis is limited to certain groups of bacteria. Photosynthesis, which often is incorrectly attributed only to algae and plants, is carried out by many groups of bacteria. Chemosynthesis and photosynthesis are often, but not always, correlated with processes that use inorganic chemicals or light, respectively, to generate energy to make organic compounds. Both types of synthesis are forms of strict autotrophic nutrition, the synthesis of all food and derivation of energy exclusively from inorganic sources. Heterotrophy the alternative mode of nutrition is the deriving of food and energy from performed organic compounds—from live or dead sources. Like algae and plants, most photosynthetic bacteria convert atmospheric carbon dioxide and water into organic matter and oxygen; unlike them, many bacteria are also capable of very different modes of photosynthesis—for example, the use of hydrogen sulfide instead of water and the elimination of sulfur but not oxygen. Bacterial \ and chemosynthesis are essential for recycling the elements and compounds on which the Biosphere, including ourselves, depends. Bacteriologists refer to phototrophy as the mode of nutrition for organisms that nourish themselves by light reactions. Photosynthesis refers to any process of living tissue in which light energy is used to build organic matter.

75 Earth - Designed for Biodiversity. Life will find a Way!

Probably the most important evolutionary innovation on Earth, if not in the solar system and the galaxy, was photosynthesis, the transformation of the energy of sunlight into usable form: the chemical energy of food or energy-storage molecules (that is, carbohydrates, lipids, and proteins). Photosynthesis, the process, began in anaerobic bacteria more than 3 billion years ago. Bacteria that derive their energy from sunlight, their carbon from CO2 of the air, and their electrons from H2, H2S, H2O, or other inorganic sources are called photolithoautotrophic bacteria. They “feed” on sunlight. Photosynthesis is an essentially anaerobic process, and none of the proteobacteria (Phylum B-3) can carry it out when they are exposed to oxygen. Except for the Chloroflexa (Phylum B-7), green nonsulfur bacteria are hypersensitive to oxygen. Some purple nonsulfur bacteria (Phylum B- 3) can grow microaerophilically—that is, under oxygen concentrations less than the modern norm—or even aerobically, but only in total darkness. In that case, they derive their energy not from photosynthesis, but from the breakdown of food, as do respiring bacteria.

Oxygen release is not an essential property of photosynthesis, even thought it is characteristic of photosynthesis in plants, algae, and cyanobacteria. The essential properties are the incorporation of carbon dioxide from the air into organic compounds needed for growth of the photosynthesizer and the conversion of the energy of visible light into chemical energy in a form useful to cells. The conversion of light energy requires chlorophyll molecules. The chemical energy currency produced is adenosine triphosphate (ATP), a nucleotide used in transformation reactions of all cells. Although the details of the enzymatic pathways of photosynthesis are still being worked out, it is clear that the five types of photosynthetic bacteria (purple sulfur, purple nonsulfur, green nonsulfer, green sulfur, and oxygenic) differ in details of metabolism, in their source of electrons for CO2 reduction, and in other ways. To reduce the CO2 in the air to organic compounds, cells need a source of electrons, which, as a rule, are carried by hydrogen atoms. The source of these electrons varies with the organism. In green sulfur bacteria (Chlorobia, Phylum B-8), the electrons come from hydrogen sulfide (H2S), although they may also come from hydrogen gas (H2). The purple sulfur bacteria (Phylum B-3) also use H2S as the hydrogen donor. In purple nonsulfur bacteria, such as Rhodospirillum and Rhodopseodomonas (Phylum B-3), the hydrogen donor is a small organic molecule such as lactate, pyruvate, or ethanol. Thus, the general photosynthetic equation can be written as in which X varies according to species.

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The notion that the food web starts with the plants, followed by the herbivores, and ends with carnivorous animals is shortsighted. Zooplankton of the seas feed on protoctists; non photosynthesizing protoctists feed on bacteria; bacteria (and fungi and animal scavengers) break down the carcasses of animals, plants, and algae, releasing back into solution such elements as nitrogen and phosphorous required by the phytoplankton. Because phyto means plants and because no plants float in the open ocean, we prefer the term photoplankton to refer to floating bacteria and algae that photosynthesize at sea and in lakes. Bacteria, because they are eaten by others, facilitate entire food webs. The ways in which we and other forms of life depend on bacteria, and evolved from them, will be explained in the descriptions of the phyla. Life on Earth would die out far faster if organisms in the Kingdom of Bacteria became extinct than if any of the other kingdoms disappeared. We believe that bacterial life on our planet thrived long before the large organisms that evolved by symbioses from communities of bacteria ever appeared. Bacteria have an ancient and noble history. They were probably the first living organisms and, with respect to everything but size, have dominated life on Earth throughout the ages. The oldest fossil evidence for bacteria dates to about 3400 million years ago, whereas the oldest evidence for organisms belonging to the eukaryotic kingdoms is about 1200 million years.

Biologists and geologists agree that, some 2000 million years ago, the cyanobacteria (the oxygen-releasing photosynthetic prokaryotes that used to be called “blue-green algae”; Phylum B-5) began one of the greatest changes known in the history of this planet: the increase in concentration of atmospheric oxygen from far less than 1 part per thousand (<0.001>) to about 200 parts per thousand, or 20%. Without this high concentration of oxygen, plants, people, and other animals would not have evolved. All bacteria reproduce nonsexually by binary fission (for example, one cell divided, giving rise to two identical offspring cells) or budding. Although bacteria participate in sexual donations of DNA from one (the donor) to another (the recipient) in the process of conjugation, this bacterial sexuality is not associated in time or space with reproduction. The extent of bacterial sexuality in nature is not well known, partly because—the “sex life” of bacteria is elusive. Any process that leads to the formation of a bacterium with genes from more than a single parental source is bacterial sexuality. If the source is a second bacterium in contact with the first, the bacterial sexual process is conjugation. In the second source of genes is a plasmid (circular fragment of DNA), virus, or linear

77 Earth - Designed for Biodiversity. Life will find a Way! piece of DNA carrying bacterial genes, the bacterial sexual process has another name: transformation. When genes are transferred to recipient bacteria by viruses that infect bacteria, the process (a special case of transformation) is called transduction. Many bacteria excrete DNA. In the laboratory and most likely in nature, DNA excreted by one bacterium is taken up and incorporated by another to form genetically recombinant organisms.

No location anywhere on Earth lacks bacteria, but only a few places today are dominated by them. Some exclusively bacterial habitats, most often found in intemperate climates, are the bare rocks of cliffs, the interior of certain carbonate rocks, and muds lacking oxygen. Perhaps the most spectacular are the boiling hot springs and muds such as those in Yellowstone National park, in Wyoming, or the brightly colored salt flats and shallow embayments of tropical and subtropical areas. Many such thermal springs, flats, and bays are dominated by microbial mats—cohesive, domed or flat structures on soil, air, or in shallow water that are caused by the growth and metabolism of bacteria, primarily filamentous cyanobacteria. By entrapping bits of sand, carbonate, and other sediment, such microbial communities grow to be quite conspicuous manifestations of biological activity. The habitat scenes are notably arbitrary in this book because so many bacteria can be found in protoctist, animal, fungal, and plant hosts, as well as in soil, air, and water samples, in vastly different habitats and locations. Bacterial communities in the intestines of animals have been studied disproportionately.

Except for those rather extreme environments where microbial mats or thermal springs abound, eukaryotes seem to dominate our landscape. However, microscopic examination of a sample from any forest, tide pool, riverbed, chaparral, or other habitat reveals bacteria in abundance. When a specific type of bacterium is removed from nature for growth on its own (pure culture) or with other microbes (mixed culture) that type called a strain is given a name or identifying number. When environmentalists mourn the destruction of habitats by pollution, they are usually thinking of the loss of fish, fowl, and fellow mammals, and not strains of bacteria. If our sympathies were with the cyano-and other bacteria instead, we would recognize the pollution of green scummy lakes, for example, as a sign of flourishing life. Much of bacterial nomenclature is in dispute; there is no consensus among scientists on how to name and group the thousands of strains or how to relate them to bacteria in nature or in the literature. Most bacteria are still not identified; microbiologists, who study bacteria (as well as the smaller fungi and anaerobic protoctists), assert that the vast majority of bacteria have not yet been carefully studied and described. Microbiologists

78 The Kingdom of Life is the Kingdom of God lack standard nomenclatural and taxonomic practices. Relative to the strict rules of those who study animals (zoologists) or plants (botanists), the terminology and taxonomic practices of microbiologists are inconsistent and not directly comparable.

Subkingdom Archaea or Archaebacteria - Bacteria come in many basic body plans, represented by the more than 14 phyla to which they belong. These are the some of the most important phyla: B1: Euryarchaeota - B2: Crenarchaeota.

Subkingdom Eubacteria - B3: Proteobacteria - B4: Spirochaetae - | B5: Cyanobacteria- B6: Saprospirae -B7: Chloroflexa - B8: Chlorobia - B9: Aphragmabacteria - B10: Endospora: B11: Pirellulae - B12: Actinobacteria : B13: Deinococci - B14: Thermotogae.

Superkingdom Eukarya - Organisms composed of cells containing more than two chromosomes per cell that reproduce by mitosis. In mitosis, pore- studded membrane-bounded nuclei totally or partly dissolve and re-form as two offspring nuclei. Display viable cytoplasmic and chromosomal doubling with subsequent meiotic or equivalent reduction of cytoplasmic and nuclear content; hence, Mendelian motility, lack unidirectional gene (naked DNA) transfer. 2. The Kingdom Protista (Protoctista or Protists)

“The Kingdom of God is like a sower who went out to sow. And as he sowed, some seed fell on the path, and birds came and ate it up. Some fell on rocky ground, where it had little soil. It sprang up at once because the soil was not deep, and when the sun rose it was scorched, and it withered for lack of roots. Some seed fell among thorns, and the thorns grew up and choked it. But some seed fell on rich soil, and produced fruit, a hundred or sixty or thirty-fold. Whoever has ears ought to hear” (Mathew 13:3-9).

The protists are much more complicated than monerans. A protist cell is somewhat like the whole body of a plant or an animal stuffed into a single cell. The protists are one-celled organisms, like the monerans. However, the protists are quite different from monerans in several ways. A protist cell has many specialized parts designed to carry out various life functions. For example, a man has legs for walking that are made of many kinds of cells, but a protist uses special parts of its single cell for locomotion. These parts that aid in locomotion may be called pseudopodia, cilia, flagella etc. Protist cells are so complex that they are often thousands of times larger than one of

79 Earth - Designed for Biodiversity. Life will find a Way! human body cells. They are of diverse kinds, generally water dwelling, unicellular eukaryotic microorganisms. The distinct lifestyles shown by the plants, animals and fungi are found in the various groups of Kingdom protists. They may be photosynthetic, parasitic, predatory or saprobic. On the other hand, the protists are newer than the monerans. According to the fossil record, protists have been living on Earth for only about 1.5 billion years whereas monerans have been around for probably about 3.5 billion years.

The protists can be divided into three major groups; photosynthetic protists like the protistan algae, slime moulds like consumer decomposer protists, and protozoan protists. Protists are largely defined as single-cell organisms that contain a nucleus. They include plant-like organisms like algae that use photosynthesis. Other protists, like the hypotrich, a cliliatre protozoan, are more animal-like. For example “Lamproderma cucumber is a slime mold that nourishes itself from bacteria, yeast, and fungi. It was once seen as a fungus, but is now classified with the protists. Tiny organisms that are not bacteria also permeate the environment. They are eukaryotes, complete with nuclei and other cellular compartments, but they are difficult to classify among other eukaryotes. Most are one-celled. Protists, as they are called, range from malaria parasites to sea lettuce, and are broken down into three groups: fungi-like, animal-like, and plant- like.

Fungi-Like Protists – Protists that resemble fungi include predatory and parasitic molds, which are decomposers in fresh water and marine habitats. Like fungi and some bacteria, they produce spores and absorb nutrients. But, unlike fungi, they actively engulf food and can aggregate and migrate to their equivalent of green pastures when nutrients are scarce. Downy mildew seen on grapes and fuzzy mold found on aquarium fish fall into this category. The most famous of the parasitic molds is “Phytophthora infestans, the protist responsible for the Irish potato famine of 1845-50. Several years of damp growing seasons contributed to the protist’s population explosion, and one-third of Ireland’s population starved as a result. Even today, “Phytophthora infestans is considered the single most costly biological constraint on global food production.

Animal-Like Protists – Animal-like protists can be predators, grazers, or parasites. They have complex life cycles and actively move through the environment. Like the other protest groups, they are quite diverse. Some species house photosynthetic algae within, while others are free-living. The amoeba and the paramecium, members of a group called protozoa,

80 The Kingdom of Life is the Kingdom of God are animal-like protists. Sometimes these are called “protozoans,” which means “first animals.” They are chemotropic heterotrophs, and cannot prepare their own food. Once they find food, they may either engulf it or absorb it. Engulfed food is digested in the cell, whereas absorbed food must be in a predigested form. Protozoans normally reproduce asexually by fission, but they may also reproduce sexually. Protozoans are classified by their organelles of motion into four main groups; the zooflagellates, the sarcodines, the ciliates, and the sporozoans. Some animal-like protists are major pathogens, such as Plasmodium, the protozoan that causes malaria. Giardia lamblia, a species known to campers as the cause of “beaver fever,” is found in freshwater streams and can cause weeks of intestinal discomfort and diarrhea if untreated water is ingested. Another protest causes African sleeping sickness. But not all animal-like protists cause such human suffering. Foraminifera created the English white cliffs of Dover, with the fossilization of their shells 200 million years ago. Here are some of the terms explained, you should know in this context:

Sarcodines: Amoeba – The sarcodines use fingerlike projections of cytoplasm called pseudopods or false feet. When a living amoeba is seen under a microscope, a constant change in its shape is observed. As the amoeba moves, it slowly pushes out its pseudopods. These disappear as the amoeba pulls itself around them. By using its pseudopods in amoeboid motion, the amoeba can engulf food, such as bacteria and other protists, and food vacuoles may be formed by phagocytosis. Moreover, amoeboid motion also enables amoeba to respond to various stimuli, such as light, chemicals and contact.

Ciliates – The Paramoecium is both common and abundant in fresh water. The ciliates use short flagellalike organelles called cilia for locomotion. The organism swims rapidly using the cilia that cover its body. It is an active predator and feeds on particles sucked into a mouthlike cavity, by beating of cilia around it. From the gullet, food enters a food vascuole where enzymes digest the food.

Sporozoans – Parasitic Protozoans – Pathogenic or parasitic protists are second only to pathogenic monerans in the amount of misery, they cause in human and other hosts. Among protozoans pathogenic to humans are the sporozoan Plasmodium, which causes malaria; the sarcodine Entamoeba causes amoebic dysentery, and the zooflagellate Trypanosoma, causes African sleeping sickness.

81 Earth - Designed for Biodiversity. Life will find a Way!

Plantlike Protists – the plantlike protists are abundantly found in both fresh water and sea water. These plantlike protists along with other kind of algae maintain over half of the Earth’s oxygen supply. They are the most important primary producers. The primary producers make the main source of food—either directly or indirectly—for all animals of the sea and shore. Nevertheless, they are so important; the Earth would be unable to support life without them. Plantlike protists are critical to aquatic food webs: Using photosynthesis, they convert sunlight energy into usable forms for other organisms. Without them, aquatic food webs would collapse. These protists can be single-celled or can form colonies; they either drift or swim through the water. Dinoflagellates are one group of plantlike protists. Some of which kill billions of fish during red tides, episodes in which large numbers of microorganisms turn water reddish; other dinoflagellates create beautiful displays of bioluminescence. Red algae form colonies and protect themselves with slippery mucus. Red algae is probably best known to landlubbers as nori, the sushi wrapping. Kelp is a form of brown algae, another example of a plantlike protest. Kelp forests support huge underwater communities, where fish, abalone, lobsters, and other organisms live. Products that contain kelp compounds include ice cream, jelly beans, salad dressing, toothpaste, and paper. Green algae are other types of plantlike protists. In fact, they exhibit so many “plantlike” qualities that some taxonomists consider them plants. Structurally and biochemically, green algae are, indeed, very similar to plants. Some examples include edible sea lettuce and red algae, which turns snow pink or red. Here are some of the key words explained, you should know in this context:

Euglena-Like Flagellates – As a one-celled eukaryote, Euglena is a member of the Kingdom protista. Prior to the invention of five kingdom scheme, Euglena was claimed by some for the animal kingdom because of its animal like traits. It has a flexible outer covering and no cell wall. At the same time it was claimed by others for the plant kingdom because it contains the green pigment chlorophyll.

Diatoms – Diatoms are probably the most numerous of all plantlike protists. Because of this abundance, they are one of the most important primary producers of the sea. There are about 5,500 species of diatoms, mainly marine. They have no flagella and float because of the light storage lipids in them. The diatoms constitute an important phytoplankton component of the oceans.

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Dinoflagellates – The great majority of dinoflagellates are motile, unicellular organisms. The term dino means whirling. A dinoflagellate appears to whirl, or spin, as it moves. They are always completely or incompletely encircled by a transverse or spiral groove. Motile cells are always biflagellate and with the two flagella inserted in the girdle. One flagellum lies in the girdle and encircles the cell, while the other extends backward from the girdle. The position and appearance of these flagella is characteristic of this phylum. With the exception of the grooves, a dinoflagellate remains covered by armour like cellulose plates. There are about 120 genera and 1000 species of dinoflagellates. Dinoflagellates are second only to the diatoms in abundance and importance as than one rod-shaped, discoid, or irregularly band-shaped chromatophore within a cell. The cells store their photosynthetic reserves as starch or as oil. Many of them have a large eyespot of simple structure. Many species have pyrenoids which lie within the chromatophores.

Slime Molds: Consumer Decomposer Protists – Slime molds are often studied with the fungi because they resemble with the fungi. However, the resemblances do not occur in all four stages of their life cycle. Of the four stages two are inactive, involving reproduction, and two are active involving feeding and moving. The first stage in the life of a slime mold is a spore. The spore is an inactive, reproductive cell. When the spore germinates, it produces the second stage—a single celled, active form. This may be flagellate, amoeboid or both. Like all other slime-mold forms, it does not contain chlorophyll, and with the result, is heterotrophic and cannot make its own food. Since it lacks cell walls, it feeds by engulfing bacteria, yeasts and other small organisms. The other active form occurs when the single-celled forms coalesce together, becoming microscopic. This stage is called a plasmodium. The plasmodium is generally found in cool, moist, shady places and under fallen leaves or rotten logs. The plasmodium may be cellular or acellular, when cellular its cytoplasm is restricted by crosswalls to the cells. If acellular, its cytoplasm is restricted by crosswalls and may be seen streaming inside the tubular filaments. In either case, the plasmodium acts like a single organism. The fourth and last stage is a fruiting or reproductive form. The plasmodium stops moving and feeding to form spore cases. The upright structure produces and releases spores, completing the cycle. Protists come in many basic body plans, represented by the more than 30 phyla to which they belong. These are the some of the most important phyla:

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Pr1: Archaeprotista - Pr2: Microspora - Pr3: Rhizopoda - Pr4: Granuloreticulosa: Pr5: Xenophyophora - Pr6: Myxomycota - Pr7: Dinomastigota- Pr8: Ciliophora -Pr9: Apicomplexa - Pr10: Haptomonada - Pr11: Cryptomonada - P12:Discomitochondria: Pr13: Chrysomonada - Pr14: Xanthophyta - Pr15: Eustigmatophyta - Pr16: Diatoms:Pr17: Phaeophyta - Pr18: Labyrinthulata - Pr19: Plamodiophora - Pr20: Oomycota: Pr21: Hyphochytriomycota - Pr22: Haplospora - Pr23: Paramyxa - Pr24: Myxospora: Pr25: Rhodophyta - Pr26: Gamophyta - Pr27: Actinopoda Pr28: Chlorophyta:Pr29: Chytridiomycota - Pr30: Zoomastigota 3. The Kingdom of Fungi

“The Kingdom of God may be likened to a man who sowed good seed in his field. While everyone was asleep his enemy came and sowed weeds all through the wheat, and then went off. When the crop grew and bore fruit, the weeds appeared as well” (Mathew 13:24-26).

Many people associate fungi with mushrooms in the supermarket or the frightening food forgotten in the back of the fridge. But mushrooms and molds are much more than those simple images might suggest. In addition, mold is an ambiguous term, sometimes used to describe distantly related members of other kingdom. Fungi are heterotrophs, which means that they cannot produce their own food like plants can. Some are saprobes, decomposers that secrete enzymes to break down food into smaller components, which they then absorb. Other fungi, like those that cause athlete’s foot1, are parasites that live and feed on their hosts. Some are symbionts, living in concert with their hosts. Many are multicellular. The first fungi evolved 900 million years ago, and by 300 million years ago, the major groups alive today had been established. Millions of years of evolution have created vast diversity within the group.

The fungi make up a kingdom that includes molds, mildews, morels, mushrooms, yeasts, rusts, smuts and blights. More than 100,000 species of fungi have been described and named. Biologists estimate that at least

1Athlete’s Foot, also called tinea pedis or ringworm of the foot, a contagious fungal infection occurring most often between the toes and on the soles of the feet. A condition that tends to recur, athlete’s foot is caused by several kinds of fungi that thrive in warm, damp places, such as the floors of showers, swimming pools, and gymnasiums.

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10,000 species of fungi are yet to be discovered. Mainly the fungi are decomposers and their activity is absolutely essential for the recycling of inorganic resources in the biosphere. Some parasitic forms cause diseases in plants and animals. Two examples of such diseases are black rust of wheat and athlete’s foot in humans. The life of a fungus begins when a fungus germinates from a reproductive cell called a spore. The spore is commonly covered by a thick, resistant outer layer to protect it from unfavorable conditions. A few fungi continue life in the form of a single cell. Such fungi are called yeasts. But most fungi develop larger, filamentous, or threadlike structures. The fungi lack chlorophyll and other photosynthetic pigments and cannot synthesize their food from carbon dioxide and water in the presence of sunlight and their mode of nutrition is either saprophytic, or parasitic, or symbiotic. When fungi live as saprobes they bring about the decay of organic materials, and when they act as parasite they attack living protoplasm and cause diseases of plants, animals and human beings. Fungal structure and nature of growth are well suited for this type of nutrition.

Groups of Fungi – One group of fungi is Zygomycota, which includes terrestrial molds and soil decomposers such as black bread mold. One zygomycete inhabiting cow dung flings its spores in the direction of sunlight. This action probably serves to propel the offspring onto fresh grass. Cows are likely to graze on the grass and therefore swallow the fungus, helping to complete its complex life cycle.

Ascomycota - Ascomycota is a much larger group than zygomycota, encompassing about three-quarters of fungi species, including yeasts and truffles. The unifying feature of species within this group is a specialized reproductive structure. To humans, yeast is good and bad—aiding in the production of bread and beer, but also causing athlete’s foot and thrush. One species, Claviceps purpure, infects rye and other grains and produces toxins that stay active even after baking. The toxins cause ergotism1, a poisoning that results in convulsions. Ergotism may have been the

1Ergotism comes from Ergot, name used interchangeably for a disease of rye, for the fungus causing the disease. Rye is a grain, common name for an annual cereal grain, of the grass family, allied to wheat and barley.

85 Earth - Designed for Biodiversity. Life will find a Way! underpinning of the Salem witch trials1 of the American colonies, because the poison causes people to act abnormally and, as perceived at the time, possessed. Ergotism may have also led to the downfall of Russia’s Peter the Great, whose soldiers and horses ate rye and went into convulsions. But before wholeheartedly condemning Claviceps purpure, keep in mind that its by-products have been used to treat migraines, lower high blood pressure, and prevent hemorrhaging after childbirth. The next group, Basidiomycota, includes the Portobello. Coral fungus and the shelf fungus often seen on rotting logs in forests are also prime examples. One hallucinogenic species, Amanita muscaria, has been used in rituals in Central America, Russia, and India. Ingest too much, however, and it is fatal. Less familiar basidiomycetes are rusts and smuts, plant diseases that can wreak havoc on crops and are the bane of farmers.

Ascomycetes: The Sac Fungi – The fungi produce a distinctive type of sporangium, the ascus or sac containing a definite number of ascopores that are formed immediately after meiosis. The typical number of ascopores in an ascus is a multiple of four. Most species have eight ascospores within an ascus. According to a recent estimate the Ascomycetes make a group with over 30,000 species. They include diverse types, such as yeasts, blue and green molds, cup fungi, morels and the fungi that cause powdery mildews in plants. A few sac fungi exist as single- celled yeasts, but most of them are filamentous. In the filamentous forms, the vegetative hyphae are septate. However, the septa are provided with openings, for the movement of cytoplasm from one cell to another.

Nutrition – The fungi are chlorophyll-less organisms and cannot synthesize their own food unlike green plants. They are so simple in structure that they cannot obtain inorganic food directly from the soil, and therefore they always depend for their food on some dead organic material or living beings. The fungi that obtain their food from dead organic materials are called the saprophytes, on the other hand the fungi which obtain their prepared food from living organisms are parasites. The living beings on which the fungi parasitize are called the hosts. The parasitic

1Salem Witch Trials, trials that occurred during the years 1692 and 1693 in the eastern counties of colonial Massachusetts in USA, in which people were accused of being witches. Over the course of the spring and summer of 1692, 14 women and 5 men were hanged, by Catholic Church (Inquisition), another suspect was passed to death under heavy stones when he refused to take part in his trial, 4 people died in jail awaiting their trials, and nearly 200 other people were arrested.

86 The Kingdom of Life is the Kingdom of God fungi commonly absorb their food from the hosts by means of haustoria, which may be small, rounded, button-like, branched, convolute and finger like. Some fungi grow in the association of other plants and are mutually beneficial. This association is called the symbiosis and the participants, are symbionts. The most striking examples of this type are lichens and mycorrhiza. Besides, there are many animal-trapping fungi which have developed ingenious mechanisms for capturing small animals such as eelworms, rotifers or protozoans which they use for food. The most interesting of these mechanisms is that which utilizes a rapidly constructing ring around a nematode which holds it captive while the hyphae sink haustoria into the body of the victim.

Basidiomycetes: The Club Fungi – There are about 25,000 species in this class of fungi. The Basidiomycetes include the fungi that bear their spores exogenously on basidia. The group gets its name from the basidium. The class Basidiomycetes is a large group, having various types of fungi, such as the rusts, the smuts, the jelly fungi, the bracket fungi, the coral fungi, the mushrooms, the puffballs, the earthstars, the stink horns, the toadstools and the bird’s nest fungi. The fruiting bodies of these fungi make a small part of total thallus which consists of mycelial hyphae. They grow in the soil, in logs and tree stumps, and are supposed to be best decomposers of wood material. They can decompose cellulose and lignin. Some Basidiomycetes parasitize the other host plants causing rusts and smuts.

Deuteromycetes: The Fungi Imperfecti – The fungi of this class mostly resemble to Ascomycetes or sometimes Basidiomycetes, but they are known to produce neither asci nor basidia. They reproduce by means of conidia which are very similar to those produced by many Ascomycetes or Basidiomycetes which have lost their ability to reproduce sexually. Thus, they lack always perfect or sexual stages. Many of them are known to possess a parasexual cycle in which hyphal union, nuclear fusion and meiosis occur but not in a definite place or at a definite time in the life cycle. Many species of this type are responsible for causing many diseases such as early blight of potato is caused by Alternaria solani; red rot of sugarcane is caused by colletotrichum falcatum; tikka disease of groundnut is caused by Cercospora personata and stripe disease of barley is cause by Helminthosporium gramineum.

Lichens – The lichens make a symbiotic association of a fungus with an alga. Usually this association is found between an ascomycete or a

87 Earth - Designed for Biodiversity. Life will find a Way! basidiomycete and a green alga or cyanobacterium. The relationship differs in its details in various specific combinations, but in general it may be said to be one of balanced parasitism in which most algal cells are given a certain amount of protection, generally from intense light and desiccation, by the fungal hyphae, which enables them to survive under circumstances which they might not be able to withstand alone. The photosynthetic algal partner prepares the food from carbon dioxide. If the algal component is a cyanobacterium, it even helps in the fixation of atmospheric nitrogen. On the other hand, the fungus also provides the structural covering and anchors the lichens to a rock, tree bark and other such supports. The lichens are found in varied habitats, such as the surface of exposed rocks, and localities, such as the arctic tundra and the Antarctic regions, where very few other plants thrive. On the other hand, they occur in places, such as the tropical rain forest where hundreds of plant species grow together and where the same algae that form lichens also survive independently without a fungus associate. Lichens also live on the bark of trees in places where the air is free from atmospheric pollutants. The lichens make the pioneer organisms in a new terrain and colonies bare rocks.

Mycorrhizae – A mycorrhiza is a mutualistic relationship between a plant root and a soil fungus. The soil fungus surrounds the root of a green plant and the hyphae penetrate the root tissues. The green plant provides organic nutrients to the soil fungus. In turn the soil fungus provides the root with a greater surface area for the absorption of water and minerals from the soil. Fungi come in many basic body plans, represented by the more than 2 phyla to which they belong. These are the some of the most important phyla:

F1: Zygomycota - F2: Basidiomycota 4. The Kingdom of Plants (Plantae)

“This is how it is with the Kingdom of God; it is as if a man were to scatter seed on the land and would sleep and rise night and day and the seed would sprout and grow, he knows not how. Of its own accord the land yields fruit, first the blade, then the ear, then the full grain in the ear. And when the grain is ripe, he wields the sickle at once, for the harvest has come” (Mark 4:26-29).

The Plants and Animals - Plants and animals are the organisms in the biosphere with which humans are most familiar. They are classified through long-established methods that distinguish organisms broadly,

88 The Kingdom of Life is the Kingdom of God such as by food or habitat, and also by increasingly specified shared characteristics, such as body structure for animals and leaf shape for plants. In addition to being living organisms dependent on sun and water for sustenance, animals have much in common with plants. Both have regular daily and seasonal rhythms. Both are multicellular organisms with complex anatomies and physiologies. Both fall into regular classifications that include phyla, classes, and other categories that reflect their differences. Both exhibit adaptations to their surroundings. Humans depend on plants and animals for food, tools, work, and companionship. In some cases, interaction with humans has caused animals great hardship and forced them to develop new adaptations, by increasing their number through domestication (in animals such as cat and dog), by diminishing their number through overdomestication, or by thinning their ranks and endangering entire species. Plants and animals have much in common. They are multicellular organisms that are adapted to live in many environments. They require nutrition and water to live. For the process of respiration, both need oxygen and release carbon dioxide. They grow from one cell to complex forms through stages of development that span an organism’s youth and maturity. These stages are marked by changes in appearance or behavior. Through one cause or another, all plants and animals die. Animals can cooperate and compete with other species and members of their own kind. So can plants: They engage in various types of cooperation and competition with other plants and animals to promote seed dispersal and reduce invading species.

Differences – Plants and animals also have many differences. For example, plants account for the greater part of the world’s biomass but have many fewer known species than do animals. There are approximately 300,000 known species of plants, while there are two million known species of animals. In addition, plants and animals get their nutrition differently. Plants obtain energy directly from sunlight through photosynthesis, and they use this energy to build organic matter. Animals get their energy from other organism—living or nonliving animals or plants. The cell structure of plants and animals is markedly different. In the case of a plant cell, the rigid cell wall consists of cellulose, a material not present in animal cells. Plants and animals differ in their mobility. Animals are the fastest organisms on Earth, able to react and move in response to their environment. They can do so because of their specialized muscular and nervous tissue. The nervous tissue receives data from the environment and sends appropriate signals to stimulate the muscles; the muscles move in response. In contrast,

89 Earth - Designed for Biodiversity. Life will find a Way! plants are so sedentary they are anchored to the ground with roots, which secure the plant and obtain water and minerals from the soil. Animals are able to modify their behavior in response to past experience. This is not the case with plants, although some plants do have specialized parts, such as leaves shaped into spines, to ward off predators. Life spans from another area of difference. The life span of an insect can be a number of hours; small animals such as rodents or birds may last weeks or months. Medium or large mammals live between 20 and 30 years. The life span of plants, however, has an even wider range. Some may last several days or weeks, but some such as redwood trees can live for thousands of years.

Classification – Plants and animals are classified according to different criteria. Plants are classified in two basic ways: as flowering or non- flowering varieties, or as vascular (containing circulatory vessels) or nonvascular varieties. Bryophytes are three phyla of nonvascular plants, including mosses, liverworts, and hornworts. Tracheophytes are vascular plants that have vascular tissue (xylem and phloem) that delivers water and minerals from the roots to the stems and leaves and delivers food from the leaves to stems and roots. Animals are classified by internal anatomy (vertebrates and invertebrates, cold-blooded and warm- blooded), habitat (land and water), food (herbivores and carnivores), patterns of development (breathing, loco-motion), and genetic make-up. There are about 30 phyla in the animal kingdom. The study of animals in zoology; the study of plants is botany.

Desert Plants – Many desert plants have evolved adaptations that enable them to survive in an environment with little water. These plants are called xerophytes. Some xerophytes, such as desert annuals, do not have structural adaptations for conserving water. Instead, they avoid periods of drought by having their life cycle during the short period when there is enough moisture in the soil to sustain them. Plants that are active during the dry period have special adaptations in their leaves or roots. For example, some plant leaves have a protective epidermal layer such as a cuticle or epidermal hairs. A different adaptation occurs in the ocotillo, a plant common to Mexico and the southwestern United States. It produces leaves only when the region has sufficient water. Plants with root adaptations include cacti, which have large, shallow root systems that trap water even during light rains. Some trees, such as a genus of the mesquite tree, have long taproots that can reach water sources located a considerable distance underground. Plants are multicellular organisms that make up the kingdom Plantae. They are characterized by their

90 The Kingdom of Life is the Kingdom of God development from an embryo, presence of chlorophyll, and ability to carry out photosynthesis. Among the 260,000 or more species of plants are bushes, ferns, flowers, liverworts, mosses, trees, and vines. The bulk of these species are land plants: plants that rise from the ground. They evolved about 450 million years ago from green algae that existed around lakes and oceans and had cell structure, cell walls, and chlorophyll similar to plants. The environment reaps benefits from plants in many ways, including erosion control, shelter, clothing, and medicine. Above all, they are a source of food.

Feeding Themselves - Unlike animals, which take in food from living or dead organic matter, plants make their own food through photosynthesis. Photosynthesis is the process of taking light energy from the sun and turning into chemical energy. In the green organelles called chloroplasts (which contain chlorophyll), plants use sunlight to make their own nutrition. Fungi were once considered part of the plant kingdom but are no longer so classified because they do not have chlorophyll and their cell walls contain chitin instead of cellulose. They do not make their own food but acquire it from living or dead organic matter.

Vascular and Nonvascular Plants – Plants may be divided into two distinct classifications: vascular and nonvascular plants. Nonvascular plants (bryophytes) have no leaves, stems, or roots. They also do not have internal vessels or leaf veins. In contrast to most vascular plants, nonvascular plants grow close to the ground. There are three phyla of nonvascular plants and about 16,000 species within them; they include mosses and other moss-like plants, such as the liverwort and hornwort. Because these plants lack roots or a transport system of vessels, they live and grow in pools of water. Vascular plants (tracheophytes) account for the majority of plant species. Their name refers to the tubes that branch out through the plant and act as a nutritional delivery system. They have two types of vascular tissue: xylem, which transports water and minerals from the ground to the stem and leaves, and phloem, which transports food from the leaves to the roots, stems, and reproductive organs. Due to this delivery system, vascular plants often have strong stems and are taller than nonvascular plants. Vascular tracings are particularly distinctive on leaves. Vascular plants can be further distinguished by the presence of absence of seed production. Aside from seedless vascular plants (most of which are ferns or are related to ferns), vascular plants reproduce through seeds.

Gymnosperms and Angiosperms – Varieties of seeded vascular plants

91 Earth - Designed for Biodiversity. Life will find a Way! are gymnosperms and angiosperms. Gymnosperms are vascular plants that have seeds that are exposed, not enclosed in and protected with fruits. Fossil gymnosperms date back 350 million years. Varieties include conifers and similar plants such as cycads and ginkgoes. Their seeds develop in cones. Angiosperms are vascular flowering plants whose seeds are protected inside an ovary and eventually ripen into a fruit. More complex than gymnosperms, angiosperms probably appeared on Earth later than gymnosperms, during the Mesozoic era (248 to 65 million years ago). Eventually they took dominance and now account for most plants and trees. Angiosperms reproduce by fertilization. There are two kinds. Monocotyledons have a single seed leaf in the embryo. And dicotyledons have two seed leaves in the embryo. 5. The Kingdom of Animals (Animalia)

“The Kingdom of God is a gift that the Father is pleased to bestow upon the little flock of Jesus’ disciples” (Luke 12:32).

“To what shall we compare the Kingdom of God, or what parable can we use for it? It is like a mustard seed that, when it is sown in the ground, is the smallest of all the seeds on the Earth. But once it is sown, it springs up and becomes the largest of plants and outs forth large branches, so that the birds of the sky can dwell in its shade” (Mark 4:30-32).

Animals are multicellular organisms that are not plants or fungi. They are eukaryotes because their cells contain nuclei and heterotrophs because they obtain energy by eating other organisms or organic matter. Most animals have true body tissue, collections of cells that perform certain body functions. Animals can be divided into vertebrates and invertebrates. Vertebrates are composed of animals with spines, or backbones. Invertebrates evolved first: The earliest animal fossils date back to about 600 million years ago, during the Precambrian era, and are those of invertebrates, including jellyfish or corals. Vertebrates, beginning with jawless fish, evolved about 500 million years ago. Land animals evolved about 400 million years ago.

Arthropods – Arthropods are invertebrates distinguished by having jointed legs. There are five classes of arthropods: crustaceans (such as lobsters) arachnids (such as spiders), chilopods (such as centipedes), diplopods (such as millipedes), and insects (such as butterflies). In all, there are between one and two million known species. Arthropods have bilateral symmetry, with bodies divided into jointed segments, an open circulatory

92 The Kingdom of Life is the Kingdom of God system, and dependence on molting to allow for growth. Each class of arthropod is characterized by distinctive behaviors and appearance: the arachnids by spinnerets, organs used for making webs; the millipedes by their many legs.

Invertebrates - Invertebrate, any animal lacking a backbone. Invertebrates are by far the most numerous animals on Earth. Nearly 2 million species have been identified to date. These 2 million species make up about 98 percent of all the animals identified in the entire animal kingdom. Some scientists believe that the true number of invertebrate species may be as high as 100 million and that the work of identifying and classifying invertebrate life has only just begun. Invertebrates can be broken down into categories based on their body tissues or body form. Parazoans are organisms that lack true tissue. Eumetazoans have true tissue, which develops after repeated cell division in the embryo. Invertebrates may also be distinguished by their symmetry, or balance of the organism’s two sides. Types of symmetry include bilateral (mirror- image) symmetry and radial symmetry. Animals with bilateral symmetry are called the bilateral or two-sided animals and include vertebrates and some invertebrates. Other invertebrates are radiolarians; they have portions of the body that radiate outward from a spokelike center. Another way to classify invertebrates is through the presence of a body cavity. An acoelomate—a flatworm, for example—has no central body cavity a coelomate is a bilateral invertebrate with a central body cavity, or coelom. Pseudocoelomates are organisms with false cavities and are considered to exist midway between coelomates and acoelomates. More developed than acoelomates, coelomates are represented by annelids, such as segmented worms. Similar to them are mollusks, such as clams, octopuses, and oysters.

Invertebrates live in a vast range of habitats, from forests and deserts to caves and seabed mud. In oceans and lakes they form part of the plankton—an immense array of miniature living organisms that drift in the surface currents. Invertebrates are also found in the soil beneath our feet and in the air above our heads. Some are powerful fliers, using wings to propel themselves, but others, particularly the smallest invertebrates, float on the slightest breeze. These tiny invertebrates form clouds of aerial plankton that drift unseen through the skies. Although the majority of invertebrates are small, a few reach impressive sizes. The true heavyweights of the invertebrate world are giant squid, which can be over 18 m (60 ft) long and can weigh more than 2,000 kg (4,000 lb). The longest

93 Earth - Designed for Biodiversity. Life will find a Way! are ribbon worms, also known as nemerteans, whose pencil-thin bodies can grow up to 55 m (180 ft) from head to tail. At the other end of the size scale, animals called rotifers rank among the smallest invertebrates of all. Some species may reach 3 mm (0.12 in) in size, but most are less than 0.001 mm (0.00004 in), smaller than the largest bacteria.

Vertebrates – The phylum Chordata includes all organisms possessing a notochord, a flexible, rodlike cord along the back. Vertebrates are part of this group, but, unlike other chordates, a vertebrate’s notochord develops into the vertebral column. This characteristic, along with the braincase, or skull, and vertebrates’ tendency toward cephalization, or concentration of neural and sensory organs in the head, distinguishes vertebrates from other chordates. Vertebrates are a diverse group that includes fish, amphibians, and reptiles are alike in that they are cold-blooded, while birds and mammals are warm-blooded, but within each of those categories, organisms exhibit marked differences. For instance, fish live underwater and breathe through gills while amphibians live only part of their lives underwater and the rest on land, breathing through lungs. The remaining vertebrates are land dwellers all their lives. Reptiles are distinguished by dry, scaly skin; birds have feathers, and most can fly. Mammals nurse their young, and most have hair and reproduce through live birth in contrast to the other invertebrates, which reproduce by laying eggs. Vertebrates come in eight classes: 1. Class Agnatha – It consists of fishlike creatures without jaws. These organisms were probably among the first vertebrates to make their appearance on Earth, about 500 million years ago. The class now includes about 60 species, mainly lampreys, eel- shaped vertebrates with gill slits. 2. Class Placodermi – It consisted of jawed fishes called placoderms, which had flat surfaces and armor. They are now extinct. 3. Class Condrichthyes – It is a group of fish with skeletons made of cartilage, such as sharks and sea rays. They have hinged jaws and paired fins; sharks have the added advantage of teeth. 4. Class Osteichthyes – It consists of fish with bony skeletons. The 30,000 known species in this class include perch, salmon, and trout. 5. Class Amphibia – It consists of four-footed animals that hatch from eggs and move from water to land. Members include frogs, newts, salamanders, and toads.

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6. Class Reptilia – It consists of organisms with waterproof scaly skin, including alligators, crocodiles, and turtles. They move by crawling, breathe through their lungs, and give birth from eggs. 7. Class Aves – It consists of birds. They are warm-blooded and have wings, feathers, two legs, and a bill or beak, and they also lay eggs. 8. Class Mammalia – It contains warm-blooded vertebrates that have mammary glands, which are used by mothers to produce milk for their nursing infants. Among mammals are three major groups, monotremes, marsupials, and placentals. Monotremes have a single opening for their urinary and reproductive regions. Close to the reptiles in design, the class now includes mainly the platypus and spiny anteaters. Female marsupials have pouches in which offspring complete their development. Examples include the koala bear and kangaroos. Most mammals are placentals, which means they receive nourishment when young from a placen, or flat cake, the placenta. The fetus develops in the womb and receives nutrients from an umbilical cord attached to the placental organ. Invertebrates come in many basic body plans, represented by the more than 30 phyla to which they belong. These are the some of the most important phyla:

A1: Placozoa - A2: Porifera - A3: Cnidaria - A4: Ctenophora A5: Platyhelminthes - A6: Gnathostomulida - A7: Rhombozoa - A8: Orthonectida : A9: Nemertina - A10: Nematoda - A11: Nematomorpha - A12: Acanthocephala : A13: Rotifera - A14: Kinorhyncha - A15: Priapulida - A16: Gastrotricha : A17: Loricifera - A18: Entoprocta - A19: Chelicerata - A20: Mandibulata : A21: Crustacea - A22: Annelida - A23: Sipuncula - A24: Echiura : A25: Pogonophora - A26: Mollusca - A27: Tardigrada - A28: Onychophora : A29: Bryozoa - A30: Brachiopoda - A31: Phoronida - A32: Chaetognatha : A33: Hemichordata - A34: Echinodermata - A35: Urochordata - A36: Cephalochordata : A-37: Craniata The Wilderness Experience – Reconnecting with Nature

In Bible, we read, “At once the Spirit drove him out into the desert, and he remained in the desert for forty days, tempted by Satan. He was among wild beasts, and the angels ministered to him” (Mark 1:12-13).

95 Earth - Designed for Biodiversity. Life will find a Way!

Buddha was in the wilderness, Mahavir was in the wilderness, Confucius was in the wilderness, Zoroaster was in the wilderness, Jesus was in the wilderness, Prophet Mohammad was in the wilderness, Moses was in the wilderness, Hindu Pandavas were in the wilderness, and Hindu God Rama was in the wilderness and we can call it as “The Wilderness Experience.” This wilderness experience of Jesus could be seen as the “human-nature relationship.” It is a tool for better understanding the relationship, for diagnosing what is wrong with that relationship, and for suggesting paths to healing. These are issues Jesus had been exploring for more than forty days in the wilderness. As a result, Jesus has seen the profound transformations that take place during extended stays in the wilderness and the equally dramatic changes that occur upon the return to everyday life in his ministry to the people. After the forty days he was connected with the nature and ecology, enabled him to feel that he was part of this natural world, perhaps the real shift from divinity to humanity happened in “the Wilderness Experience.” This is the place where Jesus detoxed divinity and fully adapted humanity. Another example from the Bible is about Israelites newly freed from the oppression in Egypt, were to go directly into Canaan and assume power there, why would they be any different? Instead of Canaan they come to Sinai, “in the heart of Wilderness,” for an extended period of time for what I call, “attitude adjustment,” permeated by “the Wilderness Experience.”

So what had been a wonderful but naïve practice, the escape to wilderness, became a very self-conscious study of the dramatic changes people go through during extended stays there. “The Wilderness Experience” and “Ecopsychology” became complementary, two sides of the same coin. To experience the “human-nature relationship,” everyone should take a trip into wilderness. The trip itself would be designed to encourage participants to leave behind the props of culture and enter fully into wilderness. Food would be carefully organized to be fully nutritious but “just enough.” Only items essential to health and safety should be taken with. Delve into the sounds of nature; listen to all-night chanting rituals of crickets and frogs; climb to peaks at sunrise or sunset or in silence in the moonlight; encounter a cobra or a rat snake on the trail; get annoyed by the buzzing of a bumble bee; get acquainted with your new neighbors, trees, streams, ants, bugs, snakes, and other forms of flora and fauna. Consider these as opportunities to explore one’s relationship with nature. Together you can experience the incredible drama of a genuine relationship between humans and nature unfolding. All these experiences

96 The Kingdom of Life is the Kingdom of God undoubtedly leave on us “a Wilderness Effect,” healing the disjunction with nature that appears to be destroying possibilities for a human future on this planet?

It is said that without intimacy with nature, humans become mad. It is also said that our culture is pathogenic with regard to natural processes. Thus, it seems healthy to attempt to retreat from “culture” and embrace “natural processes” in their fullest and most pristine forms. When entering the wilderness psychologically as well as physically, participants most often speak feelings of expansion or reconnection, symbolically as Jesus talked to Satan and also to Angels. We might interpret these as expansion of “self” or as reconnection with adaptations of our evolutionary past, still layered in our deeper psyches or simply with complete and fully natural systems, such as death, fear, and violence, as well as beauty and elegance, in wondrous balance. For many the wilderness experience means release of repression—release of the inevitable controls that exist in any culture. Participants who speak of this benefit tend to see its source not so much in the external wilderness, but in the “internal wilderness” of physiology, instincts, archetypes, and thus like. It is obvious that we are dealing with an extremely diverse experience, which each person tends to remember and to interpret differently. It is also obvious, to me at least, that I am attempting to explore an experience of such depth and complexity that the terms “ineffable” or “spiritual” are appropriate. It appears to be an experience of exquisite beauty and clear impact for most people, and one that either dissolves upon return to the urban culture or places the individual in more or less severe conflict with that culture. Thus, as will all research on “learning” or “therapy” or “transformation,” generalizations are always questionable, the research always a challenge.

I have conducted 5 expeditions comprising 20 members in a group, in the wilderness and mountains around A. Kattupadi Village, near Vellore, and each expedition lasted 2 to 3 days. Almost 100 participants had some kind of “Wilderness Experience.” After a few days mushing around with various approaches to wilderness classes, when things settled down a bit, I began conducting research on the process—for my own edification. For the more than 100 persons passing through the program I have collected approximately 70 questionnaires and 20 interviews. Here are some preliminary descriptive statistics:

1. 90 percent of respondents described an increased sense of aliveness, well-being, and energy.

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2. 90 percent stated that the experience allowed them break an addiction, from nicotine to chocolate and other foods.

3. 80 percent found the return from “Wilderness Experience” back to civilization initially very positive and productive.

4. 53 percent of those found that within two days the positive feelings had turned to depression.

5. 99 percent stated that watching “flora and fauna” first hand was the most extreme and exhilarating experience.

6. 77 percent described a major life change upon return, in areas such as personal relationships, employment, housing, or life- style.

7. 60 percent of the men and 20 percent of the women stated that a major goal of the trip was to conquer fear, challenge themselves, and expand limits.

8. 57 percent of the women and 27 percent of the men stated that a major goal of the trip was to “come home” to nature: better understood the relationship with nature.

9. 92 percent cited “alone time” or “quite time with nature” as the single most important experience of the trip; getting up before dawn and climbing a ridge or peak in order to greet the sun was cited by 73 percent of the respondents as the second most important experience of the trip. “Community” or the fellowship of the group was cited by 80 percent as the third most important experience. Rush to Riches – The War on Creation

The Kingdom of God is under attack. The Kingdom of life is losing their habitats. In search of better life and in the name of progress, Man has declared war on creation. Now almost 7 billion people fill the world. The great majority are very poor; nearly one billion exist on the edge of starvation. All are struggling to raise the quality of their lives any way they can. That unfortunately includes the conversion of the surviving remnants of the natural environment. Our rush to riches is wrecking the ecosystems and Earth systems without any foresight. Half of the great tropical forests have been cleared. The last frontiers of the world are effectively gone. Species of plants and animals are disappearing a hundred or more times faster than

98 The Kingdom of Life is the Kingdom of God before the coming of humanity, and as many as half may be gone by the end of this century. An Armageddon1 is approaching at the beginning of the third millennium. But it is not the cosmic war and fiery collapse of mankind foretold in sacred scripture. It is the wreckage of the planet by an exuberantly plentiful and ingenious humanity.

The race is now on between the technoscientific forces that are destroying the living environment and those that can be harnessed to save it. “We are inside a bottleneck of overpopulation and wasteful consumption,” wrote Edward O. Wilson. The amount of arable land and water available per person, globally, is already declining. In solving the problem, other experts tell us, it should also be possible to shelter most of the vulnerable plant and animal species. In order to pass the bottleneck, a global land ethic is urgently needed. Not just any land ethic that might happen to enjoy agreeable sentiment, but one based on the best understanding of ourselves and the world around us that science and technology can provide. Surely the rest of life matters. Surely our stewardship is its only hope. We will be wise to listen carefully to the heart then act with rational intention and all the tools we can gather and bring to bear.

Each species—King Cobra, Bengal Tiger, Peacock, Mina bird, Centipede, Scorpion, Earth Worm, Snail, Ant, and on down the roster of ten million or more still with us—is a masterpiece. The craftsman who assembled them was natural selection, acting upon mutations and re-combinations of genes, through vast number of steps over long periods of time. Each species, when examined closely, offers an endless bounty of knowledge and aesthetic pleasure. It is a living library. The number of genes prescribing a eukaryotic life form such as a Douglas Fir2 or a human being runs into the tens of thousands. The nucleotide pairs composing them—in other words, the genetic letters that encode the life-giving enzymes—vary among species from one billion to ten billion. If the DNA helices in one cell of a mouse, a typical animal species, were placed end on end and magically enlarged to have the same width as wrapping string, they would extend for over

1Armageddon, battlefield described in the Bible in the Book of Revelation 16:16 as the scene of the predicted final struggle between good and evil.

2Douglas Fir, common name for a large coniferous tree, named for the British botanist David Douglas. It is sometimes called Douglas spruce but is not closely related to either the firs or the spruces. The Douglas Fir occasionally reaches a height of 250 feet and commonly grows to 6 feet in diameter. The saplings are popular as Christmas trees.

99 Earth - Designed for Biodiversity. Life will find a Way! nine hundred kilometers, with about four thousand nucleotide pairs packed into every meter. Measured in bits of pure information, the genome of a cell is comparable to all editions of the Encyclopedia Britannica published since its inception in 1768.

The creature at your feet dismissed as a bug or a weed is a creation in and of itself. It has a name, a million-year history, and a place in the world. Its genome adapts it to a special niche in an ecosystem. The ethical value substantiated by close examination of its biology is that the life forms around us are too old, too complex, and potentially too useful to be carelessly discarded. Biologists point to another ethically potent value: the genetic unity of life. All organisms have descended from the same distant ancestral life form. The reading of the genetic codes has shown thus far that the common ancestor of all living species was similar to present-day bacteria and archaeans, single-celled microbes with the simplest known anatomy and molecular composition. Because of this single ancestry, which arose on Earth over 3.5 billion years ago, all species today share certain fundamental molecular traits. Their tissue is divided into cells, whose enveloping lipid membranes regulate exchange with the outside environment. The molecular machinery that generates energy is similar. The genetic information is stored in DNA, transcribed into RNA, and translated into proteins. Finally, a large array of, mostly similar protein catalysts, the enzymes, accelerate all the life processes.

Still another intensely felt value is stewardship, which appears to rise from emotions programmed in the very genes of human social behavior. Because all organisms have descended from a common ancestor, it is correct to say that the biosphere as a whole began to think when humanity was born. If the rest of life is the body, we are the mind. Similar saying of Jesus is “I am the vine, you are the branches. Whoever remains in me and I in him will bear much fruit, because without me you can do nothing” John 15:5. Jesus described himself as the true vine, and the blood he shed on the cross is symbolized with the wine Christians drink during communion. Thus, our place in nature, viewed from an ethical perspective, is to think about the creation and to protect the living planet. The genetic unity is a fact-based history confirmed with increasing exactitude by the geneticists and paleontologists who reconstruct evolutionary genealogy. A sense of genetic unity, kinship, and deep history are among the values that bond us to the living environment. They are survival mechanisms for ourselves and our species. To conserve biological diversity is an investment in immortality.

100 The Kingdom of Life is the Kingdom of God

Do other species therefore have inalienable rights? There are three reaches of altruism possible from which a response can be made. The first is anthropocentrism: nothing matters except that which affects humanity. The second is pathocentrism: intrinsic rights should be extended to chimpanzees, dogs, and other intelligent animals for whom we can legitimately feel empathy. And finally the third is biocentrism: all kinds of organisms have an intrinsic right at least to exist. The three levels are not as exclusive as they first seem. In real life they often coincide, and when on life-or-death conflict they can be ordered in priority as follows: first humanity, next intelligent animals, then other forms of life. The influence of the biocentric view, expressed institutionally through quasi-religious movements such as Deep Ecology and the Epic of Evolution, is growing worldwide. It is not so difficult to love nonhuman life, if gifted with knowledge about it. The capacity, even the proneness to do so, may well be one of the human instincts. The phenomenon has been called biophilia, defined as the innate tendency to focus upon life and lifelike forms, and in some instances to affiliate with them emotionally (More to read in Chapter 3). Human beings sharply distinguish the living from the inanimate. We esteem novelty and diversity in other organisms. We are thrilled by the prospect of unknown creatures, whether in the deep sea, the unbroken forest, or remote mountains. We are riveted by the idea of life on other planets. Dinosaurs are our icons of vanished biodiversity.

A prominent component of biophilia is habitat selection. Studies conducted in the relatively new field of environmental psychology during the past thirty years point consistently to the following conclusion: people prefer to be in natural environments, and especially in savanna or park-like habitats. They like a long depth of view across a relatively smooth, grassy ground surface dotted with trees and copses. They want to be near a body of water, whether ocean, lake, river, or stream. They try to place their habitations on a prominence, from which they can safely scan the savanna and watery environment. With nearly absolute consistency these landscapes are preferred over urban settings that are either bare or clothed in scant vegetation. To a relative degree people dislike woodland views that posses restricted depth of vision, a disordered complexity of vegetation, and rough ground structures—in short, forests with small, closely spaced trees and dense undergrowth. They want a topography and openings that improve their line of sight.

No direct evidence has yet been sought for a genetic basis of the human habitat preference, but its presence is suggested by a consistency

101 Earth - Designed for Biodiversity. Life will find a Way! in its manifestations across cultures from Amazon to India. The aesthetics brings us to the question of the origin of the biophilic instincts. The human habitat preference is consistent with the “savanna hypothesis1”, that humanity originated in the savannas and transitional forests in Africa. Almost the full evolutionary history of the genus Homo, including Homo sapiens and its immediate ancestors, was spent in or near these habitats or others similar to them. The savanna hypothesis extended to include behavior stipulates that Homo sapiens is likely to be genetically specialized for the ancestral environment so that today, even in the most sequestered stone-and-glass cities, we still prefer it. Part of human nature is a residue of bias in mental development that causes us to gravitate back to savannas or their surrogates. Every species that moves under its own power, from protozoans to chimpanzees, instinctively seeks the habitat it must occupy in order to survive and reproduce. The behavioral steps for which it is genetically programmed are usually complex and exactly executed. The study of habitat selection is an important branch of ecology, and no species ever lets down the researcher who chooses to examine this part of its life cycle.

Humans have the idea, now centuries old, that we are above natural processes rather than immersed in them. We have thought, and continue to teach our children to think, that we can control nature, at least most of the time. It is time to grow up! The new approach has to be different; we are not “above the nature,” but “with the nature.” As the great British Naturalist David Attenborough puts it, “If you lose human person, nature would not suffer, but if you lose nature, humanity will definitely suffer.” In other words, “All animals and plants don’t need humans for their survival, but humans need plants and animals for their survival.”

1The global climate cooled and became drier between 8 million and 5 million years ago, near the end of the Miocene Epoch. According to the savanna hypothesis, this climate change broke up and reduced the area of African forests. As the forests shrunk, an ape population in eastern Africa became separated from other populations of apes in the more heavily forested areas of western Africa. The eastern population had to adapt to its drier environment, which contained larger areas of grassy savanna.

102 Chapter III

Life will Find a Way

“Everybody needs beauty as well as bread, places to play in and pray in, where nature may heal and give strength to body and soul,” wrote Scottish- born naturalist John Muir.

Over the past two centuries, scientists have painstakingly pieced together the history of life. The fossil record shows clearly that ancient life was very different from extant life. Generally speaking, the farthest back in time you go, the simpler were the living things that inhabited Earth. The great proliferation of complex life forms occurred only within the last billion years. The oldest well-documented true animal fossils, found in Australia are dated as 560 million years. Known as Ediacara1, they include creatures resembling jellyfish. Shortly after this epoch, about 545 million years ago, there began a veritable explosion of species, culminating in the colonization of the land by large plants and animals. But before about one billion years ago, life was restricted to single-celled organisms. This record of complexification and diversification is broadly explained by Darwin’s theory of evolution, which paints a picture of species continually branching and rebranching to form more and more distinct lineages. Conversely, in the past these lineages converge. The evidence strongly affirms that all life on Earth descended via this branching process from a common ancestor.

That is, every person, every animal and plant, every invisible bacterium can be traced back to the same tiny microbe that lived billions of years ago, and thence back to the first living thing. What remains to be explained—what stands out as the central unsolved puzzle in the scientific account of life—is how the first microbe came to exist. It is clear that Earth life has vastly changed the environment of the Earth’s surface. The evolution of oxygen, of multicellularity, of plant life and trees with roots: The list is enormous. So important has been the contribution of life to the nature of our planet that a hypothesis, the Gaia hypothesis, has been formulated. Its most extreme adherents believe that the connection between life and the planet show that the planet itself is alive.

1Beginning about 600 million years ago in the Precambrian, the fossil record speaks of more rapid change. First, there was the rise and fall of mysterious creatures of the “Vendian biota” or “Edicara fauna,” named for the fossil site in Australia where they were first discovered.

103 Earth - Designed for Biodiversity. Life will find a Way!

Living Planet and the Gaia Hypothesis

Let us look at another really implausible idea—that our planet itself, is a form of life—and scrutinize the components that make up a greatly influential hypothesis that the Earth may be alive, and if one planet is, surely there are others. In the defense of this idea, it is clear that planets have life spans, and some would say life cycles of a sort: They form, evolve over time, and ultimately die. It may even be said that they metabolize, after a fashion. But can it be said that they are alive? This is the premise of the Gaia hypothesis. A living planet would certainly qualify as life as we do not know it, and such a being would tax the tree of life methodology to the max. People throughout time have championed the concept that the Earth is in some way alive. Most recently, this view has taken on new credibility because of adherence to it by a collection of world-class scientists, led by the British scientist James Lovelock. In a series of books published in the 1970s and 1980s, Lovelock focused this view. This hypothesis is based on the idea that the biomass of life self-regulates the conditions on the planet to make its physical environment, in particular, the temperature and chemistry of the atmosphere, more hospitable to the species that constitute its “life.” The most extreme form of Gaia theory is that the entire Earth is single unified organism; in this view, the Earth’s biosphere is consciously manipulating the climate in order to make conditions more conducive to life.

The Gaia movement has spawned an interesting new discipline called Earth System Science. Yet the analogy of a living human and a living planet is easily misused, as evidenced by the extreme nonsense promulgated by many self-described Gaians. Our planet is not alive. Planet Earth is a closed system with respect to material—essentially we do not receive new material from outer space but continuously recycle what is already present—but an open system with respect to energy, whereas all organisms are “open” systems with respect to both. Humans and almost all other organisms do not last very long without a constant intake of new material. The study of fossil animals and plants shows how life forms have evolved over the millennia by reacting to changes in the environment. Some populations have adapted to new conditions brought on by climate change and evolved into new species. Others have not, and their species have become extinct. Of the billions of species that have come and gone since life first arose on this planet nearly three and half billion years ago, more than 99 percent have become extinct. We are just beginning to understand the significance of the astonishing diversity of past and present life forms

104 Life Will Find a Way on Earth and how their often bewildering and always beautiful variety weaves a supportive web that makes life possible for our own species. Resurrection – The Immortality of Life

Understanding life’s existence as something consciously aware of inevitable death implies about the beginning and the end of life’s existence. Buddhism, which understands human existence as a form of life that undergoes continuous living-dying, rather than merely as life facing inevitable death, sees human beings as sentient beings originally transcending anthropocentrism. Accordingly, in Buddhism life and death or birth and death are not understood to be two different entities. They are inseparably interconnected. This is why Dogen, the thirteenth-century Japanese Zen master, emphasizes that “it is mistake to think that you pass from birth to death.” Man is born to achieve life through living it. Life is different from living. He can go on breathing, eating and growing old— but this is not life! It must not be simply growing old. It must be growing up, living up to it. Therefore, living is essential component in life. Growing up means moving every moment deeper into the principle of life; it means going further away from death—not towards death. That is what Jesus Christ did in his life. The deeper you go into life, the more you understand the immortality within you. To me, the first principle of life is awareness. Awareness means that we are eternal beings and we never die! Awareness means going into your immortality, going into your eternity, going into your godliness. We are not human beings who are after spirituality, but on the other hand we are spiritual beings who are after humanity, becoming human. And the child is the most qualified person because he is still unburdened by knowledge, unburdened by religion, unburdened by education, unburdened by all kinds of rubbish. Children posses a quality called “innocence,” the treasure that sages find after arduous effort. Sages have said that they become children again, that they are reborn. Jesus says that unlike you become like little children you shall not enter the kingdom of God.

The second principle is the pilgrimage. Life must be seeking—not a desire, but a search. “Search, you shall find it,” exclaims Jesus. The best place to find life in abundance is nature. When you take time off to explore nature, a new world is unraveling in front of your eyes. A new array of plants and animals become your new neighbors, whom you did not know all these years. They become objects of your admiration and concern. Then each moment is a discovery, each moment brings a new joy; a new mystery

105 Earth - Designed for Biodiversity. Life will find a Way! opens the doors, a new love starts growing in you towards newly discovered animals and plants, a new compassion on them that you have never felt before, a new sensitivity about beauty, about abundance and goodness. Your sensitivity makes it clear to you that this small blade of grass is as important to existence as the biggest star; without this blade of grass, existence would be less than it is. And this small blade of grass is unique, it is replaceable, it has its own individuality. And this sensitivity will create new friendships for you—friendships with trees, with birds, with animals, with mountains, with rivers, with oceans, with stars. Life becomes richer as you know what’s going on around you in nature? And you fall in love with the biotic and abiotic worlds of nature and your life becomes bigger. This whole existence becomes your family—because no man is an island, we are all connected. We are a vast continent, joined in millions of ways. We belong intrinsically to existence.

The third principle is celebration of life. Transform small things into celebration. Ants, frogs, bees, grass, stone, sand and a drop of water offer a reason to celebrate. Everything you do should be expressive of you; it should have your signature on it. Then life becomes a continuous celebration. Most religions talk about God’s presence in creation which calls for worship and celebration. Especially Christianity believes in the power of resurrection which is the ultimate celebration of life. Jesus is the lover of life. He was aware that life is a virus, you cannot kill it. That is why no grave can contain him he is out of the grave less than three full days. Then he has found that life permeates all over the universe, perhaps life is a very common thing in the universe and we are not alone. St Paul says that not all of us will die, but we will be transformed (1 Cori 15:35-58). It will happen in a moment, in the blinking of an eye, when the last trumpet is blown. For when the trumpet sounds, the Christians who have died will be raised with transformed bodies. And then we who are living will be transformed so that we will never die. For, our perishable earthly bodies must be transformed into heavenly bodies that will never die. Paul launches into a discussion about what our resurrected body will be like. If you could select your own body, what kind would you choose-strong, athletic, beautiful? In another context St Paul mocks death itself. “Oh death, where is your victory? Oh death, where is your sting?” (1 Cori 15:54-56).

Paul explains that we will be recognized in our resurrected body, yet it will be better than we can imagine, for it will be made to live forever. We will still have our own personality and individuality, but these will be perfected through Christ’s work. The Bible does not reveal everything that

106 Life Will Find a Way our resurrected body will be able to do, but we know it will be perfect, without sickness or disease (see Philippians 3:21). We know that evolution moves towards complexity and perfection, each design is better, more complex than the previous one. Natural selection will bring all life to its fullness and perfection. I see death as the ultimate perfection of life. You have to pass through death to resurrection. Our present body is perishable and prone to decay. Our resurrection body will be transformed. Our spiritual body will not be limited by the laws of nature. This does not necessarily mean we’ll be superpeople, but our body will be different form and more capable than our present earthly one. Our spiritual body will not be weak, will never get sick, and will never die. I do believe that natural selection is capable of eternal life and perhaps the creator has intended this way. Jesus is the apex of life, he is the first born he is alpha, omega and he is the head of all creation. Where the head goes, there we are to follow. Life is a winner all the time. “Christ has died, Christ has risen and Christ will come again!” This is the mystery of our faith, also mystery of life as well. Phoenix – It Shall Rise Again!

The Phoenix is a mythical sacred firebird. Said to live for 500 or 1461 years, the Phoenix is a bird with beautiful gold and red fiery plumage. At the end of its life-cycle the Phoenix builds itself a nest of cinnamon twigs that it then ignites: both nest and bird burn fiercely and are reduced to ashes, from which a new, young Phoenix arises. The bird was also said to regenerate when hurt or wounded by a foe (hence the expression rising Phoenix-like from ash or ruin), thus life is being almost immortal and invincible—a symbol of fire and divinity. Here are some of the remarkable and enduring qualities of life.

Before we tackle the problem of its origin, it is important to have a clear idea of what life is? Fifty years ago, many scientists were convinced the mystery of life was about to be solved. Biologists recognized that the key lay among the molecular components within the cell. Physicists had by then made impressive strides elucidating the structure of matter at the atomic level, and it looked as if they would soon clear up the problem of life too. The agenda was set by the publication of Erwin Schrodinger’s book “What is Life?” in 1944. The property of autonomy, or self- determination, seems to touch on the most enigmatic aspect that distinguishes living from nonliving things, but it is hard to know where it comes from. Autonomy is one important characteristic of life. But there are many others, including the following:

107 Earth - Designed for Biodiversity. Life will find a Way!

Metabolism: Life Metabolizes – To be considered as properly alive, an organism has to do something. Every organism processes chemicals through complicated sequences of reactions, and as a result garners energy to enable it to carry out tasks, such as movement and reproduction. This chemical processing and energy liberation is called metabolism. However, metabolism cannot be equated with life. Some micro-organisms can become completely dormant for long periods of time, with their vital functions shut down. We would be reluctant to pronounce them dead if it is possible for them to be revived. All organisms process chemicals and in so dong bring energy into their bodies. But of what use is this energy? The processing and liberation of energy by an organism are what we call metabolism, and it is the way that life harvests the negative entropy described by the famous biologist Shrondinger that is necessary to maintain internal order.

Organization: Life has Organization – Maybe it is not complexity per se that is significant, but organized complexity. The components of an organism must cooperate with each other or the organism will cease to function as a coherent unity. For example, a set of arteries and veins are not much use without a heart to pump blood through them. A pair of legs will offer little locomotive advantage if each leg moves on its own, without reference to the other. Even within individual cells the degree of cooperation is astonishing. Molecules don’t simply career about haphazardly, but show all the hallmarks of a factory assembly line, with a high degree of specialization, a division of labor, and a command-and- control structure. There is no really simple life composed of but a handful of atoms. All life is composed of a great number of atoms arranged in intricate ways. But complexity is not enough; it is organization of this complexity that is a hallmark of life.

Complexity: Life has complexity – All known forms of life are amazingly complex. Even single-celled organisms such as bacteria are veritable beehives of activity involving millions of components. In part, it is this complexity that guarantees the unpredictability of organisms. On the other hand, a hurricane and a galaxy are also very complex. Hurricanes are notoriously unpredictable. Many nonliving physical systems are what scientists call chaotic—their behavior is too complicated to predict, and may even be random.

Reproduction: Life Reproduces – A living organism should be able to reproduce. However, some nonliving things, like crystals and bush fires,

108 Life Will Find a Way can reproduce, whereas viruses, which many people would regard as living, are unable to multiply on their own. Mules are certainly living, even though, being sterile, they cannot reproduce. A successful offspring is more than a mere facsimile of the original; it also includes a copy of the replication apparatus. To propagate their genes beyond the next generation, organisms must replicate the means of replication, as well as replicating the genes themselves. This one is obvious, and one could argue that a series of machines could be programmed to reproduce. But life must make a copy of itself but that it must make a copy of the mechanism that allows further copying.

Nutrition: Life Sustains - This is closely related to metabolism. Seal up a living organism in a box for long enough and in due course it will cease to function and eventually die. Crucial to life is a continual throughout of matter and energy. For example, animals eat, plants photosynthesize. But a flow of matter and energy alone fails to capture the real business of life. The Great Red Spot of Jupiter is a fluid vortex sustained by a flow of matter and energy. Nobody suggests it is alive. In addition, it is not energy as such that life needs, but something like useful, or free, energy.

Growth and Development: Life Develops – Individual organisms grow and ecosystems tend to spread. But many nonliving things grow too, such as crystals, rust, clouds. A subtler yet altogether more significant property of living things, treated as a class, is development. The remarkable story of life on Earth is one of gradual evolutionary adaptation, as a result of variety and novelty. Variation is the key. It is replication combined with variation that leads to Darwinian evolution. We might consider turning the problem upside down and say: if it evolves in the way Darwin described, it lives. Once a copy is made, life continues to change; this can be called development. Again, it is a process mediated by the machines of life but also involves processes that are unmachine-like.

Evolution: Life Evolves – This is one of the most fundamental properties of life and one that is integral to its existence. This characteristic is the paradox pf permanence and change. Genes must replicate, and if they cannot do so with great regularity, the organism will die. On the other hand, if the replication is perfect, there will be no variability, no way that evolution through natural selection can take place. Evolution is the key to adaptation, and without adaptation there can be no life.

Information Context – In recent years scientists have stressed the analogy between living organisms and computers. Crucially, the

109 Earth - Designed for Biodiversity. Life will find a Way! information needed to replicate an organism is passed on in the genes from parent to offspring. So life is information technology writ small. But, again, information as such is not enough. Though there is information aplenty in the positions of the fallen leaves in a forest, it doesn’t mean anything. To qualify for the description of living, information must be meaningful to the system that receives it: there must be a “context.” In other words, the information must be specified. But where does this context itself come from, and how does a meaningful specification arise spontaneously in nature?

Hardware/Software Entanglement – As we shall see all life of the sort found on Earth stems from a deal struck between two very different classes of molecules: nucleic acids and proteins. These groups complement each other in terms of their chemical properties, but the contract goes much deeper than that, to the very heart of what is meant by life. Nucleic acids store life’s software. The two chemical realms can support each other only because there is a highly specific and refined communication channel between them mediated by a code, the so-called genetic code. This code, and the communication channel—both advanced products of evolution— have the effect of entangling the hardware and software aspects of life in a baffling and almost paradoxical manner.

Permanence and Change – A further paradox of life concerns the strange conjunction of permanence and change. This ancient puzzle is sometimes referred to by philosophers as the problem of being versus becoming. The job of genes is to replicate, to conserve the genetic message. But without variation, adaptation is impossible and the genes will eventually get snuffed out: adapt or die is the Darwinian imperative. How do conservation and change coexist in one system? This contradiction lies at the heart of biology. Life flourishes on Earth because of the creative tension that exists between these conflicting demands; we still do not fully understand how the game is played out.

Life is Autonomous – This one might be the toughest to define, yet is central to being alive. An organism is autonomous, or has self- determination. But how “autonomy” is derived from the many parts and workings of an organism is still a mystery. How to Define Earth Life?

We are to compile a large number of specific characteristic that our kind of life uses to stay alive. Let us look at the genes of Earth life in more

110 Life Will Find a Way detail, so as to understand how they might differ in non-Earth life. First of all, genes are the blueprint necessary to make Earth life’s major structural and chemical partner, proteins. Proteins perform the various functions of the cell. A protein’s action is determined both by its chemical constituents and by its shape. Proteins become folded in highly complicated topographies, and often their final three-dimensional shape determines their actions. So, how does DNA specify a particular protein? A typical protein might be made up of a hundred to more than five hundred amino acids, and thus its gene, the sequence of nucleotides coding for the protein on the DNA strand, will be composed of a hundred to five hundred or more sets of “steps” on the DNA ladder. These are arranged in linear order along the DNA strand, like letters in a sentence. And like a sentence, there will be spaces and punctuations as well. The RNA slaves grab these and take them to a ribosome, where the actual protein is constructed. So, Earth life has DNA, and RNA, has a specific code, and uses tiny structures in the cell called ribosomes to make another characteristic of Earth life, proteins. The code itself is important to look at, for it is one area that could be changed to produce alien life or at least from a DNA life unlike that on Earth.

The fact that all our bodies are made up of proteins constructed from twenty different amino acids, but always the same twenty, is itself a characteristic of Earth life. Again, using different, more, or fewer amino acids would certainly seem to qualify a life-form as being un-Earthlike. This information flow goes only one way: from DNA to RNA. The poor RNAs have no say in any of this: go here, build that, bossed forever by hierarchy (not surprising) from above by DNA. All the proteins being built by the ribosomes, at the direction of the RNAs do one of two things: They build a structure, or more commonly, they function as enzymes that catalyze a chemical reaction in the cell itself important for maintaining life function, such as metabolism. Our description has gotten more complex. We need to incorporate the code that is used and the twenty amino acids that we are made of. Now we have more to play with: We have a specific information-carrying molecule (DNA) that is found in a structure (a Chromosome) that (using RNA and ribosome) works to produce a slew of proteins, all made up of twenty, only twenty, specific amino acids, using a particular code of nucleotides to specify an individual amino acid. This is a unique fingerprint to life on Earth or even to all life on Earth.

111 Earth - Designed for Biodiversity. Life will find a Way!

Life in Solid, Liquid, Gas – Cells

The spark that really ignited interest in the possibility of life on other worlds was the discovery of so-called “extremophiles” life on Earth— organisms thriving in hostile environments, previously assumed to be absolutely sterile. Interest in this branch of microbiology has grown enormously since the 1900s; now it feels as if in any location we care to check we invariably find life flourishing. Life, once started, seems to have become utterly irrepressible, adapting to fill almost any damp niche. There is evidence for liquid water on many planets and moons within the solar system; indeed is ought to be abundant on any planet at an appropriate distance from its star, so these discoveries at the extremes of our own world are obviously tremendously important. There are three main parameters that affect the functioning of cellular biology: temperature, acidity and salinity; different organisms can survive over different ranges of these conditions. In terms of temperature, acidity and salinity, certain terrestrial life would be perfectly content in extra-terrestrial settings. There is no such thing as a “standard” environment on Earth and we don’t have much of an idea about the conditions under which life first arose. Extremity in the eye of the beholder—from the point of view of a bacterium dwelling in the crush and heat of the deep underground, the cells eking out a living in the bitter cold and low-pressure environment of the surface, toxic with corrosive oxygen and awash with UV radiation, are the evolutionary freaks.

Here on Earth we humans, and probably the majority of Earth life, live in air. While there are millions of marine species, it now seems clear that terrestrial diversity, especially among insects, is greater than the overall diversity, especially among insects, is greater than the overall diversity of marine species. But our ancestry is made from water, and we air dwellers (or land dwellers, if you prefer) are but water filled bags moving around. This leads us to the question, could there be life in gas or in solid in the same way that we are water creatures? Let’s look at solid first. Life, as we know it and don’t know it, must be chemical in nature and must be able to undergo chemical reactions. For this to happen, the various molecules capable of chemical activity have to be able to move around one another yet also be in close proximity. This is where theoretical solid life and gas life are at a great disadvantage. In a solid, there is close proximity but little movement, while a gas has lots of movement but no proximity. For these reasons we can eliminate life in a solid or gas from serious considerations. The abundance of life is found in liquids.

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Genetic Code – The Stamp of Earth Life

No one would dispute the planet Earth is besotted with life. From that long-ago time when Earth life first formed, we have gone from some first cell to millions of species. From the deepest ocean depths to the highest mountain crags, it is difficult to find any habitat that does not at least harbor a smattering of microbes, and when we reach the richness of the African plain, or tropical rain forest, or coral reef habitat, the cornucopia that we call life is everywhere apparent. It is this very richness that has caused no end of dispute and work for those biologists concerned with classifying it all. But even with all this diversity, all life yet discovered shows a unifying characteristic: It all contains DNA. So perhaps this is how we should define Earth life.

Deoxyribonucleic acid, or DNA, is something that we encountered first in biology class and then constantly in the news. Composed of two backbones, the famous double helix described by its discoverers, James Watson and Francis Crick, this complex molecule is the information storage system of life itself, the “software” that runs all of Earth life’s hardware. These two spirals are bound together by a series of projections, like steps on ladder, made up of the distinctive DNA bases, or base pairs: adenine, cytosine, guanine, and thymine. The term base pair comes from the fact that the bases always join up: Cytosine always pairs up with guanine, and thymine always joins with adenine. The order of base pairs supplies the language of life; these are the genes that code for all information about a particular life-form. If DNA is the information carrier, a single-stranded variant called RNA is its slave, a molecule that translates information into action—or in life’s case, into the actual production of proteins. RNA molecules are similar to DNA in having a helix and bases. But they differ in usually having only a single strand, or helix, rather than the double helix of DNA. Also, RNA has one different base from DNA.

There are four kinds of RNA, which Freeman Dyson has analogized with the hardware and software of a computer system. DNA is clearly always software, and proteins are usually hardware. RNA has the interesting characteristic of being either hardware or software and, in some cases, both at the same time. RNA occurs in the world in four different forms, with four different functions. First, in some viruses there is genomic RNA, which acts like DNA in storing genetic information and containing genes. In the AIDS virus, RNA makes up the entire genome. In this case the RNA acts as software. Second, there is ribosomal RNA, a structural part of

113 Earth - Designed for Biodiversity. Life will find a Way! ribosomes, the tiny organelles within cells that make proteins. This is a case of RNA clearly acting as software. Third, there is transfer RNA, the hod carrier that takes amino acids to ribosomes for protein synthesis, and as a material conveyor it is hardware. Finally, there is the most interesting of all the RNAs, messenger RNA, which conveys instructions to the ribosome from the genomic DNA. In this it acts as software, but it has been shown that it can also act as a catalyst both for protein formation and for its own splitting and spicing and thus acts as software and hardware at the same time.

Understanding RNA, its use and evolution, is the key to understanding life on Earth, and perhaps not only Earth life but other types of life as well. In Earth life DNA makes RNA, which makes proteins. This is known as the central dogma and was first defined by Francis Crick. But as we will see, RNA might have preceded DNA during Earth life’s origin. Most RNA is used as a messenger, sent from DNA to the site of protein formation within a cell, where the specific RNA gives the information necessary to synthesize a particular protein. To do this, a double-stranded DNA partially unwinds, and a single-stranded RNA forms and keys into the base pair sequence on the now-exposed DNA molecule. This new RNA stand matches with the base pairs of the DNA and in so doing encodes information about the protein necessary to be built. This brings us to the subject of genes.

DNA provided the answers to many of the mysteries of genetics, answering the question, once and for all, about what a gene is. Watson and Crick made the great discovery, one that launched an enormous revolution in biology, and it was announced in a paper in the journal “Nature” that was a single page long. Their finding was actually a model, not an experimental result, but the model had enormous predictive power. It became clear that a gene is made of DNA and that one gene makes one protein. Watson and Crick proposed that one-half of the DNA ladder serves as a template for re-creating the other half during replication. Each gene is a discrete code being three letters long. How does a gene specify the production of an enzyme? It was Crick who suggested that the sequence of bases is a code, the so-called genetic code that somehow provides information for the formation of proteins, one amino acid at a time. The information coded has to be read or transcribed and then translated into proteins. That is where RNA comes in. Life as we know it uses twenty amino acids. Not twenty one. And always the same twenty! If we suddenly found life that used a twenty-first amino acid, for instance, this would be a good reason to rejoice in the discovery of alien life. There is a transfer RNA

114 Life Will Find a Way molecule specific for each of the anointed twenty of the amino acid clan.

Once alerted by Chief DNA that a particular amino acid from the twenty is needed for a specific protein to be built, our transfer RNA goes out into the cytoplasm of the cell interior, scavenging for the particular amino acid that it alone can carry. Once the amino acid is found, this transfer RNA then heads to the ribosome with its burden. The code is elegant and can be analogized to Morse code1, itself just a system of dots and dashes that is able to string together long and complex messages. Crick realized that the different combinations of bases lined up on the DNA molecule could specify each of the twenty amino acids use by life on Earth. But actually making the proteins took place in the small spherical bodies within the ribosomes. Therefore, some link had to be made between the DNA and the protein formation centers. This is the job of messenger RNA molecules. Thus DNA codes for RNA, which codes for proteins. This, then, the central dogma of molecular biology, may also be called a central characteristic of Earth life. DNA – Deoxyribonucleic Acid

DNA is the genetic blueprint of all creatures—it contains the operating instructions for everyday life and for making the next generation. Recently, an important new dimension of DNA has been revealed—it contains a vast and detailed record of how species adapt and change. Thus DNA is a living chronicle of evolution. We can now pinpoint the precise changes in DNA that have enabled the marvelous creatures that inhabit our planet to adapt to its many shifting and sometimes extreme environments, from the freezing waters of Antarctic to the lush canopy of the rain forest. We finally understand not just how the fittest survive but also how they are made. Every change or new trait, from the gaudy colors of tropical birds to our color vision through which we admire nature’s artworks, is due to stepwise changes in DNA that we can now trace. Some steps are tiny, just a single change in one letter of a gene’s code. Others are more dramatic and involve the birth and death of many genes. Though the DNA record has resoundingly confirmed Darwin’s main principles, several major surprises have been revealed.

1Morse code was developed by Samuel Morse and Alfred Fail in 1835, and is a system of representing letters, numbers and punctuation marks by means of a code signal sent intermittently. One of the main elements of music, rhythm, also represents one of the main constituents of “Morse code” telegraphy.

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The first surprise is that there is a set of “immortal” genes in the DNA of nearly every creature, from bacteria to whales. These genes first emerged three billion years ago and have survived the constant onslaught of mutations that would have erased them eons ago, were it not for natural selection. The second surprise is the discovery of fossil genes. These are bits of DNA text that were once intact and used by ancestors but have fallen into disuse and decay. These relics are an entirely new source of insights into traits and capabilities that have been abandoned as species, including humans, evolved new lifestyles. Perhaps the most profound surprise is how the DNA record proves that evolution can and does repeat itself. Similar or identical adaptations have occurred in the same way in species as different as butterflies and humans. This repetition overthrows the notion that if we rewound and replayed the history of life, all of the outcomes would be different. There is grandeur in this new knowledge of how changing one or a few letters in simple code can dramatically change the form of physiology of complex organisms. The ability to see into the machinery of evolution transforms how we look at the process. This remarkable process—has shaped humans, the world we now inhabit, and the marvelous creatures with whom, we share it.

More accurate and rigorous than fiber or fingerprint analysis, and far more reliable than eyewitness testimony, DNA analysis can provide conclusive proof about who was or was not at the scene of a crime. The authority of DNA evidence, has led to a revolution in the criminal justice system and a vast increase in the use of DNA testing to both convict the guilty and exonerate the innocent. Many crimes that would have been unsolvable in the past are now solved routinely, including “cold cases” several decades old. The number of exonerations is also growing. Innocence Project, an organization that provides pro bono representation for DNA-based appeals, reports more than 150 exonerations over the past thirteen years, including many individuals freed from death row. The power of DNA testing extends far beyond criminal justice. The determination of paternity is now definitive, and testing for carriers of genetic diseases is now routine; thanks to DNA science. But there is one arena where that power is not yet widely appreciated: in what one might call the philosophical realm. Just as the sequence of each individual’s DNA is unique, the sequence of each species’ DNA is unique. Every evolutionary change between species, from physical form to digestive metabolism, is due to—and recorded in—changes in DNA. So, too, is the “paternity” of species. DNA contains, therefore, the ultimate forensic record of evolution.

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The DNA Record of Evolution

Each step in evolution, we now know, is taken and recorded in DNA. Every change or new trait—from the antifreeze in the bloodstream of Antarctic fish, to the beautiful colors of an alpine wildflower, to our large brain-packed skulls—is due to one or more stepwise changes in DNA that are now traceable. Some steps are tiny, just a single change in one letter of one gene’s code. Others are much larger, involving the birth and death of entire genes or blocks of genes in one leap. We can track these changes because of the explosive increase in our knowledge of species genes and genomes1, which is the entire DNA content of a species. From just a trickle of the small genomes of bacteria and yeast several years ago, the large genomes of complex creatures such as the chimpanzees, dog, whale, and various plants are being revealed at a torrential pace. The unique DNA sequence of each species is a complete record of the present. It is an inventory of all the genes used to build and operate that creature.

The DNA record is also a window into the recent and the deep past. When the first genome of a member of some group is determined that pioneer paves the way for much faster analysis of its relatives. By comparing genes and genomes between relatives of different ranks, we can pinpoint important changes and spot the mark of natural selection. The view can be as humbling as it is exciting. We can peer back a few million years to track the changes that took place in the evolution of the line that led to us from our common ancestor with the chimpanzee, our closest relative on the planet. We can look back 100 million years or so to see what gave rise to the differences between marsupials and placental mammals. We can even glimpse before the dawn of animals and find hundreds of genes in simple, single-celled organisms that evolved more than two billion years ago and still carry out the same jobs in our bodies today.

The ability to see into the machinery of evolution transforms how we look at the process. For more than a century, were largely restricted to looking only at the outside of evolution. We observed external changes in the fossil record and assessed differences in anatomy. But before this new molecular age there was no way to make genetic comparisons between species. We could study the reproduction and survival of

1First there was Gregor Mendel, a monk who studied inherited characteristics. This was followed by Francis Crick and James Watson who unraveled the DNA molecule. This has led us to understanding the Human Genome sequence.

117 Earth - Designed for Biodiversity. Life will find a Way! organisms and infer the forces at work. However, we had no concrete knowledge of the mechanisms of variation or the identity of the meaningful differences between species. Yes, we understood that the outcome was the survival of the fittest, but we did not know how the fittest are made. Just as for any work of human creation, we so much better understand how complex things have come to be—cars, computers, spacecraft—when we understand how they are made, and how each new model is different from its predecessors. We are no longer savages staring at passing ships.

The first rules of inheritance were discovered by the Augustinian monk Gregor Mandel in the course of breeding experiments he conducted on pea plants in the late 1850s and early 1860s. But while Mandel was aware of Darwin, the great naturalist was never aware of Mandel’s work, although the German journal in which it was described was available in Britain. It wasn’t until 1900, some thirty-four years after publication and sixteen years after Mendel’s death, that the scientific world took note. One biologist who seized upon Mendel’s work was William Bateson, a Cambridge University naturalist. Bateson was seeking the laws of variation and he wrote a large book on all sorts of large, discontinuous variations found in nature. This was the foundation for his belief that selection acted on large differences among individuals, and that Darwin’s picture of evolution occurring in small increments was wrong. In Mendel’s work, Bateson thought he had found the evidence to clinch his view. Mendel showed that several traits in the pea plant were inherited in a simple fashion such that the difference between pea shape or color was determined by single units, we now call these units—genes. The discovery of Mendelian genetics energized all sorts of research programs, including experiments to improve animal breeds. One of the most important figures in this area was William Castle of Harvard University, who promptly embraced Mendelian inheritance and Bateson’s view of discontinuous variation as the material for evolution. Natural Selection – The Engine of Life

Natural Selection is simply “the survival of the fittest.” Natural Selection is the process through which individuals with beneficial traits are more likely to survive and reproduce. In the next generation, those traits, if they have heritable components, will be more common. Through generations of accumulation, the traits will spread in the population, which can result in speciation and adaptation. On the other hand, individuals with injurious

118 Life Will Find a Way variations will have less chance to survive or reproduce, and their traits will be eliminated from the population. The concept of “Natural Selection” was first introduced by Charles Darwin in his 1859 book “The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection”, by saying “…individuals having any advantage, however slight, over others, would have the best chance of surviving and of procreating their kind. On the other hand, we may feel sure that any variation in the least degree injurious would be rigidly destroyed. This preservation of favorable variations and the rejection of injurious variations, I call Natural Selection.” Natural Selection provides one of the most important mechanisms by which evolution occurs.

Natural Selection is much easier to see in a math formula than it is to see in the wild. In addition to the difficulty of controlling conditions, there are two major factors one can immediately appreciate that make it difficult to measure. The first is time. If changes are measurably only over periods of time that are longer than naturalists or researchers have the opportunity to record, then it would seem we are out of luck. The second challenge is the number of measurements required. The data sample must be large in order to detect subtle selective advantages or disadvantages. This latter difficulty is a fact of probability and statistics. If the relative fitness of two forms of a species differs by a small percentage, one must count a large number of individuals over time in order to overcome the random effects of sampling error. After genetics and population biology were incorporated into the studies of evolution, people get a better understanding of natural selection. The existence of genes was first suggested by Gregor Mendel and in 1910 T. H. Morgan introduced the chromosome theory of inheritance. R. A. Fisher showed how continuous variation could be the result of the action of many discrete loci. Morgan’s student Theodosius Dobzhansky was the first to apply Morgan’s chromosome theory1 and the mathematics of population genetics to natural populations of organism. Their works, as well as contributions from many other scientists shed light on the genetic basis of natural selection.

Traits of an organism are coded by their genes. But for each gene, there might be some variations, or so-called different alleles. The genetic variation arises from random mutation and recombination, and provides the

1Thomas Hunt Morgan (1866-1945) studied the embryology and phylogeny of sea spiders. However, it was his future work with “Drosophila” which defined new laws of genetics and earned him the Nobel Prize in 1933 for his work proving that genes are carried on chromosomes.

119 Earth - Designed for Biodiversity. Life will find a Way! sources for natural selection. Populations evolve by changes in the relative allele frequency brought about by random genetic drift, gene flow, and especially natural selection. Different alleles may give rise to different traits, or phenotypes. Individuals with the phenotypes favorable for surviving or reproduce have more chances to pass the alleles to the offspring, so that the allele frequency will increase in the population. The favorable genetic variants may have individually slight phenotypic effects and phenotypic changes are gradual. Given enough time, the gradual evolution could give rise to changes of great magnitude, such as reproductive isolation, and result in speciation or designation of higher taxonomic levels.

As an example of genetic natural selection and its relation to evolution, a group from University of California at San Diego demonstrated that even a few mutations in a given gene can create great phenotypic differences that would define a separate taxonomic line. They investigated the cause of the major divergence that occurred between crustacean-like arthropods and insects 400 million years ago, where crustaceans1 had multiple limbs while insects showed a hexapod body structure. They showed that by changing three amino acids at the end of the ultrabithorax and abdominal Hox proteins that are highly expressed in the abdomen of crustaceans, they could remove the inhibitory signal for a limb-repression gene. The removal of this limb-repression gene’s inhibitory signal in the Artemia crustacean produced a mutant that represses embryonic limbs and showed a phenotype similar to the drosophila fruit fly. Such an experiment was the first evidence that showed that minor alternations in genes could bring rise to major morphological differences seen with evolution.

In the book “The Origin of Species”, Darwin coined the term natural selection in analog to artificial selection, the process by which a farmer selects his breeding stock. But in fact, natural selection and artificial selection are quite different processes. It would be beneficial here to make some comparisons between them. Artificial selection often encourages the breeding of individuals possessing “desirable” characteristics over others, from a human perspective, either intentionally or unintentionally. The choice to encourage, or discourage certain characteristics are usually clearly directed. The species formed under artificial selection do not necessarily

1Crustaceans are, lobsters, spiny lobsters, sea urchin, whelk, crab, prawn. slipper shell, limpet, shrimp, crayfish, periwinkle and turban snail.

120 Life Will Find a Way have the fitness under natural conditions. Besides, people can only choose to change the frequency of alleles that have observable phenotypes. On the other hand, as Francois Jacob pointed, “… natural selection does not work as an engineer works. It works like a tinker – a tinker who does not know exactly what he is going to produce but uses whatever he finds around him whether it be pieces of string, fragments of wood, or old cardboard… Evolution does not produce novelties from scratch.” It should be noticed that the underlying genetic basis for both artificial selection and natural selection are the same, and that the concept of artificial selection was first introduced as an illustration of the wider process of natural selection. Concerning the selection forces, natural selection can generally be divided into two classes, ecological selection and sexual selection.

Ecological Selection (or environmental selection) – It refers to the ecological processes that operate on inherited traits without reference to mating or secondary sex characteristics. Examples of ecological selection are climate and geographical changes, competitions for limiting natural resources, interactions among individuals of the same species (including relatives, e.g. kin selection) and con-specifics (e.g. competition, infanticide), etc.

Sexual Selection – It includes mechanisms such as mate choice and male-male competition. Sexual selection can happen both inter-sexually and intra-sexually. Within a species, when one sex (typically females) acts as a limiting resource for the other, competitions (typically between males) will occur over the limiting sex, and this will result in sexual selection. In the case that females choose males, usually the most vigorous and best adapted males will have the greatest number of offspring, and therefore the alleles coding these favorable traits are more likely to be passed down to the progeny. Intra-sexual selection is often associated with sexual dimorphism, including differences in body size between males and females of a species. Natural selection happens at every life stage of an individual. Selection at each of these stages can affect individuals’ survivability and reproductive capacity.

Antibiotic resistance is a biological phenomenon that vividly illustrates the concept of natural selection and is a medical issue that is important and timely. For years, antibiotics have been used for the treatment of infectious diseases by killing primarily bacterial pathogens. Each of these antibiotic drugs place survival hindrances for bacteria. Since bacteria multiply at a rapid rate, many generations of organisms are exposed to the antibiotic and each of these generations have slight mutations from

121 Earth - Designed for Biodiversity. Life will find a Way! the previous generation. Thus, this scenario naturally selects only the organisms that posses a mutation that thwarts the action of the drugs to survive. These traits are then passed to the next generation of bacterial organisms and will thus have resistance to the antibiotic.

Initially, penicillin was the drug of choice against bacteria that possessed peptidoglycan cell walls. The drug would bind to a cell wall protein, the penicillin binding protein, and prevent cell wall cross linking and thus prevent bacteria from making the cell wall. The organisms would thus die. After long-term exposure to penicillin, some generations of bacteria were able to generate enzymes that broke down penicillin - penicillinases. After several generations of antibiotics were used that resisted the penicillinase of particular bacteria, pharmaceutical drug design created a new drug for gram positive bacteria, vancomycin, which binds to the D- ala D-ala component of the cell wall and prevented cross linking rather than binding to the penicillin binding protein component of the cell wall. However, recently some gram positive bacteria which had mutations that changed the D-ala D-ala of the cell wall with a one oxygen atom substitution in the hydrocarbon ring within the cell wall. This one mutation resisted vancomycin’s attachment to the cell wall and thus conferred another antibiotic resistance. Similar natural selection stories between bacterial pathogens and modern antibiotics have been seen with the latest antibiotics including linezolid (a very specific gram positive antiobiotic used against vancomycin resistant organisms). The endless saga of antibiotic resistance shows natural selection at work and has been the cause of much alarm in the field of infectious disease management in medicine.

Until the early 19th century, through studying the fossil records, people began to recognize that organisms that lived in the distant past were often quite different from those that lived today. People tried to explain the dramatic changes and became aware that species might emerge by modification from ancestor species. Jean-Baptiste Lamarck is one of the important radical evolutionists at that time. He proposed the theory of “inheritance of acquired characters”, that changes in physiology (adaptations) acquired by individuals during the life time might be inherited by their progeny, causing, in enough time, transmutation of species. The Darwin’s Theory of natural selection is considered as a cornerstone in modern biology. Inspired by the observations during the trip on the Voyage of the Beagle, and by the economic theories of Thomas Malthus, Darwin conceived his theory of evolution by natural selection as an

122 Life Will Find a Way explanation for adaptation and speciation between 1842 and 1844. It should be noticed that in 1858, Alfred Russell Wallace, a young naturalist, independently proposed the principle and described it in a letter to Darwin. Two short papers by the two were read at the Linnean Society1 announcing co-discovery of the principle. The following year, Darwin published the book “The Origin of Species”. Neo-Darwinism, or often referred as modern evolutionary synthesis, was initially established in the 1930s and 1940s, and led to a gene-centric view of evolution by the work of W. D. Hamilton, George C. Williams, John Maynard Smith and others in the 1960s. Neo-Darwinism integrates Charles Darwin’s theory of natural selection, with genetics as the basis for biological inheritance, random genetic mutation as the source of variation, and mathematical population genetics.

It has been theorized that more than just genes are capable of being passed down from one generation to the next. Of course there is a direct link between genetics and some types of behavior. However, there are some behaviors that, independent of genes, are capable of undergoing natural selection. This process occurs in much the same way as its genetic counterpart. There must be a variation in behavior, with some form being more advantageous than others, and there must be a struggle for survival. Here we may represent the struggle for survival in many ways. It may very well be linked to life and death. For example, the behavior in question was how one acquires food or fends off predators. The behavior may also be indirectly linked to survival as well. More socially apt individuals may be able to acquire more resources for their offspring which increases their rate of survival. This concept may also be expressed in another manner. Think of behavior that has become common to some specific societies, a social norm. Those who align themselves with these norms tend to “fit in.” However, those who go against them stick out in the crowd and often are socially excluded. Thus there is a survival of the fittest where social skills are concerned. Mutation – We are all Mutants

The source of all variety is mutation. This word has many connotations, some of which have contributed to two widespread misconceptions about

1Located in a handsome neo-classical building near the tourist hubbub of Piccadilly Circus in London, the basement holds an intimate little bank vault of leather-bound volumes and other items that belonged to the Swedish botanist Carolus Linnaeus, one of the most influential figures in science.

123 Earth - Designed for Biodiversity. Life will find a Way! mutation that I want to dispel right away. The first is that all mutations are bad and therefore must be destructive, not creative. We will see that the odds of evolving a useful mutation are much better than those of buying a winning lottery ticket. The second notion is that, if mutations are random, then a random process cannot possibly account for the complexity and order we see in living things. This misconception is based upon a failure to distinguish between mutation and selection. The mutational process is blind, natural selection is not. Mutations generate random variation, selection sorts out the winners and losers. Furthermore, natural selection acts cumulatively. Neither Rome nor Romans were built in a day, nor did the Southern Ocean freeze and icefish evolve in an instant. Evolution has shaped icefish, humans, and other species over hundreds of thousands to millions of generations. New mutations are superimposed on, and then incorporated into, an already functioning creature; they do not and need not generate complex functions in a single bound.

In order to appreciate the creative power of mutation, we have to know what kinds of mutations are possible and the frequency of what actually happens in DNA. Fifty years of study have given us a clear picture of the dynamics of DNA. I will provide a brief explanation here of the variety of ways that DNA is altered by mutation. In order to reproduce, organisms must make copies of their DNA. The copying of DNA is a complex biochemical process. Mistakes happen, and when they are not immediately or correctly repaired, mutations are born. There are many different kinds of mutations. If we think of DNA as being like a written text, then the categories of mutations of the four letters A, C, G, and T. The most common mistake is the substitution of an incorrect letter—a typo. But there are many other kinds of events that also occur, such as deletions and insertions of blocks of letters. Copy and paste errors also occur; these result in duplications of text. Groups from just a few letters on up to entire genes, or large blocks of genes, are duplicated at a significant frequency. Blocks of DNA letters are also rearranged—by inversions and the breakage and joining of parts of text. As a result, in every new individual, there are some new mutations. The rate of mutation has been carefully studied in many species. In humans, there are an estimated 175 new mutations among the 7 billion DNA letters in every individual. As biologists Armand Leroi has said, “We are all mutants.” Wait! How can this be?” You might ask. Aren’t mutations bad? Sure, some are, but not all of them. We are generally just fine because these 175 mutations either:

1. They occur in regions of our DNA that are empty of any meaningful information.

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2. They fall in or near a gene and do not change how that gene works.

3. They are compensated for by our carrying two separate copies of most genes.

4. They affect a gene in such a way that produces an effect within a tolerable range of variation. These variations in size, shape, color, and other physical and chemical properties are what make each of us unique. This is the raw material for evolution.

I’ll use a concrete example for which there is plenty of available data to illustrate that the odds of adaptively useful mutations arising are very much on the side of nature. Let’s consider a population of wild mice in which every individual is light-colored and lives on sandy soil in a relatively stable habitat. Then, over centuries and millennia, geological activity within their habitat leads to some volcanic eruptions and the formation of lava flows. After that lava cools, it forms black rocky outcroppings. The mice are no longer color-matched to their environment; on the dark rocks they are now visible to predators, such as owls. Darker mice would be better color-matched. So what we want to know is: How long will it take for a black-causing mutation to arise in a population of light-colored mice? How quickly will that mutation spread? The answer to the first question is a product of the interplay between chance and time; it is solved in the same way one calculates odds in a lottery. The answer to the second question depends on the interplay between selection and time. Life – The Most Extreme

Ammonia Life or ammono life - The concept of ammonia life goes back to 1954, when the great chemist and origin of life specialist John Haldane conceived of an alternative biochemistry in which water is replaced by ammonia. Ammonia, like water, dissolves many compounds and remains in a liquid phase over a very wide range temperatures, a range that even increases under pressure. Ammonia has a much lower boiling point than water, a property that makes it an interesting candidate for a solvent of low-temperature life or at least life that can live at a lower temperature than Terroan life (life on Earth). Also, there is no shortage of ammonia in our solar system. There would be major differences between ammonia life and Terroan life, of course. Such life would have to have a very different kind of outer cell wall or membrane, since liposomes (a fatty component that is a major structural part of Terroan cell walls) dissolve in ammonia.

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And metabolism would be very different by necessity as well. Ammonia cannot be used in Terroan life. The hope of making an Earth bacterium somehow using ammonia and water as an internal solvent is doomed to failure, even though no less a personage than Carl Sagan once considered trying to concoct such a life-form in the laboratory. Could there be a viable ammono life-form? Steve Benner and his colleagues think that such life is theoretically and chemically possible. “Where Terroan life exploits compounds using carbon-oxygen bonds in metabolic pathways, a workable metabolism using carbon-nitrogen bonds seems possible,” according to Benner. So here is an alien that seems plausible and worth studying or perhaps synthesizing.

Acid Life - Scientists suspect the possibility of life high in the clouds of Venus. The problem there is the very high acidity. While some microbes on Earth today live in acidity equal to or even greater than that which would be encountered in the high-cloud environment on Venus, another solution would be an alien biochemistry that deals better with the nature of the Venusian cloud layers. Living among these aerosols, or small droplets of acid, might be some type of life.

Silicon Life or Silane Life - The first aspect to consider is whether there is a plausible pathway by which a silicon life-form could originate. Once again, on the basis of the nature of its chemistry, this has been shown to be chemically permissible. Silicon can form stable polymers, a building block of life, by Si-Si molecules called silanes. Silicate rocks are composed of large chains or sheets of silicon bonded to oxygen. Silicon can also bond with carbon. Where might we find silicon life? Not in water and not in water-ammonia solutions since these solvents would quickly destroy the complex silicon-organic molecules. Not all bodies in our solar system have water and/or ammonia. On Titan, Saturn’s largest moon, we found ethane/ methane lakes, and on Triton, Neptune’s moon, perhaps an ocean of liquid nitrogen. In such places we might find silicon-based life. Would we even recognize it as such? The very cold might make it pretty slow life compared with the speed of chemical reactions on our warm Earth. Would we even recognize life moving at very slow rate?

Silicon/Carbon Clay Life - Another radical variety of potential alien life is that envisioned by the geologist Alexander Cairns-Smith, one of the most creative astrobiologists around. He has imagined an entirely new kind of life, crystal life. His view that silicon-rich clay might be alive is both

126 Life Will Find a Way reviled by life scientists and considered a brilliant insight the life-form Cairns-Smith proposes so audaciously is nothing less than a growing crystal. He envisions small crystals of clay that actively grow and evolve as they do so. Cairns-Smith singles out the clay known as kaolinite as a prime example of how this type of life might exist. A kaolinite crystal grows by accretion, a layer-by-layer application of new minerals on its faces. The evolutionary scenario envisioned by Cairns-Smith has numerous stacklike crystals of clay all in the same environment and all competing for “food”— the atoms of silicon, oxygen, and hydrogen dissolved in water that surrounds the crystals. When these atoms come out of solution to increase the size of the solid crystal, we say that growth has occurred. Where are their “genes”? The top layer of the growing crystal is the gene; it holds all the information necessary for the “organism” to grow, just as a DNA molecule holds the information necessary for an organism to grow.

A Warm Pond - The first, most famous, and longest-accepted model for life’s appearance on Earth was proposed by Charles Darwin, who in an 1871 letter to a friend suggested that life began in some sort of “shallow, sun-warmed pond,” and as late as the 1970s, when those deep-vent expeditions1 were taking place, this was still the favored hypothesis. To this day this type of environment be it of freshwater or perhaps in a tide pool at the edge of the sea, still remains a viable candidate in some circles and in textbooks. Biologists Robert Shapiro, in his book “Origins,” summarizes his evolution theory as follows:

1. The Earth at the time of life’s first formation had a reducing atmosphere with methane, ammonia, hydrogen, and water, but no oxygen and thus was strongly reducing.

2. This atmosphere was exposed to such energy source as lightning, solar radiation, and volcanic heat, which, when combined with the atmosphere, led to the formation of simple organic compounds.

3. These compounds accumulated until the oceans reached the consistency of hot dilute soup, and from this came the now- much-used phrase prebiotic soup.

1Deep sea explorations deal with the under sea volcanoes and the life around those volcanoes, scientifically known as “deep-vent expeditions.

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4. By further transformation life formed in the soup. The order of appearance was then simple protocells first, enzymes second, genes much later. The Bizarre Style of Life - An Eerie Contrast

The Seashore - This is a variant on the warm pond but differs in some significant ways. It has been proposed that tidal pools would be a better place for life’s beginning than warm ponds because a tidal pool offers some of the same operations that an organic chemist might use in his lab. Tidal pools have repeated drying and rehydration, they have lots of energy from waves producing bubbles of organic scum that might serve as protocells, and there is a complex chemistry going on with various salts and other chemicals that can be distilled and concentrated by the action of hot sun and tidal action in the myriad microenvironments of a tidal system with freshwater also flowing in from the land. This is a much more deluxe oven than the warm pond model.

Hydrothermal Vent Community - But if not pond or tidal pool, where could the various components necessary for living cells come together to produce life? How about the absolute most deluxe oven on planet Earth! With the Alvin dives1, described by NASA, a new possibility was raised: Life on Earth began in the newly discovered deep-sea vents. Soon new molecular techniques used to classify the vent microbes added confimatory information to this idea. Most of the microbes from the vents were eventually found to belong to the domain Archaea, microbes. The Archaeans, it seems, belonged to the most ancient lineage of organisms known on Earth. But where would they have first come to life? While Darwin championed his nice warm little pond, we know that the early Earth was a place constantly bombarded by giant comets and asteroids, making small ponds unlivable most of the time. The only places that would be insulated from the titanic energies would be the deep oceans, and in them perhaps only the hydrothermal vent system would provide the bomb shelters necessary for life’s survival. But the problem is in making DNA and RNA in such settings. The energetic hydrothermal rift systems might not be conducive to these crucial components.

1Alvin is the name of the submergible device, which can dive to the bottom of ocean for scientific expeditions.

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Cloud Origin - A fourth locality where life might start on a Planet like Earth, and perhaps on planets or moons not like Earth, is in the clouds, according to the man who gave us the tree of life. The research leading to the tree of life produced by the brilliant but irascible Carl Woese1 has changed our view of how life diversified. But what about is its first evolution? His own proposal is especially interesting because it deals with life forming in clouds. Since this might be the only mechanism leading to life on the gas giants such as Jupiter and Saturn, the Woese idea has much astrobiological relevance. Woese puts the formation of life on Earth at a time earlier than any other proposal. He envisions life starting even before the Earth was fully formed and differentiated into its core, mantle, and crust components that we see today. In those early times there would have been large amounts of metallic iron present on the surface of the Earth in contact with steam and some liquid water, amid an atmosphere filled with carbon dioxide and hydrogen. It is the last that is so interesting, since hydrogen is a potent driver of chemical reactions, but because of its light weight, it is easily lost to space on small-mass planets like Earth, Mars, and Venus. At this time our planet was being barraged by space debris large and small, causing it to be encircled by a haze of dust particles and water vapor.

High clouds of water vapor would form, and Woese envisioned that these droplets would have served as protocells, tiny cell-like objects. With sunlight as an energy source and the dust thrown up from the surface carrying organic molecules among the many other molecules and elements blasted into the sky by the asteroid bombardment, there would have been plenty of raw materials to make life from. With lots of hydrogen present as well, the first primitive organisms to evolve would have produced methane after using carbon dioxide as a carbon source. Microbes using this pathway today, hydrogen for energy and CO2 for carbon, are called methanogens. As the Earth cooled, oceans formed, and life fell from the sky to populate the oceans. The cloud origin hypothesis was originated to explain Earth life. But it might more appropriately be used as a mode to understand how life might arise on very un-earthlike planets, ranging from Venus to the gas giants such as Jupiter, Saturn, Neptune, and Uranus that make up our outer solar system. And we know that the most common

1In 1977, Carl Woese proposed that Archaea are different from bacteria and constitute a new super-kingdom Archaebacteria. By 1990 Woese adopted the term “domain” for the three new branches of life and shortened the name Archaebacteria to Archaea. He wished to get rid of the term prokaryote altogether.

129 Earth - Designed for Biodiversity. Life will find a Way! extrasolar planets that can be detected are Jupiter life worlds. Any mechanism that might lead to the formation of life in the upper atmosphere of extrasolar planets should be investigated. So, perhaps, life could start in clouds. But would it be a specific type of life that we find over and over again, a kind of life that arises because of this particular mechanism?

On the Surface of Rocks - One of the most ingenious suggestions about how life did arise on Earth, and thus how it might arise elsewhere, comes from a German patent lawyer named Gunther Wachtershauser, who has proposed that the first life formed on crystals of a sulfide mineral called pyrrhotite, which is made up of iron and sulfur in crystal form. When this mineral is oxidized, it turns into the common mineral pyrite, which is also exclusively iron and sulfur but with a different crystal structure. According to Wachtershauser, this chemical reaction could have fueled an early life- form that sat on the crystals. This energy source and a primitive life that might arise on the faces of the crystals themselves are now called the iron-sulfur world hypothesis. Since life requires that a large number of organic or carbon-containing molecules in a wide variety be available, and since in most cases many of these organic molecules have to be synthesized from simpler compounds, a powerful energy source is very important. Because both pyrrhotite and pyrite are found in abundance in hydrothermal vent systems, this energy system would not have been rare on the early Earth—or on other bodies in the solar system either. What is somewhat amazing about this conception is that any life forming in this way would be tethered to or, more accurately, smeared onto the rock crystals themselves. Thus we can imagine some sort of essentially two dimensional organism that has a powerful energy source available but that cannot reproduce. The next step would be the formation of RNA, with the final evolutionary step of this new life leaving the mineral surface to become autonomous. A brilliant conception and such life would definitely qualify as life as we do not know it.

A newly Proposed Origin: Linked Impact Craters - It seems as if almost every conceivable environment has been touted for the site of life’s origin on Earth: Darwin’s warm little pond, hot springs, hydrothermal vents, waves, clouds, deserts. Suggesting a desert origin may be novel, yet this is just what Benner and his group prefer. They talk of a hot climate in alkaline conditions, where evaporitic minerals of the borate group can be found. Because of the poisonous effects of water on the prebiotic synthesis of complex organic molecules, such as RNA and many proteins, a lack of

130 Life Will Find a Way water, or at least a reduction of it, would be favored. Under such desertlike conditions, where the overall environment is alkaline and has calcium carbonate in abundance, the formation of ribose among borate minerals might be favored. Clay minerals of various kinds are also common in such settings, and increasingly it looks as if templates formed from clay would help bring about the synthesis of the complex organic compounds necessary for life. Deserts have little water. Under such conditions another necessary ingredient for life—peptides, which are composed of amino acids—can also form and exist for some period of time. But life does need a solvent, and if not water, what? Benner thinks that a liquid called formamide might do the trick. A mixture of formamide and water in a hot pool under the desert sun would cause water to evaporate away, leaving a concentrated pool of formamide. In this mixture the formation of peptides from amino acids and RNA from nucleotides could take place. This is the stuff of life. Could a primitive RNA life have formed under these conditions?

There must be many “next steps,” such as getting back into water somehow. If an RNA life was produced with a membrane that allowed its fragile RNA genome to be protected from the dissolving power of water, might we have the first life? Let us look in a little more detail at this desert origin of life idea. There are some fascinating ramifications, the most startling being that Earth life did not start on Earth but on Mars. For the borate mineral pathway to RNA to work, there has to be a liquid system that repeatedly decants and distills the liquids. Borate is an evaporitic mineral, forming only when liquid water evaporates away. A Martian setting for life’s first formation, using the borate pathway hypothesized by Benner, but then passing through linked craters in a desert setting, is the message, and the evidence to support it comes from the geology of the early Earth. All the earliest Earth rocks appear to have been produced in a water setting. In fact, there is no good evidence of continents on Earth until less than 3 billion years ago—on a planet 4.5 billion years old. This sounds suspiciously like the abysmal movie “Waterworld1” of several years ago, which imagined planet Earth completely covered by water, perhaps right vision, but wrong time. Scientists can cite a lot of evidence supporting their contention that the Earth, at the time when life would have first formed on some island, but to some scientists there is an easier

1Waterworld is a Hollywood block-buster movie staring Kevin Costner and Whitney Houstan.

131 Earth - Designed for Biodiversity. Life will find a Way! solution. Mars never had planet-covering oceans, we are quite sure; Large lakes, maybe small seas—but no huge oceans? The necessary desert could easily have been on Mars, but only with difficulty could there have been such a desert on Earth 4 billion years ago. The last trick was to take the first life and then get it to Earth. This mission was carried out by meteorites and asteroids, bombarding with rocks along with the microbial elements, which later became active. Extremophiles - Some Like it Hot

Organisms that live in the most extreme conditions are known as “Extremophiles.” Several decades ago, biologists were surprised to discover that certain bacteria live comfortably at temperatures up to 70 degrees Celsius—158 degrees Fahrenheit. These peculiar microbes were found in compost heaps, silage towers, and even domestic hot-water systems. For obvious reasons, they were christened thermophiles. Investigation revealed that thermophiles use special stabilizing proteins and are encased in cell membranes made of a type of heat-resistant wax rather than normal fat. For a time it was assumed that 70 degrees Celsius marked a strict upper limit to the temperature of thermophiles’ habitats, beyond which even DNA would start to melt. It therefore came as even bigger surprise when, in 1969, Thomas Brock of Indiana University found a superbug, which he named “Thermus aquaticus,” living in the hot springs of the Yellow-stone National Park at temperatures of 80 degrees Celsius, at 176 degrees Fahrenheit.

As it turned out, this was just the beginning. In the late 1970s, the submersible vessel “Alvin,” belonging to the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute, was used to explore the seabed along the Galapagos Rift in the Pacific Ocean. This feature, some two and a half kilometers below the surface, is of interest to geologists as a prime example of submarine volcanic vents known as black smokers. The name derives from the appearance of the mineral-coated rock chimneys from which dusky fluids billow forth into the surrounding ocean. Near a black smoker the seawater can reach temperatures as high as 350 degrees Celsius—way above the normal boiling point. This is possible because of the immense pressure at that depth. To the astonishment of the scientists involved in the Alvin Project, the region around the Galapagos black smokers, and several other deep-sea locations, turned out to be teeming with life. Among the more exotic denizens of the deep were crabs and giant tube worms. There were also familiar thermophilic bacteria on the periphery of the black smokers.

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Most remarkable of all, however, were some hitherto unknown microbes living very close to the searing affluent in temperatures as high as 110 degrees Celsius. No scientist had ever seriously imagined that any form of life could withstand such extreme heat.

Organisms that live at 80 degrees Celsius, or higher are known as “hyper-thermophiles” in recognition of their amazing heat-resisting powers. Following their discovery, it soon became clear that these superbugs are not freaks. To date, about twenty genera have been described. Significantly, many hyper-thermophiles are archaea. The official temperature record is currently held by an organism known as “Pyrodictium occultum” that reportedly emerged fit and well after autoclaving at temperatures of 121 degrees Celsius for an hour. However, John Parkes of Bristol University claims to have evidence of microbes living at temperatures as high as 169 degrees Celsius. The majority of extremely heat-tolerant organisms— ”hyperthermophiles” are archaea. Eukaryotes are comparative wimps; a few algae and fungi are able to cope up to about 60 degrees Celsius and the Saharan Desert ant can forage under the midday sun at 55 degrees Celsius. Chlorophyll degrades at 75 degrees Celsius, so very little photosyntheis happens in hot pools. Another problem is that the solubility of gases such as oxygen and carbon dioxide decreases in hotter water and so many hyperthermophilic cells are anaerobic.

A basic question about these deep-sea organisms is: how do they make a living? Biologists long supposed that all life on Earth depends ultimately on the sun for energy. Plants won’t grow without light, and animals must eat plants to survive. However, that far beneath the sea it is pitch-black. No sunlight penetrates. This isn’t a problem for the crabs and worms, because they scavenge for food among the smaller creatures on the seabed. But something must lie at the base of the food chain. It turns out that microbes act as primary producers, obtaining their vital energy directly from the hot chemical broth vomiting from the volcanic depths. Organisms that don’t eat organic matter but manufacture their biomass directly are known as “autotrophs” or self-feeders. Plants are the most familiar autotrophs; they use the energy of sun light to turn inorganic substances like carbon dioxide and water into organic material. Autotrophs that make biomass using chemical energy rather than light energy have been dubbed “chemoautotrophs,” or chemotrophs for short. The discovery of true chemoautotrophs, was a pivotal event in the history of biology. Here was the bases of a completely independent life chain, a hierarchy of organisms that could exist alongside familiar surface life, yet

133 Earth - Designed for Biodiversity. Life will find a Way! without being dependant on sunlight for its primary energy source. For the first time it became possible to conceive of ecosystems free of the complexities of photosynthesis. Scientists began to glimpse a vast new biological realm that has lain hidden for billions of years. Panspermia - Astrobiology

The idea that life could have come to Earth from space dates back to about 500 B.C., when the Greek philosopher Anaxagoras wrote about “the seeds of life” that spread through the cosmos. By the 1800s the concept that life might spread through space was seriously discussed first by Sales- Guyon de Montlivault, who thought that Earth life had been seeded from the moon. Later the idea was explored by the great German physicist H. E. Richter, who first recognized to suppose that meteorites contain carbon and then made the intellectual leap to suppose that meteorites could have brought the first life to Earth. This concept was accepted and promoted by the most famous scientists of the nineteenth century, Lord Kelvin, who noted: “We must regard it probable in the highest degree that there are countless seed-bearing meteoric stones moving about through space.”

The theory of panspermia, meaning literally “seeds everywhere,” was revived widely in the early 1900s. It was thought that hardy microscopic cells, such as bacterial spores, could be dispersed throughout the galaxy, blown by the radiation pressure of their star. The original theory fell out of favor, since unprotected cells would never survive the acons of time necessary to voyage between the stars. But the essence of the idea, adapted with the notion that cells could be transported between planets and moons aboard meteorites, has recently been resurrected and is rapidly gathering encouraging evidence. There are essentially three hurdles that bacteria must leap to survive the journey between two planets: ejection from their home world within a chunk of their surrounding rock, exposure to the hostile space environment during transit inside this meteorite and re-entry through the atmosphere of and impact on to the destination planet. Calculations and experiments carried out on each of these stages generally show no acute problem with the prospect of panspermia.

There are three stages of panspermia: ejection, transfer and arrival. However, they offer very low survival rates of the organisms aboard the meteorite. Each one has perhaps only a one in a hundred million chance of ending the voyage alive, odds more commonly encountered in lottery jackpots. But every lump of rock ejected from its home world could hold

134 Life Will Find a Way billions of tickets to this sweepstake. Lithoautotrophic cells have been found living in the pores of deep basalt rocks at densities of up to one hundred million per kilogram and the abundance of spores in surface rock is a thousand times higher again. Even a small chunk of Earth’s crust ejected into space would be literally teeming with life. And it takes only a single bacterium to survive the interplanetary voyage, to reawaken, to grow, to divide and to spread beyond the impact crater for its descendents to infect an entire virgin world.

The tragedy of the latest space shuttle disaster shows all too well the enormous temperatures that objects reach when slamming into a thick atmosphere while traveling at more than twenty-five kilometers per second, a typical entry speed for an asteroid or meteor. Comets come in even faster, at speeds of as much as seventy-five kilometers per second. At such velocity most matter turns molten, reaching temperatures far in excess of that necessary to kill life, or so the thinking has gone. So there was certainly reason for skepticism. However, we are talking about the early Earth, when there was no atmosphere at all. So microbes in a meteorite could have been intact. Scientist Arrhenius’s view was that life could spread throughout space in the form of tough and impervious spores of some kind and that the motive power of their spread was a force that he called “radiation pressure.” He saw these spores as escaping the atmosphere of a planet with life and then spreading to other stars by light pressure. Carl Sagan critically reexamined the panspermia hypothesis in the 1960s and he thought it plausible that some star systems, such as red dwarfs, might catch such interstellar traveling spores.

It was yet again sensationally revived in the 1970s by the British cosmologists Fred Hoyle and his colleague Chandra Wickramasinghe, who believed that the process is so widespread and common that aliens are being delivered to Earth each day and that, new diseases may be attributed to this. Could life have traveled as the result of light pressure propelling spores through space, or was the motive force for microbial stowaways the passage through space on fast-moving meteors? It is this second idea, now called the ballistic panspermia hypothesis1 that seems possible. As far as the late 1800s the idea of ballistic panspermia was advanced: that it was not light pressure spreading spores, but meteor-carrying stowaway

1Ballistics, is a science dealing with the motion of bodies projected through space. Ballistic panspermia, is the life carrying heavenly bodies, projected through space.

135 Earth - Designed for Biodiversity. Life will find a Way! microbes that constituted the best chance for the interstellar transport to life. While it is true that rocky material from space ending up in the Earth’s atmosphere heats upon entry, it is only the sand-size fraction that completely vaporizes. Even, meteorites as small as a piece of gravel will have an interior that does not melt, or even, approach a melting temperature. Clearly, the reentry process could preserve microbial life if it were safely tucked into the middle of a gravel-size meteor entering the Earth’s atmosphere. Life on Mars

If life did get going on the surface of Mars 3.8 billion years ago, it would have faced a desperate race against time. Hardly had the sterilizing bombardment ceased when the climate began to deteriorate. As the temperature plunged and water froze, suitable habitats would have become scarcer and scarcer. Within just a few hundred million years, any remaining organisms would in all likelihood have retreated to special refuges, such as desolate lakes protected by ice covers, or deep subsurface locations. Is it conceivable that life is still clinging on there today? Erupting volcanoes and vomiting vents may be largely a thing of the past, but substantial geothermal heating could still be going on deep underground. Though the permafrost extends down for several kilometers, liquid water, probably salty, could be plentiful beneath it. We know Earth’s biosphere extends deep into the crust. If organisms can dwell contentedly in the subsurface zone here, they could do so on Mars too. Though Mars may lack the cornucopia of black smokers we find on our ocean floors, there is no reason why Martian microbes could not have adapted over time to that planet’s more Spartan conditions. On Earth, bacteria and archaea have invaded the harshest of habitats, and thrive in places that would make conditions beneath the Martian permafrost seem positively benign. If there is life on Mars, it would probably resemble the SLIMEs found on Earth in the deep rock strata beneath the ground, supported by chemotrophs. Remember that chemotrophs are primary producers: they require no light, organic food, or oxygen. Their nutrients are inorganic chemicals supplied from below, such as hydrogen and hydrogen sulfide, carried Martian conditions, where sulfur and iron deposits could supply the necessary chemicals.

An organism like “Methanococcus,” which converts hydrogen and carbon dioxide into methane, would probably feel at home in subsurface Mars. NASA Mars expert Chris McKay places his bets on the frozen Polar

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Regions, which he thinks may harbor dormant microbes. Although the temperatures there are desperately low, there is at least ice available, unlike in the equatorial regions, which have dried out completely. More clues come from the one place on Earth that resembles the surface of Mars today—Antarctica. In spite of temperatures well below freezing, fierce dry winds, and serious ultraviolet radiation, micro-organisms inhabit the bottom of ice-covered lakes in the McMurdo Dry Valleys. Liquid water can be retained beneath ice even when the average temperature is below freezing through a combination of sunlight, geothermal heat, and the intrusion of meltwater from short episodes when the temperature rises above zero. Martian organisms could have found a final refuge in such a place, and extended their survival time by hundreds of millions of years. Life has to be protected at any costs on Earth or on Mars. Mars might have harbored intelligent life, but lost it in the history of time, perhaps due to climate change. We know now, that the climate change we experience on Earth is definitely induced by human activity. Ethical and moral obligations imply the necessity of doing something very urgently to save life on Earth. Ecopsychology a study of man’s relationship with nature states that our state of the mind is connected to the state of the world, which compels us to make right choices, enabling all life to proliferate on Earth. A New Environmental Revolution - Ecopsychology

Over the forty years, the environmental movement has succeeded in turning the health of the planet into a major political issue in every industrial society. When it comes to raising the collective consciousness about the liabilities of industrial “progress,” we have done a remarkably good job of sounding the alarm. The environmental movement has grown to become the largest, most densely organized political cause in human history. From lofty government agencies to grass-roots citizens’ groups, it has engaged people at every social level. Everybody seems to be protecting some piece, big or little, of the biosphere—from the worldwide tropical rainforests down to the local streams passing through our communities. Everything we turn our hand to becomes infused with an impassioned sense of urgency. From the global vantage point, we see a world economy that is unsustainable, one that is slowly destroying its underpinnings.

We live on a planet that is deteriorating ecologically and inhabited by people who are psychologically troubled. We know that we cannot continue to deforest the planet at the current rate without eventually

137 Earth - Designed for Biodiversity. Life will find a Way! getting into trouble. Similarly we cannot continue to lose topsoil far faster than natural soil formation without eventually facing impoverishment. If we continue to lose plant and animal species at the rate of the past few decades, we face eventual ecosystem collapse. We also know that we cannot continue to pump greenhouse gases into the atmosphere without eventually producing economically disruptive climate change. Nor can we continue to add ninety million people to the world each year without eventually destroying the natural systems and resources on which we depend for sustenance. Out of ninety million people, India alone adds 16 million people each year.

What we are now looking at is nothing less than an environmental revolution, an economic and social transformation that ranks with the agricultural and industrial revolutions. Like the agricultural revolution, the environmental revolution will dramatically alter population trends. Whereas the former set the stage for enormous increases in human numbers, this revolution will succeed only if it stabilizes population size, reestablishing a balance between people and nature. In contrast to the industrial revolution, which was based on a shift to fossil fuels, this new transformation will be based on a shift away from them.

The two earlier revolutions were driven by technological advances— the first by the discovery of farming and the second by the invention of the steam engine, which converted the energy in coal into mechanical power. The environmental revolution, while it will obviously use new technologies, will be driven primarily by the restructuring of the global economy so that this economy does not destroy its natural support systems. The pace of the environmental revolution will be faster than that of its predecessors. The agricultural revolution began some ten thousand years ago, and the industrial revolution has been under way for two centuries. But if the environmental revolution is to succeed, it must be compressed into a few decades.

Ecopsychology addresses the problem of effective communication with the general public that will have to meet the demands of the environmental revolution. It has to do with our understanding of human nature—or, if you will, the nature of the soul. Psychology is, after all, the study of the soul in all its complexity and contradiction. It is the study of what people love and hate and fear and need. At some point, both psychologists and environmentalists need to decide what they believe our human connection is with the planet our species has so endangered.

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Do we believe people want to do the right environmental thing? Do we believe people care about the future of the living planet? Ecopsychologists believe there is an emotional bond between human beings and the natural environment out of which we evolve. The major contribution ecopsychology promises to make to environmental politics is the identification of the irrational forces that the people to their environmental habits. For example, some ecopsychologists believe that our consumption habits are connected to deep addictive attractions. The advertising industry is a contingent of talented “pushers” working to make us compulsive consumers. That is psychology working against environmental sanity. Ecopsychology seeks to readress that balance. It wants to know how to free people from the addictions of the shopping mall and to encourage values that serve the life of the planet rather than imperiling it.

At its most ambitious, ecopsychology seeks to redefine sanity within an environmental context. It contends that seeking to heal the soul without reference to the ecological system of which we are integral part is a form of self-destructive blindness. Ecopsychologists are drawing upon the ecological sciences to reexamine the human psyche as an integral part of the web of nature. At the heart of environmental revolution is a change in values, one that derives from a growing appreciation of our dependence on nature. Without it there is no hope. In simple terms, we cannot restore our own health, our sense of well-being, unless we restore the health of the planet. It is against this backdrop that we find the emerging new field of ecopsychology so exciting. Ecopsychology brings together the sensitivity of therapists, the expertise of ecologists, and the ethical energy of environmental activists. Out of this rich mixture may arise a new, more effective and more philosophically grounded form of environmental politics.

Darwin’s work on the expression of emotion demonstrated deep similarities between humans and animals. Moreover, an individual’s harmony with his or her “own deep self” requires not merely a journey to the interior but a harmonizing with the environmental world. The deepest self cannot be confined “in here” because we can’t be sure it is not also or even entirely “out there”! If we listen to Roszak, and to Freud and Jung, the most profoundly collective and unconscious self is the natural material world. Since the cut between self and natural world is arbitrary, we can make it

139 Earth - Designed for Biodiversity. Life will find a Way! at the skin or we take it as far out as you like—to the deep oceans and distant stars. Perhaps killing weeds on my lawn with herbicides may be as repressive as what I am doing with my childhood memories. Perhaps the abuses I have unconsciously suffered in my deep interior subjectivity pale in comparison with the abuses going around me every minute in my ecological surroundings, abuses that I myself commit or comply with. It may be easier to discover yourself a victim than admit yourself a perpetrator. Therefore, psychology is bound to encourage us to take human emotions, relationships, wishes, and grievances utterly out of proportion in view of the cast disasters now being suffered by the world.

Treatment of the inner requires attention to the outer; or, as another early healer wrote, “The greater part of the soul lies outside the body.” Perception school of J.J. Gibson of Cornell University locate memory as much in the world as in the interior brain of the subject. Landscape affords information to an animal; it is not simply stored in the mind. The animal— and we humans are animals—perceives what is there in the environment, given with the environment if we attend to it carefully. Human soul can’t cut itself from reality. Where else in the world would a human soul be so divorced from the spirits of the surroundings? Humans contend, recognizing subjectivity in animals, plants, wells, springs, trees, and rocks. Psychology, so dedicated to awakening human consciousness, needs to wake itself up to one of the most ancient human truths: we cannot be studied or cures apart from the planet. I write this appeal not so much “to save the planet” or to enjoin my fellow priests to retrain as environmentalists. I do not wish to urge another duty on you, another region of phenomena for your care. Yes, I worry over the disruption of the natural environment—as a citizen, as a father and grandfather, as a human animal. The motivation behind this appeal to my colleagues is to keep our calling at the service of saving life on Earth, along with saving souls. Today such ideas are blowing in from the world, the ecological psyche, the soul of the world by which the human soul is afflicted, to which the human soul is commencing to turn with fresh interest, because in this world soul the human soul has always had its home.

Ecowarriors - Dave Foreman, one of Australia’s leading “ecowarriors,” wisely reminds his colleagues that the greater goal of all they do is to “open our souls to love this glorious, luxuriant, animated planet.” To forget that, he warns, is “damaging to our personal mental health.” The environmental movement holds its place in history as the largest political

140 Life Will Find a Way cause ever undertaken by the human race. It includes everybody, because there is nobody the movement can afford not to talk to. Its constituency even reaches beyond our own species to include the flora and fauna, the rivers and mountains. Whenever I turn to an environmental issue, I find myself intensely aware that other, nonhuman eyes are upon me: our companion creatures looking on, hoping that their bewildering human cousins will see the error of their ways.

Is it possible that in this sense the personal and the planetary are pointing the way toward some new basis for sustainable economic and emotional life, a society of good environmental citizenship that can ally the intimately emotional and the vastly biospheric? After all, there is a great deal to be afraid of and a great deal to be ashamed of in our environmental habits. A new generation of psychotherapists is seeking ways in which professional psychology can play a role in the environmental crisis of our time. The Australian rainforest activist John Seed puts it this way: “It is obvious to me that the forests cannot be saved one at a time, nor can the planet be saved one issue at a time: without a profound revolution in human consciousness, all the forests will soon disappear.” Psychologists in service to the Earth are helping ecologists to gain deeper understanding of how to facilitate profound change in the human heart and mind seems to be the key at this point. Biophilia, Biophobia and Ecopsychology

In a recent work, the Harvard Zoologist Edward O. Wilson has raised the possibility that humans posses a capacity called “biophilia,” defined as “the innately emotional affiliation of human beings to other living organisms.” He sees this as an important force working to defend the endangered Biodiversity of the planet. Wilson’s colleagues have been quick to suggest that the influence of biophilia might be offset in some degree by an equally innate “biophobia,” but from the psychologist’s viewpoint, both our love and our fear of nature are emotions; both merit study. The innate biophobic intensities are most readily evoked by sources of peril that have existed in the natural world throughout humanity’s evolutionary past. They include heights, close spaces, running water, snakes, wolves, rats and mice, bats, spiders, and blood. In contrast, prepared learning is unknown in response to knives, frayed electric wires, automobiles, and guns, although far deadlier today than the ancient perils of humankind, are too recent in evolutionary history to have been targeted by genetically prepared learning. The companion of biophilia is therefore biophobia. Like

141 Earth - Designed for Biodiversity. Life will find a Way! the responses of biophilia, those of biophobia are acquired by prepared learning. And both, as they might be translated into devotion, respect, concern, or awe, can be used to rebuild our strained bonds with the natural environment. In a sense, ecopsychology might be seen as a commitment by psychologists and therapists to the hope that the biophilia hypothesis will prove true and so become an integral part of what we take mental health to be.

Ecopsychology is the name most often used for this emerging synthesis of the psychological and ecological. Several other terms have been suggested: pscychoecology, ecotherapy, global therapy, green therapy, Earth-centered therapy, reearthing, nature-based psychotherapy, shamanic counseling, and even sylvan therapy. Such neologisms never sound euphonious; nor, for that matter, did “psychoanalysis” in its day. But by whatever name, the underlying assumption is the same: ecology needs psychology, psychology needs ecology. The context for defining sanity in our time has reached planetary magnitude. Ecopsychology proceeds from the assumption that at its deepest level the psyche remains sympathetically bonded to the Earth that mothered us into existence. Ecopsychology suggests that we can read our transactions with the natural environment—the way we use or abuse the planet—as projections of unconscious needs and desires, in much the same way we can read dreams and hallucinations to learn about our deep motivations, fears, hatreds. Precisely because we have acquired the power to work our will upon the environment, the planet has become like that blank psychiatric screen on which the neurotic unconscious projects its fantasies. Toxic wastes, the depletion of resources, the annihilation of our fellow species; all these speak to us, if we would hear, of our deep self.

Learning from Stone Age Psychiatry - I have been calling ecopsychology “new,” but in fact its sources are old enough to be called aboriginal. Once upon a time all psychology was “ecopsychology.” No special word was needed. The oldest healers in the world, the people our society once called “witch doctors,” knew no other way to heal than to work within the context of environmental reciprocity. Some are quick to see elements of sentimentality or romanticism in our growing appreciation of the sacred ecologies that guide traditional societies. It is homely common sense that human beings must live in a state of respectful give-and-take with the flora and fauna, the rivers and hills, the sky and soil on which we depend for physical sustenance and practical instruction. Some religions call this experience as “mystical” or “transcendental.”

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Even in a dominant and domineering culture, both religion and science are subject to that sort of major transformation we have come to call a shift of paradigms. In the mainstream Christian churches today, there are environmental ministries that are encouraging an active discussion of planetary stewardship and creation spirituality. A new Earth and Spirit movement is exploring the possibility of a religiously based biophilia. Meanwhile at least along the fringes of modern science, we are witnessing the birth of a new cosmology grounded in an ever-deepening vision of ordered complexity on the Earth and in the universe at large. We now know that the periodic table of elements, as it moves from heavy to light, from simple to complex, is the language of our evolving collective autobiography. It is in its own right a creation story. Hydrogen, as one astronomer has put it, is “a light, odorless gas that, given enough time, turns into people.” The Vision of an Ecological Universe

Ecology is the study of connectedness, study of relationships. It began its intellectual history as the holistic study of the myriad niches and crannies in which life has taken hold on this planet, but its destiny was to be much greater. It has eventually come to see the entire Earth as a remarkable cosmic “niche” intricately connected with the grand hierarchy of systems we call “the universe.” As nature around us unfolds to reveal level upon level of structured complexity, we are coming to see that we inhabit a densely connected ecological universe where nothing is “nothing but” a simple, disconnected, or isolated thing. We now know that the elemental stuff of which we are made was forged in the fiery core of ancient stars. In a very real sense, the ecologist’s web of life now spreads out to embrace the most distant galaxies. This magnificent cosmology has led us to the greatest turning point in our understanding of the human place in nature since our ancestors first looked skyward to ponder the wheeling stars.

At the turn of the century, when the foundations of modern psychiatry were being laid, the newly discovered law of entropy had achieved cult status as the final answer to the riddle of the universe. For many twentieth century intellectuals, thermodynamic doom1 became irrefutable proof for the futility of life. Human consciousness was a transient accident destined

1The central concept of thermodynamics is that of the macroscopic system, defined as a geometrically isolable piece of matter in coexistence with an infinite, unperturbable environment. Thermodynamics, field of physics that describes and correlates the physical properties of macroscopic systems of matter and energy. The principles of thermodynamics are of fundamental importance to all branches of science and engineering.

143 Earth - Designed for Biodiversity. Life will find a Way! for annihilation; ultimately, every chemical process in the universe would succumb to the great and final “heat death.” After that, for all eternity, there would be nothing, nothing, and nothing at all except the measureless waste of space sparsely littered with the wandering cinders of long- expired stars. Firmly under the spell of the inexorable second law, early twentieth-century humanists could see no better destiny for life than merciful extinction.

Psychology as if the Whole Earth Mattered - The illusion of separateness we create in order to utter the words “I am” is part of our problem in the modern world. We have always been far more a part of great problem in the modern world. We have always been far more a part of great patterns on the globe than our fearful egos can tolerate knowing … To preserve nature is to preserve the matrix through which we can experience our souls and the soul of the planet Earth. Sarah Conn, a Cambridge clinical psychologist who had helped initiate a form of “ecotherapy,” put it more dramatically. She contended that “the world is sick; it needs healing; it is speaking through us; and it speaks the loudest, through the most sensitive of us.” The environmental philosopher Paul Shepard has invoked this same psychology in speaking of “the self with a permeable boundary … constantly drawing on and influencing its surroundings, whose skin and behavior are soft zones contacting the world instead of excluding it … Ecological thinking registers a kind of vision across boundaries.

As we have seen earlier, “Gaia Hypothesis,” and it began its career as a biochemical explanation for the long-term homeostasis of the planetary atmosphere. James Lovelock and Lynn Margulis postulated that the biota, oceans, atmosphere, and soils are a self-regulating system that plays an active role in preserving the conditions that guarantee the survival of life on Earth. Their brainchild soon became a major talking point among the Deep Ecologists, some of whom saw it as a compelling statement of the vital connectedness of all living things. While some Deep Ecologists express concern that the global perspective of the hypothesis—the image of the Earth as a single superorganism adrift in space—may undercut a sensuous experience of place, others find in it the basis for a quasi-mystical biocentric ethic. More hypothetically, we have the possibility that the self- regulating biosphere “speaks” through the human unconscious, making its voice heard even within the framework of modern urban human culture.

Deep Ecology – The ecosphere approach, sometimes called “deep ecology” holds that the well-being of the living and nonliving world has

144 Life Will Find a Way its own value apart from its usefulness to humans. Preserving the richness and diversity of Earth’s ecosystems is of value, according to this approach, no matter whether that goal is beneficial to humans or not. Humans have no right to reduce diversity. Deep ecology theory would contend that it would be ethically acceptable to reduce human populations in order to keep the rest of Earth’s living and nonliving environment healthy, but it is unethical to sacrifice the health of Earth’s ecosystems for the benefit of people. Healers or Hecklers of Biodiversity - Ecological Unconscious

This is the line of thought I have pursued, suggesting that an “ecological unconscious” lies at the core of the psyche, there to be drawn upon as a resource for restoring us to environmental harmony. Whether one accepts or rejects the concept of an ecological unconscious, ecopsychology as a field of inquiry commits itself to understanding people as actors on a planetary stage who shape and are shaped by the biospheric system. By assuming a deep, abiding connection between psyche and Gaia, ecopsychology could produce a timely reappraisal of the environmental movement’s political strategy. It might generate a new, legally actionable, environmentally based criterion of mental health that could take on prodigious legal and policy-making implications. Exploring the psychological dimensions of our planetary ecology also gives environmentalists a compassionate new role to play. It makes them allies of the Earth in a noble and affirmative project: that of returning the troubled human soul to the harmony and joy that are the only solid basis for an environmentally sustainable standard of living. It makes them healers rather than hecklers.

The time is clearly at hand to draw up a psychological impact statement for the environmental movement. In its task of saving life on Earth, does this movement believe it has anything more to draw upon than the ethical resolution of a small group of overworked , increasingly frustrated activists who feel they must assume more and more coercive legislative control over the conduct of daily life? Do we believe there is an ecological dimension to the human personality that is both “natural” and universal? The psyche is rooted inside a greater intelligence once known as the “anima mundi,” the psyche of the Earth herself that has been nurturing life in the cosmos for billions of years through its drama of heightening complexification. The “greening of psychology” begins with matters as familiar to all of us as the empathic rapport with the natural world that is

145 Earth - Designed for Biodiversity. Life will find a Way! reborn in every child and which survives in the work of nature poets and landscape painters. Where this sense of shared identity is experienced as we most often experience it, person to person, we call it “love.” More coolly and distantly felt between the human and non-human, it is that sympathetic bonding we call “compassion.” In either case, the result is spontaneous loyalty.

In his otherwise tough-minded analysis of the inner life, Freud at last felt compelled to grant that our infantile sense of oneness with the world plays one major role in adult life. From it, he believed, arise the fires of Eros: the emotional force that binds the self to others. A man who in love declares that “I” and “you” are one, and is prepared to behave as if it were a fact. But now enlarge that insight; let it reach beyond our social relations to embrace all we have learned of the intricate bond that exists between ourselves and the biosphere that gives us life. Let the “you” become the Earth and all our fellow creatures upon it. Only follow where ecological science leads in its honest effort to understand the uncanny intricacy that links us to our planetary habitat. Somewhere within this emerging vision of biospheric wholeness lies a new, ecologically based conception of the psyche. Freud, who borrowed so much from the poets, might have done well to read one poet more, in whose imagination the ecological unconscious was taking shape. His name was Walt Whitman: “Was somebody asking to see the soul? In nature, see your own shape and countenance, persons, substances, beasts, the trees, the running rivers, the rocks and sands.” There are times when we can see ourselves, and recognize the heroic cast of our conditions. The greatest and the most powerful share the same longings and hopes as the least noted and most vulnerable among us. There are times for gathering and scattering, for living and dying, for loving and healing.

In a consumer society that is nonetheless filled with frustrations and shortages, the question might better be phrased, “What can we buy?” our society has great concern about inflation and how to find those investments that will make money grow faster than the price of everything else. Some popular contemporary values are as fragile and distended as balloons; and we can only survive, in an inflated environment, if the investments of our person are in values that are rich in the right things and, therefore, lasting. To discover where our treasure is, we must, as the scripture tells us, find out where our hearts are. In other words, what makes a difference to us in life? What moves us to action or to make sacrifice? What do we believe in? Is it progress, the notion that things keep getting better whether we do anything about them or not?

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There is a big difference in the kinds of treasure that gladden men’s hearts. Some people desire concrete things that can be counted and stored away; these are usually cold and are kept in the dark under lock and key. Others recognize that the only things that matter are not concrete, cannot be counted, and cannot really be seen much less stored away safely. These abiding values center on whether we put other people and their growth and development first, or whether, in other words, we understand that loving God and loving our neighbor are bound up together. There is no way to do either unless we are willing to spend free rather than just make tax-exempt deductions on the gift of ourselves in life. Fulfillment is the word of the age and yet many have a corrupt notion of its meaning. It has been operationally translated as putting oneself first, no matter what commitments are thereby endangered and no matter who is hurt. Fulfillment, however, can never flow from a totally selfish basis. Personal fulfillment depends on our learning to respect the truth not only about ourselves but about all those who are close to us. A sense of fulfillment is an illusion in the life of a person who has not learned how to love.

Placing our needs and wants in first place no matter what it means in terms of sacrifices or psychic injury to others is to live an infantile dream. The sad part about the careless use of fulfillment as an excuse, for example, to break up families—and lots of hearts in the process—is that the romantic notion that doing an heroic thing on our own can easily turn into a ravaging experience of aloneness. It means isolation and hurt for the person who strikes out alone and for those, especially children, left behind. This is not to deny the importance of some of the overdue hard choices of life. These can include the maturing person who shifts to more suitable careers or locations or even goals. It is hard, however, to imagine that breaking the hearts of a lot of other people along the way can ever justify our own development. The fact is that such psychological carnage is presently being rationalized on a wide scale in our society. We don’t find ourselves by abandoning others, especially plants and animals; we still discover who we are more by letting go of rather than holding on to ourselves.

It is a fair question to ask in a generation that counts longing as an everyday experience. Long ago Oscar Wilde1 had a character say: “In this world there are only two tragedies. One is not getting what one wants, and

1Oscar Wilde (1854-1900), Irish-born writer and wit, who Ws the chief proponent of the aesthetic movement, based on the principle of art for art’s sake. Wilde was a novelist, playright, poet, and critic.

147 Earth - Designed for Biodiversity. Life will find a Way! the other is getting it.” Indeed, it is a time to reflect on what we are looking for in life and on the means we choose to secure it. “More!” is what the old union leader is supposed to have replied when asked what the workers would want. And that, in the same undifferentiated sense, is what many people today have sought as well. Maintaining a balance between more and less may sum up the art of living. We disrespect ourselves as persons when we ignore the conscious choices that must go into keeping that balance. There are some things we desperately need more of; these include sensitivity and understanding as well as tenderness and compassion. These are the very things which ask us to make less of ourselves so that there is more room close to us for others. And we could use less of noisy self-assertion, narcissistic personal absorption, and the twin dwells of envy and greed. These are the blind forces that seek more for us at the price of making less of us.

The things we actually need in order to become more considerate and loving persons only seem to ask us to be less than we are. In truth the pursuit of these qualities strips us of the selfishness that remains our greatest obstacles to fulfillment and happiness. We can never get enough of what we seek only for ourselves. But we still find everything we need when we understand that we never do anything really loving or lasting by insisting on doing it “my way.” We are a mixture of longings, of idealizations and grand plane, of decisions about what we will do or what we will be like after we have achieved this or that objective. And we achieve the objective and we are, strangely but consistently, not as content as we had supposed. Often enough we are restless, already spying yet greener pastures on the other side of the fence that is just beyond us.

We always have something to learn about ourselves and who we might yet be. There is no season like summer for these feelings—the time of ripeness and fulfillment, the season we look forward to only to feel it slipping away from us as we can enter into the poignancy of our lives, learning from rather than regretting the hints we constantly receive that we are made finally to transcend all our broken moments in eternal life. It is at once the pain and the preoccupation of our culture. We are, to some extent at least, absorbed with surfaces, with effects and appearances, with the winking glint of polished brass as much as the glitter of diamonds, with the cleverness of photographic-like art that seems to make flat walls give way to winding paths and old-fashioned streets, with the outside of bodies even in a land that speaks about its missing fullness of personhood. Somehow we have become transfixed with appearances of things, with the way they look far more than the way things actually are, with the backdrop for our lives more than the substance of our living.

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Things we can’t Change

Our Inheritance: We can’t change our genetic and cultural make-up. There is no way to change these even though we may transform our looks, our names, and our social levels. We cannot change our blood the way we change our car’s oil. People who cut themselves off from their religious and national roots are the real poor of this world. They have thrown the symbols of their life history away and they can be remarkably empty and alienated as a result. To live against the grain of our own truth makes a cruel contradiction out of life.

Our Limitations: What we do, if we are purposeful and lucky, is adjust to them and function well despite them. But we don’t do very well by simply denying them. We get ourselves in trouble whenever we retouch our mind’s-eye photo of ourselves to eliminate whatever is limited about us. In fact, this leads us to exaggerated expectations of our own performance because we hold out an impossible ideal for ourselves. And from this comes frustration and disappointment, much of it needless and all of it arising from thinking we can change something unchangeable about ourselves.

Our Weaknesses: This is a special category of our limitations and it needs attention because we don’t like to admit or look very closely at these. Our weaknesses may plague us for years; they won’t completely go away but, as we become more mature, we handle them better. And we do this precisely because we understand that these weaknesses, even if we despise them, may abide. We handle them better after we have come to respect them, take them into account, and don’t try to live as though they did not exist. We are stronger in the moment we develop a healthy respect for our weaknesses.

Our Needs: Here is another category that we prefer to overlook or to deny altogether. We think it beneath us to have needs when actually it is only human. We need other persons, for example, even though we sometimes claim that we don’t—or wish that we didn’t. We need people with whom we can be our true selves far more than we need powerful or influential acquaintances. We need to let ourselves be dependent in a healthy way at times, letting others care for us as one of the most mysterious and important of our human experiences. We need to be able to mourn and weep, to forgive and be forgiven, to let ourselves live fully and without denying our needs.

149 Earth - Designed for Biodiversity. Life will find a Way!

Our Foibles (misadventure): Include in this many of the experiences we wish we didn’t have but which we go on having all the time. These include being distracted during church services, having wild, unbidden fantasies, and a host of highly individual flaws or imperfections of personality that are an important part of our identity. Count in here the way we smile, hunch our shoulders, or the way we sound when we are most sincere. These are the elements of our individuality, the imperfections that make us charming rather than sinister, the scattered tiny treasures that people miss about us when we are away the things that make us who we are. Luckily, we are not too self-conscious about these things and so we are unself- conscious, that we are free and unaffected even though we are never quite finished. Things we can Change

Our Minds: It is a healthy thing to change our minds, not every day on every subject, of course, but regularly when we are wiser or have new information or have deepened our understanding of our human experiences. It is not a bad thing to do because it is a sign that we are alive and responsive. Changing our minds on important matters means that our spirits are not fixed in cement; it goes along with greatness of soul as well as keenness of intellect. It is something to make life more interesting, a transformation to make us safe from the circling vultures of boredom.

Our Direction: Before we do this, of course, it is good to ask what direction we’re going in the first place. We may be idling or quite still in the water, a slight tension on the anchor rope. Some of us are just adrift and at times we are all a little off course. The worst thing that could happen would be to discover that we have never left port. Most individuals living purposeful lives, however, have a sense of direction that they neither inspect very often nor become very self-conscious about. They are heading in the right direction but it might reassure them to inspect the evidence that proves this tot them. This may consist in the long lists of decisions made with integrity, of classes well-prepared and taught, of difficult situations faced honestly, of emotional tangles worked through fully. If we have gotten this far we will be able to believe more fully in ourselves in the future.

Our Ideals: To entertain the idea of changing our ideals does not mean that we are giving up on idealism or that we are abandoning the notion of making ourselves better. Changing our ideals suggests that we are ready

150 Life Will Find a Way to modify our expectations, perhaps in a more realistic fashion, because we now have a deeper and more realistic fashion, because we now have a deeper and more trustworthy knowledge of ourselves and our capabilities. We revise our ideals only after we have a better understanding of ourselves. People often fall short of attaining their ideals because they have a poor sense of themselves. They either overestimate or underestimate their abilities; such an incorrect perception of the self doesn’t do anybody any good. Such persons fail in achieving their ideals or they have a poor sense of themselves. They either overestimate or underestimate their abilities; such an incorrect perception of the self doesn’t do anybody any good. Such persons fail in achieving their ideals or they have ideals that don’t really challenge them. We should not be afraid to redraw the outlines of our ideals so that they are in better line with the truth of our own selves.

Our Style: It is healthy for us to examine our typical pattern of relationship with each other. What is the critical shape of it, not the shape it has all the time? This might be too global an outlook. Better to look at ourselves in tight times, when something is on the line, when there is something difficult to face or some truth to tell. What are we like then and could we be a little more open and straightforward, a little truer to what we really are? Sometimes we fall into a pattern of handling things rather than experiencing them, of learning to process events and people so that they do not bother us too much. Perhaps a certain amount of this is inevitable in life but a refreshed life demands a re-examination of our style and an attempt always to make it a better reflection of the whole truth about ourselves.

Our Schedule: This may be important for our physical and psychological health and, therefore, for our effectiveness in whatever work we are doing. We can begin by asking ourselves: What have I been doing to myself? Have I been treating myself fairly or have I at times ignored even the basic rules of good health? We don’t have to make enormous changes in our schedules in order to improve them. Perhaps we can begin with a small effort to discover one thing that we can modify without losing much but gaining a lot at the same time. That might be as simple as a little extra sleep, a change in our food, or a change in the time and way we do some of our work.

Our Understanding of Life: We can always change this, not that we are going to adopt a new philosophy or religious tradition but we are always able to go more deeply into existence and to discover more about the

151 Earth - Designed for Biodiversity. Life will find a Way! magic and contradictions of life itself. We change our understanding of life and by seeking a flashy new interpretation but by taking our own existence more seriously, by respecting ourselves enough to treat ourselves better than just a tourist’s blurred-bus-window look of our own existence. This is an area we can do something about: in fact, it is an area only we can do something about.

Now, we know that we cannot annihilate life even if we try, from the face of the Earth. Life is beyond any destruction. Life has seen all the odds and well established to stay forever in cosmos. Individual structures die but life will not. Ideally, people will figure out a way to utilize science and technology, combined with a respect for the Earth’s life support systems, to engineer a safe future as human populations continue to rise. For this to succeed, we must understand those support systems and learn more about the planet’s Biodiversity and ecology, many aspects of which are still poorly understood. Ecologists say we know more about how many stars are in the universe than how many species live on Earth. There is a lot to learn. Some things we know: As humans test limits of how far we can stretch water and land resources without creating environmental disasters, poor people will pay the heaviest price. We cannot know precisely where the dangers lie if we push the ecological envelope. Scientists’ best recommendation is that people adopt a cautious, respectful approach to how the world’s resources are used. Ecologists like to point out that wilderness is the soul of human hope. It is the spirit of opportunity and freedom. What kind of a world do we want to live in and pass on to our children? It is to be hoped that the future world will be one in which the spirit survives.

152 Chapter IV

An Appeal to Save Life on Earth “Parithranaya sadhunam vinasaya ca duskrtam Dharma samsthaparanthaya sambhavami yuge-yuge” Bhagavad-Gita.

The old Sanskrit text means that “for the protection of the God, for the destruction of the wicked and for the establishment of dharma1 I am born age after age.” Purgation is an unfailing process in nature. The cleansing takes place at all levels in various ways. In the agricultural field it goes on as weeding and manuring. When the wicked become more in number in the world dharma would not thrive in their midst. War, pestilence, famine, Global Warming, Climate Change, extinction and such like forces inevitably come in both to strike a balance of the population and to set aright the perverts. All religions talk about salvation. Salvation, the condition of the ultimate restoration and fulfillment of humanity and all creation effected by, God’s incarnation and redemption, also, the process by which the condition is brought about. As the condition of humanity and the cosmos at the end of history, salvation is the final triumph over sin and death and, therefore, the ultimate accomplishment of God’s purpose for creation. Salvation as experience means perfect fulfillment and happiness. The mystery of salvation lies not in the impenetrable darkness of the future but in the omnipotent love of the God who is beyond human comprehension. Christian teaching on salvation is that man is lost in sin and cannot save himself, Jesus died in the place of sinners. If we receive him as our savior, we become “born again” and escape condemnation.” True enough, but how is the salvation applied? Do we make a “decision” for Jesus? That is to say, do we weigh the evidence, ponder a bit, and of

1 Often the word dharma is translated to mean religion, but to conceive of dharma as a religion is to misconceive the word. In general usage, the word religion refers to a particular type of faith. The word dharma does not. Dharma indicates the natural occupation of the living entity. For example, wherever there is fire, there is heat and light, so it may be said that heat and light are the dharma of fire. Fire cannot change its dharma. In the same way, liquidity is an intrinsic quality of water, and this quality cannot be changed. If it is, it can no longer be considered water. The dharma of the individual soul can never be changed, and that dharma is the occupational duty of rendering service unto the Supreme Lord. Faiths and religions can be changed. Today I may be a Hindu, but tomorrow I may become a Christian or Moslem. In this way faiths can be changed, but dharma is a natural sequence, a natural occupation or connection.

153 Earth - Designed for Biodiversity. Life will find a Way! our own free will ask Jesus into our life? If this is the case, then man is in control of his salvation. God has given to humanity power to create, to protect, to save and to redeem, enough to have control over creation. In the wake of problems like Global Warming and Extinction of Species, I don’t see any savior coming on clouds in the near future, leaving no other choice, but only man alone has to play “savior” and “redeemer.” Planet Earth is Dying – Save Planet Earth

I am the Earth. You are the Earth. The Earth is dying. You and I are murderers. Yes, we’re matricidal—murdering mother Earth one forest, one species and one atom at a time. According to the World Resources Institute, 4 species go extinct every hour, due to tropical deforestation alone. More than half the tropical rainforests are gone and at the rate we’re going, we will have reduced chopped, hacked, sawed, dozed, and burned our way to the virtual eradication of the “lungs of the planet” by the year 2030. Kids, get ready to start suffocating because we’re not giving up our meat habit! Forests are destroyed to produce meat, more grazing lands and give us more grazing land or give us death! Reflecting the spirituality perverse beings we are on this planet, don’t be fooled by our carefully polished veneer of civility and humanity—we’re the most savage murderers of all. It is the fact that we are considering replacing our “commander-in-chief,” the most heinous war criminal since Hitler1.

We are all oblivious to the devastation and suffering our obscene existence is causing. Our factory farms will continue torturing and slaughtering billions of animals each year to satiate our meat addiction. Non-vegetarian food will keep our arteries clogged and our ascent to obesity intact, Big Pharmaceuticals will inundate us with soothing and sedating “happy pills” to ensure our guilt-free participation in the murder of the planet. Big Oil will gleefully continue meeting our gluttonous demand for its “black gold,” and the corporate media will keep our wretched and vile hologram intact by constantly re-enforcing rabid nationalism, consumerism, narcissism, alienation, rugged individualism, “free” markets, the virtues of wealth, and the “superiority” of the “Rich Way.” While

1Adolf Hitler was an Austrian-born, political and military of Germany from 1933 to 1945. He became dictator and provoked Word War II. He was responsible for “Holocaust” which whipped away 6 million Jews. He is the biggest war criminal in the history of humanity.

154 An Appeal to Save Life on Earth numerous complex entities and dynamics enable the power elite to maintain their strangle-hold on wealth and power, military might remains their principal means of dominating, extorting, exploiting, stealing, and annihilating with impunity. While we spend enormous amount of money, maintaining and expanding the war machines, such as nuclear weapons, and missiles, we revere with religious fervor, it is not money alone that gives our lords and masters the capacity to keep the world safe for capitalism and corporate plunder. Our dirty little secret here Earth is that we built and buttressed our crumbling empire by unleashing a force so potent and so capable of rendering life on Earth extinct that it makes capitalism’s “slow motion” ecocide look like candy-striping. In 1945 U.S became the first and only country to harness the power of nuclear fission and utilize it as a weapon of mass destruction. Their cold-blooded murder of hundreds of thousands of Japanese civilians cemented their position as global hegemon1.

The whole world saw the catastrophe, the unleashing power of nuclear weapon. Obviously, lessons are not learnt. Unfortunately, India and Pakistan chose to try it for themselves. India seems to try everything after 30 years, that have been already tried and accomplished by some other nations, such as nuclear testing 30 years after USA, and rocket to the moon, 30 years after USA sent rocket to the moon. Both of them are out of date and out of our reach, while we have at home our own trouble of hunger, poverty, and other ecological problems, waiting all along to be solved. But at what cost to the Earth and the rest of its inhabitants? Nuclear non-proliferation is a joke. Treaties, vows, resolutions, good intentions, and promises involving crossing hearts, hoping to die and sticking needles into eyes have resulted in even more nukes brandished by more nations. Meanwhile, US Americans continue dictating who gets “nuclear privileges,” and they still possess more Warheads of Mass Destruction, than any other nation. When is another country going to invade them, and tell them to dismantle nuclear infrastructure. Only few nations have been brutal and stupid enough to employ nuclear weapons. And on the other hand we can put our nuclear knowledge to constructive use by harnessing the power of the atom to

1 Hegemon is the Battle for Greece is a Classical-era mod, set during the Macedonian wars. In these wars Rome, fresh from its victory in the second Punic war, reduced the kingdom of Macedon and began the road to its conquest of the East.

155 Earth - Designed for Biodiversity. Life will find a Way! create electricity. Yet when Prometheus1 brought us the “fire of the Twentieth Century” and told us we could use it for peaceful purposes, he failed to warn us that if this “fire” gets out of control we’re all cooked.

Nuclear power only produces 20% of the electricity consumed around the world, but accounts for a number of staggering problems we simply keep sweeping under the rug for future generations to solve. Forget logic or consideration for our children or for Mother Earth, though. John McCain, Greenpeace founder Patrick Moore and a supporter to the nuclear power industry hail nuclear energy as a “green” alternative to fossil fuels and clamor for more. Let’s take a closer look at the technology many are ready to embrace as the “remedy for Climate Change.” Nuclear power is touted as a cheap alternative to coal and other ways of producing energy. While it is a less expensive means of actually generating electricity once a reactor is online, the operating cost is about half that of a coal-fired plant, there are tremendous fiscal costs associated with building a nuclear facility, removing and storing radioactive waste, and decommissioning a plant once it is retired. One hasn’t been closed yet but the estimated cost to do so is around $300 million.

More importantly, the threat nuclear energy poses to the environment is so high that calling it “green” is an absurdity. Since nuclear plants rely on large bodies of water to cool reactors to avoid a melt-down and discharge about 70% of the heat they generate as waste, they are vulnerable to droughts and cause significant thermal pollution in the bodies of water that cool them. Nuclear power production begins to contaminate the environment with radioactivity before the fuel even arrives at the plant. It takes a ton of uranium ore to produce 3 kilograms of uranium oxide. While the tailings that are left behind emit small levels of radiation, they do release radon gas and radioactive dust at a rate 10,000 times faster than the un-mined ore. This nuclear contamination stays in the environment for 100,000 years and over time reaches such high levels that

1Homer and Hesiodus agree that Prometheus was the saver of humanity: he stole the fire from the gods and gave it to the humans. Zeus, full of anger for his disobedience, put the hero in chains on a rock and ordered an eagle to visit, him every morning and eat his liver. His martyrdom lasted for hundreds of years, until Hercules killed the eagle and set Prometheus free. The weeping mermaids were placed at the right corner to stress the dramatic atmosphere. This great hero, whom Steiner indicates is a portent of Christ Jesus, will grow up to succeed Zeus in his position of authority as Law-giver in the heavens. Hercules will also kill the vulture that eats Prometheus’ liver, and then

156 An Appeal to Save Life on Earth a Los Alamos Laboratory1 report concluded that we need to, “zone the land in uranium mining and milling districts to forbid human habitation.” Nuclear power facilities produce a steady stream of low-level radioactive waste, including gas, solid and liquid. Gaseous and liquid wastes are “cleaned and diluted,” but are eventually released into the environment. Solid wastes are transported to one of three low-level radiation disposal sites, where they continue accumulating and emitting radiation into the environment.

About once a year 33% of a reactor’s fuel rods are replaced, producing anywhere from 12 to 30 tons of high level nuclear waste. The frightening part is that we’ve been using this “green” technology for 40 years now and still haven’t figured out a safe and permanent means of disposing of its extremely dangerous and lethal by-products. Temporary pools or dry cask storage, large steel cylinders that require constant monitoring onsite at nuclear facilities house most of the spent reactor fuel, which will remain a dire threat to the environment for tens of thousands of years. Nuclear power plants are running out of storage capacity and the “permanent storage solution.” How remote is the possibility of a nuclear melt-down resulting in a disaster? Let’s ask the thousands of heavily irradiated victims of Chernobyl and those living in the vicinity of the “near miss” at Three Mile Island. Lest we forget, nuclear reactors are “dual-use” by virtue of the fact that plutonium is one of their by-products and plutonium can be used to produce nuclear weapons. Small wonder US ruling class trembles with fear at the prospect of Iran, a nation which refuses to genuflect to the American/Israeli Empire, developing nuclear reactors to generate power. And someone please explain what it is that’s so “green” about a source of electricity that produces waste that people could use to make a “dirty bomb” and then deploy it against innocent people.

The fellowship of humanity2 is slowly building, step by step, a progressive eco-humanist community and village on a human scale that responds to the real and obvious biological and spiritual needs of human

1 Los Alamos National Laboratory is a United States Department of Energy national laboratory, managed and operated by Los Alamos National Security, located in Los Alamos, New Mexico. The laboratory is one of the largest multidisciplinary institutions in the world. It is the largest institution and the largest employer in northern New Mexico with approximately 12,500 employees plus approximately 3,300 contractor personnel.

2 The fellowship of humanity was founded on the hopes of creating a new Earth,

157 Earth - Designed for Biodiversity. Life will find a Way! beings. Most of us realize to the real and obvious biological and spiritual needs of human beings. Most of us realize that we are animals, primates, closest to the great apes. Yet in modern society we are expected to think and act like machines—and worship machines. We are rewarded for admiring, emulating, and increasing numbers—which translates into precision, repetition, quantification, uniformity, conformity, consistency, efficiency, sterility, isolation, and stupidity. It is an engineer’s society with the productive aspirations of engineers, both social and technologic engineers. Not only is our entire human environment engineered—all its structures, buildings, products, transportation, and communications—but our crops and our food too. All human activities are engineered, pleasantly packaged, and sold back to us as consumer goods. And in spite of our worship of efficiency, human waste is filling up the Earth. The human species has become so productive that the Earth is being killed under the weight and heat of our resourcefulness and wastefulness. And God saw his Creation and said, “It is not good.” Divine Origin Makes an Appeal

Every religion credits creation to God, especially the monotheistic religions are very consistent about it. John P. Shanley, author of “Holy War Examined,” writes, “God’s attributes are revealed to man by God through his creations, the signs he has provided and the words spoken through the prophets from the time of Adam. These revelations have been recorded in The Bible and are reiterated in the Koran. God’s attributes include that he is: most high; supreme; free of all wants; worthy of all praise; omniscient; creator of the universe and all things in it; the light of the world; master of all things, guiding, ruling, and controlling all; all-powerful and all-knowing, exalted in might and wisdom; cherisher, and sustainer of his creations, caring for all things; beneficent, bestowing bounteous favors and gifts on human kind; provide of all of mankind’s needs from all his marvelous works of creation; a most liberal giver. God is opposed on Earth by the devil, who never ceases attacking all humans. But God recognizes mankind’s weak resolve in resisting the allurements of sinfully misusing created things. Therefore, he has provided enough grace to help mankind in his struggles to defeat the devil specific and essential to Muslims, are five holy practices, the pillars of Islam, defined in the Koran: the profession of faith; ritual prayer; alms giving; fasting during the month of Ramadan, and; pilgrimage to Mecca.” God becomes the source of all good things and he cares for his creatures.

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Therefore, the presence of God can be inferred from creation, such as plants and animals. Creation itself is a powerful argument for the existence of God. God saw everything “good” in his creation. To create means to make something out of nothing. When we talk about the creation, we are talking about how God created everything in the world. Genesis 1 describes the creation of the whole world from nothing, while Genesis 2 describes the creation of the first man and woman, Adam and Eve. These chapters give the story of God’s creating the entire universe including stars, planets, oceans, plants, animals, and humans, in only six days. The focus of Genesis is not on how God created the world but on why he created it. He was creating something “very good.” As an artist, God was expressing his thoughts on beauty and perfection by creating a world that was beautiful and perfect. That is the message of Genesis—that God created this world as an expression of himself. And because he created the world, he is also Lord over it. Planet Earth is God’s property, its divine ownership makes an appeal to save all life on Earth.

The creation story in Genesis also tells us how sin entered the world, and how the beautiful and perfect environment that God created was marred. The world is now imperfect and sometimes ugly. Yet God’s imprint remains on our world, and God remains Lord of it all. Someday, it will be restored. Because creation took place such a long time ago and was such an enormous event, it is hard to understand everything about it. Instead of trying to understand the biblical creation account scientifically, it is better to look at what the Bible story really means. What did the creation story mean to people who were living in Bible times? How was the creation story used by the prophets of the Old Testament? By answering, these questions we will have a deeper understanding of God’s creation. We will be able to appreciate it more and better understand how God wants us to take care of it. Here are some important things the Bible tells us about the creation:

1. In creation, God conquered chaos. Before the universe was created, the Bible says, “the Earth was formless and empty” (Genesis 1:2). In other words, before God created the world, only chaos and confusion existed. To the ancient mind, the God who could conquer chaos was understood as the true and living God. Genesis 1 tells us how the God of Israel turned the chaos of 1:2 into an ordered universe.

2. Creation grew out of God’s good will. It was God’s free act, and it was good (1:31). Christians believe that all life is a wonderful

159 Earth - Designed for Biodiversity. Life will find a Way!

gift from God, not a meaningless accident as some people might say.

3. Creation is overshadowed by sin (Romans 8:18-25). God’s Word teaches that nature is not the pure and beautiful thing that God first created because it has been affected by sin.

4. Creation is dependent upon God. The relationship between God and his creation is set out in Ephesians 4:6. God is above all— that is, he is in charge. God is through all—that is, he works in all things. God is in all—that is, he is divinely present in the entire creation (Psalm 90:1-4). It is a comfort to know the Person responsible for the entire universe.

5. God spoke the world into existence (Genesis 1:1; Hebrews 11:3). Because the world was created with words, we know there is a divine person behind it. Sometimes when we think about the vastness of the universe, it can be mind-numbing. Knowing that there is a divine person behind it all makes even the cold stretches of space seem personal (Psalm 8:19; Romans 1:20). Human Responsibility Makes an Appeal Creation of Earth is a master piece, and it is definitely an apex of God. (Gen. 1:1). He did it by fiat, without any preexisting material; his resolve that things should exist (“Let there be . . .”) called them into being and formed them in order with an existence that depended on his will yet was distinct from his own. Father, Son, and Holy Spirit were involved together (Gen. 1:2; Ps. 33:6, 9; 148:5; John 1:1-3; Col. 1:15-16; Heb. 1:2; 11:3). The creation of humans marks the conclusion of “God’s quest for Creation,” at last God found someone to trust with his creation. Man was bestowed with honor and dignity by God, on the other hand man is supposed to bestow honor and dignity on creation. Man became “steward of creation.” Points to note are as follows:

1. The act of creation is mystery to us; there is more in it than we can understand. We cannot create by fiat, and we do not know how God could. To say that he created “out of nothing” is to confess the mystery, not explain it. In particular, we cannot conceive how dependent existence can be distinct existence, nor how angels and human beings in their dependent existence can be not robots but creatures capable of free decisions for which they are morally accountable to their Maker. Human responsibility over creation is a mandate from God, makes him a

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protector, preserver and lover of all biotic and abiotic worlds. Man becomes godfather of all life. Yet Scripture everywhere teaches us that this is the way it is.

2. Space and time are dimensions of the created order; God is not “in” either; nor is he bound by either as we are. Fifteen billion years for God is a blink of an eye. It’s God’s clock. It’s not about our wall clock. One cell to human cells, biology took a long trek of 5 billion years. 15 billion year old biology needs some respect and responsibility. The latest arrival in biology, consciousness and awareness understand and make an appeal to save life on Earth.

3. As the world order is not self-created, so it is not self-sustaining, as God is. The stability of the universe depends on constant divine and biological upholding; this is a specific ministry of the divine Son (Col. 1:17; Heb. 1:3), and without it every creature of every kind, ourselves included, would cease to be. We are all connected by a strand vertically from God to microbes, horizontally from biotic to abiotic neighbors. We can’t cut the strand, the minute we do, whole creation collapses. As Paul told the Athenians, “he himself gives all men life and breath and everything else. . . . In him we live and move and have our being” (Acts 17:25, 28).

4. Man has ability to create and destroy. The possibility of creative intrusions, for example, miracles of creative power; creating new persons through human procreative activity; reorienting human hearts and redirecting human desires and energies in regeneration, is as old as the cosmos itself. How far God in his upholding activity actually continues to create new things that cannot be explained in terms of anything that went before, it is beyond our power to know; but certainly his world remains open to his creative power at every point. Man cannot create “ex nihilo,” can create only with the stuff available already here on Earth, hence he has to protect it for the sake of future.

Knowing that God created the world around us, and ourselves as part of it, is basic to true religion. God is to be praised as creator, by reason of the marvelous order, variety, and beauty of his works. Psalms such as Psalm 104 model this praise. God is to be trusted as the sovereign Lord, with an eternal plan covering all events and destinies without exception, and with power to redeem, re-create and renew; such trust becomes rational when

161 Earth - Designed for Biodiversity. Life will find a Way! we remember that it is the almighty creator that we are trusting. Realizing our moment-by-moment dependence on God the creator for our very existence makes it appropriate to live lives of devotion, commitment, gratitude, and loyalty toward him, and scandalous not to. Godliness starts here, with God the sovereign creator as the first focus of our thoughts. Creation tells us a number of things about ourselves including our position as stewards and our responsibilities in God’s universe. The creation story tells us that both men and women were created in “the image of God” (Genesis 1:26-27).

We all bear God’s image. Scholars are not completely sure what the “image of God” means, but at the very least it means that humans are more than just animals. God created both humans and animals from the dust of the Earth, but only humans were created in his image. As God’s special creations, humans find their meaning and purpose in living in relationship with God. Part of this special relationship involves taking care of God’s creation. While other creatures are a part of God’s creation, humans are given dominion (responsibility) over it (Genesis 1:28; 2:15; Psalm 8). Because both male and female are created in God’s image, they equally bear that image, even in their relationship with each other. Sexuality in human beings is richer and more meaningful than that among the other animals. It is also more vulnerable to corruption (Mark 10:2-9). God’s creation also informs us about God. Creation is sometimes called God’s “general revelation” because it is something he gave to all people, so they can begin to know him. When we look at something as beautiful as the stars, we know that God is great and magnificent as well as very creative. Such revelation is “general” in that all people receive it, not just a few.

Even though the creation story in Genesis does not list every single animal or plant that God created, we can know that God created all things—from the tiniest insect to the tallest tree. Because God created everything, there is no need to be afraid—God is in command of everything in the universe. There is one Lord over it all. One of the greatest encouragements in all of scripture comes from the Apostle Paul1: “I am convinced that nothing can ever separate us from his love. Death can’t, and life can’t. The angels can’t, and the demons can’t. Our fears for today, our worries about tomorrow and even the powers of hell can’t keep Gods love

1 Saul of Tarsus, later known as St.Paul, the indefatigable apostle, was converted from Judaism on the road to Damascus. Saint Paul (circa AD 3-62), the greatest

162 An Appeal to Save Life on Earth away. Whether we are high above the sky or in the deepest ocean, nothing in all creation will ever be able to separate us from the love of God that is revealed in Christ Jesus our Lord” (Romans 8:38-39). In the Old Testament, one of the chief uses for the doctrine of creation is to separate the true God from false idols. Idolatry is worship of gods who did not create the world. Only the one, true God is the creator. In the New Testament, we find the doctrine of the “cosmic Christ,” which means that Christ is the Creator and Sustainer of the universe (John 1:1-2; Colossians 1:16-17; Hebrews 1:3). The purpose of linking Christ to creation is to show that he is more than a first-century Jew from Palestine. Appeal from the Symphony of Species

The study of fossil animals and plants shows how life forms have evolved over the millennia by reacting to changes in the environment. Some populations have adapted to new conditions brought on by climate change and evolved into new species. Others have not, and their species have become extinct. Of the billions of species that have come and gone since life first arose on this planet nearly four and half billion years ago, more than 99 percent have become extinct. We are just beginning to understand the significance of the astonishing diversity of past and present life forms on Earth and how their often bewildering and always beautiful variety weaves a supportive web that makes life possible for our own species. Infinite variety sometimes seems uncanny. There are plants, such as the Venus flytrap, the lethal lollipop, and the pitcher plant that trap and “eat” insects. The nonpoisonous king snake has color bands that make it look like a poisonous coral snake. Predators are fooled, and so the king snake enjoys a survival advantage. There are moths and caterpillars with color patterns resembling enormous false eyes that usually keep hungry birds away. And there are thousands of costumes that tend to make a wide variety of animals, such as ground-nesting birds, invisible to predators. The bottom-feeding flounder fish, for example, can actually change its color pattern so that it is often impossible to see against the pattern of the seafloor. All such examples of mimicry, or look-alike markings, are adaptations that give their owners a more than ever chance of going unseen and not ending up on some other animal’s dinner plate.

A truly remarkable example of adaptation is found in a small, green, African clawed frog with black and yellow speckles. When the frog is even slightly injured, a white fluid begins to ooze is a combination of chemicals from the frog’s natural medicine cabinet that kills almost all known

163 Earth - Designed for Biodiversity. Life will find a Way! bacteria and so prevents infection. The discovery of this frog’s remarkable ability to fight infections with its own homemade antibiotic mixture may be important to our own health. For example, practitioners of Indian folk medicine have long depended on the chemical secretions of toads to treat open sores and dog bites. It turns out that all frogs and toads give off fluids that have antibiotic powers. So do beetles, wasps, ants, termites, bees, the nectar of certain plants, the silk of spiders, and who knows how many millions of other critters we have not even come to know yet. So the more we can learn about these marvelously diverse animals and plants and the medicinal chemicals they produce naturally, the better off we may be in addressing our own health problems. To save humanity, you have to save Biodiversity.

Our overuse of antibiotic medicines to treat human ailments nearly always makes the harmful bacteria we hope to kill increasingly resistant to our antibiotic drugs. Through adaptation, bacteria “learn” how to become immune to our drugs. The tropical rain forests, with their nearly limitless arsenal house of medicines that we are just beginning to discover. Steroids, penicillin, morphine, and aspirin are only four products of Western medicine that have their origins in the natural world. From shark’s liver to tree bark, the incredible Biodiversity of nature offers us medicinal benefits we have never even dreamed of. A remarkable thing about adaptation is how quickly it can take place, both over spans of geologic time and in our own clock time. Well into the twentieth century, biologists assumed that evolution was a process of slow and gradual change, one needing tens or hundreds of millions of years. More recently, however, paleontologists Niles Eldredge and Stephen Jay Gould1 have shown that evolution sometimes surges ahead, one animal or plant group evolving into something quite different in only a few million years. Their evidence is the frequent appearances in the fossil record of new species with no apparent ancestors that they resemble.

Organizing the Natural World - As we have seen in chapter 2, Scientists try to keep track of the infinite variety of plants and animals by naming them and placing them in groups in meaningful ways. In the 1700s several scientists developed schemes to relate the bewildering variety of plants

1Both of them are paleontologists, they believe in “salutatory evolution” which believes that development or transition of one species to another takes place in jumps or leaps, contrary to “gradualism theory,” which believes that during the course of evolution new forms of life typically come into being via gradual, continuous

164 An Appeal to Save Life on Earth and animals. Among them were the French scientists Georges Buffon and Georges Cuvier, and most notably the Swedish naturalist and physician Carl von Linne, who lived from 1707 to 1778. All three based their systems of grouping, or classifying, plants and animals on an organism’s structure or anatomy. Von Linne’s system is the one used today. That branch of science dealing with the classification of organisms is known as taxonomy, or systematics. A particular kind of plant or animal is given two names from Latin words, or words that are Latinized. For example, modern human beings are classified Homo sapiens, from the Latin words meaning “man” and “wise.” An earlier human type was called Homo erectus, meaning “upright man.” The first name in this double-name system designates a broad group of human types, and that group is called a genus. The second name designates a smaller or more specific group called a species.

Your pet dog belongs to the genus Canis and the species familiaris. We can write the name as Canis familiaris, or abbreviate it C. familiaris. Notice that a genus-species name is always written in italic type and the genus name begins with the capital letter. Von Linne thought so highly of his classification system that he Latinized his own name to Linnaeus Carolus. Moving upward in the Linnaean classification system, your pet dog becomes a member of larger and larger groups. At the genus level he is joined by coyotes; at the family level by lions and foxes; at the order level by bears; at the class level by deer and all other mammals; and at the highest level, kingdom, by all other animals. Just to remind you again, in all there are five kingdoms, Animalia (animals), Plantae (plants), Fungi (mushrooms, for example), Protista (golden algae and diatoms, for example), and Monera (true bacteria and blue-green algae, for example). Von Linne did not know of all these groups. But as our knowledge about biodiversity has grown, the classification system has had to change, and it will continue to change in the future as new species are discovered. Protect Diversity and Habitats

A herd of cows, a colony of ants, a flock of geese, or any other healthy population is suited to, or adapted to, its environment. A king cobra, for example, is physically adapted to the heat and humidity of Western Ghats in India. The population could not survive in the Arctic any more than a polar bear could survive in India. Over time, the environment changes, as it has ever since Earth formed some 4.5 billion years ago. Ice ages come and go. New mountains are thrust up and change the local climate. Swamps and inland seas dry up. Glaciers melt. All such changes force new conditions on the plants and animals living there. Sometimes such changes are so

165 Earth - Designed for Biodiversity. Life will find a Way! severe that no individual members of a population can survive, and the population dies out. In other cases, when the change is less severe, certain individuals that are fitter than the others are able to survive. A squirrel with a thicker coat of hair might be better able to survive a series of especially cold winters than a squirrel with only a thin coat. A moth with wing colors that make it especially hard for birds to find is better protected than moths that are less well camouflaged. Such “favored” individuals in a population are produced randomly, or by chance, in a process called mutation.

Mutation is a change in a plant’s or an animal’s genes that may make the plant or animal different in one or more important ways from its parents. One puppy in a litter may have one brown eye and one blue eye, although all of its brothers and sisters have eyes that are both the same color. X rays and certain other forms of radiation can cause mutations. Even though most mutations are harmful, occasionally one just happens to turn out beneficial, as in the case of the squirrel with an especially thick coat of hair. When that happens, we say that the individual with the mutation is well adapted to the new environment. Those individuals that are well adapted and survive may then pass on their special adaptation to their offspring. Those without the new adaptation are more likely to die before reproducing. Gradually the population rebuilds as its new and fitter individuals produce offspring with the beneficial mutation. Those offspring, like their parents, are different from those that were unable to survive the environmental change. This is basically how the process called evolution changes populations and produces new species of plants and animals that account for the never-ending process of biodiversity.

Adaptation in a Test Tube - Populations of bacteria are examples of small organisms that adapt astonishingly quickly, sometimes virtually overnight to new ecosystems. The English biologists Paul Rainey, who studies diversity among bacteria, has worked with one species, named pseudomonas fluorescens, that grows on plants and in the soil. Like most bacteria, this one increases its numbers by dividing every twenty minutes. Start with one bacterium, and twenty minutes later there are two. Twenty minutes after that there are four. After a day or so, that one original bacterium has given rise to a population in the billions. Rainey once grew a colony of P. fluorescens bacteria in a test tube containing a nourishing broth. He started his experiment with a single bacterium and sealed the test tube to prevent other bacteria from entering. He then put the tube aside and did not disturb it for four days. Imagine his surprise when at the end of that time he examined the colony and found several different kinds

166 An Appeal to Save Life on Earth of bacteria instead of millions of faithful copies of his original single P. fluorescens. One distinct type was growing in the upper levels of the broth, where there was a rich supply of oxygen. A different type had evolved near the bottom of the tube, where there was less oxygen. A still different type had taken up life as a ring of growth, like a bathtub ring. Finally, there was a matlike growth of a fourth type at the surface of the broth, along the side of the tube.

Different conditions within the test tube created different small habitats, each one unique. Competition for living space, combined with the ability of bacteria to adapt to the test tube’s different habitats, had accounted for the resulting Biodiversity. A vigorous shaking of the test tube would destroy the varied habitats, and with them the variety of bacteria. In a small way, it would be like shoveling an entire tropical rain forest into a giant jar, shaking the jar vigorously, and then spilling it all back out. Countless species would be destroyed, while countless others would take up a new life in the many new nooks and crannies of the altered environment. While those species adapted to the altered conditions, the environment itself would react and change even more in response to the ways its inhabitants carried on their lives. Here are some of the rewinds into the past.

Plant Animal Relationships - The long-tongued fly and the Orchid—an example of how diversity among one group of organisms can influence diversity among another group can be seen in a long-tongued fly of southwestern Africa and the nectar-producing flowers on which the fly feeds. The flowers, certain irises, orchids, and geraniums have especially deep cavities where the nectar is stored. Only the long-tongued fly is able to reach the nectar. As it feeds, it collects pollen on its body, and carries the pollen to other flowers where it rubs off and fertilizes the plants. In this way, these plants have come to depend on the long-tongued fly for their well-being. Without the fly, plant species might not produce and without the flowers as a rich store of nectar, the long-tongued fly might face food problems. The extinction or depletion of one or both species could change the local environment’s Biodiversity in unknown ways. There are many such helpful plant and animal relationships in nature called mutualism.1

1Mutualism is a symbiotic relationship between two organisms in which both organisms benefit from the relationship. It is the name given to associations between pairs of species that bring mutual benefit. The individuals in the populations of each mutualist species grow and/or survive and/or reproduce at a higher rate in the

167 Earth - Designed for Biodiversity. Life will find a Way!

A Thorn Plant and its Ants - The “rain tree1” of India has tender leaf tips that ants cut off and use as food for their young. The ants also chew a window opening near the tip of a stem and use the interior as living space. So the plant provides the ants with both food and shelter. In return, the ants meet two essential needs of the rain tree. They patrol the rain tree day and night, biting and stinging insect invaders that try to use the plant as food. The rain tree, unlike many other plants, lacks a chemical defense system to repel harmful insects. In addition the ants make sure that the rain tree gets full sunlight it needs for healthy growth. Whenever another plant grows too close to the rain tree and threatens it with shade, the ants cut through the trespassing plant’s soft stem and cut off its leaves. Deprived of rain tree’s leaf tips, the ants might starve to death. Deprived of the ants, the rain tree might die, too.

Critters Galore – What they are? - The Age of Bacteria—to realize the power of the diversity of Earth’s early organisms, we have to turn the geological clock back about three billion years. We could not have breathed the air then. It was largely carbon dioxide, carbon monoxide, and hydrogen, with hardly any oxygen. The landscape was a kaleidoscope of brilliantly colored mats of bacteria, scum clinging to rocks, coating the surfaces of ponds, and stuck to riverbanks. Tacky, threadlike crowds of bacteria, blue, red, yellow, orange, carpeted the land from horizon to horizon. The many forms of bacteria most likely dominated the planet for its few billion years of life. Some differed from others in their ability to thrive amid especially high temperatures. Other groups needed lots of sunlight, and others that got on nicely in the scum of lake bottoms with little or no light. Some groups adapted to life in salty water, while still others lived only in freshwater.

As Earth became increasingly populated by the rapidly growing bacteria, their chemical interaction with their surroundings was bound to change the environment in many ways. For example, the waste gases given off by a large group of bacteria might have accumulated in amounts that became poisonous to some groups. These bacteria would have died,

1Sometimes also called “sleeping tree,” found everywhere in India, this enormous tree spreads a huge canopy over the streets and gardens it grows in. All year round, especially in June, it produces a gossamer web of delicate pink feathery flowers that slowly turn to giant seed pods that fall and melt into bumps on the roads. At night, the leaves fold into themselves, as the tree, along with all its resident bats, crows, mynahs, bulbuls and crickets, goes to sleep.

168 An Appeal to Save Life on Earth leaving those able to cope with the new environment. This process is called natural selection. Among the other environmental crises that bacteria had to face during the Age of Bacteria, were drought or changes in the air quality brought on by volcanoes that vented vast clouds of dust and noxious gases. But where successful mutations abounded, new populations arose fully adapted to these new environmental conditions. Populations not so adapted died out.

Critters Galore – Where they live? - Spaceship Earth—you live in a spaceship, although you probably don’t realize it. Spaceship Earth travels around the sun at an average speed of about 67,000 miles (107,800 km) an hour. But we can speed things up a bit if we add the sun’s speed around the hub of the galaxy, which is about 468,000 miles (753,200 km) an hour. Those two speeds combined give spaceship Earth a velocity of about 535,000 miles (861,000 km) an hour. At that speed, it takes our planet 240 million years, called a cosmic year, to make one circuit of the galaxy and return to its starting point. By the end of that very long year its starting point doesn’t even exist anymore because all the stars have moved to different locations.

During that very long time our spaceship has not had to take or any food supplies, breathable air, or any other material from the outside to maintain a planetwide environment friendly enough to support its billions of life forms. Nor has the planet had to rid itself of waste matter since all wastes have been recycled and converted into clean air, clean water, and food. In effect, planet Earth is what biologists call a “closed ecological system”, one that can run virtually forever by continuously replenishing and maintaining itself. We have imported only one thing, solar energy. That energy, in the form of sunlight, drives the chemical machinery of photosynthesis. Photosynthesis enables the leaves of green plants, grass, corn, wheat, fruit trees, to produce the oxygen we breathe and to manufacture glucose, the sugar that feeds the world.

Poisonous Oxygen Fouls the Air - Among that seemingly endless carpet of bacteria, some species took in ready-made food from the environment. Others made their own food by using sunlight to combine carbon dioxide from the air with hydrogen from water in the soil, a process called “photosynthesis”. As they did, they brought on the greatest natural “catastrophe” that Earth has ever experienced. That natural disaster was the introduction into the environment of a gas that was poisonous to nearly all cells living at the time, oxygen. Oxygen, so precious to most

169 Earth - Designed for Biodiversity. Life will find a Way! organisms living today, is given off as a “waste” gas during photosynthesis. As more and more oxygen kept entering the air, the trouble started. Unless an organism’s structure protects it from oxygen, it will be poisoned by the gas. Free oxygen quickly combines with and destroys living matter. It breaks down vitamins. It destroys proteins and destroys a cell’s protective membrane sac that holds the cell together, killing the cell instantly. Many populations of bacteria were wiped out by this new gas. But those that had taken up life in mudflats and swamp bottoms avoided the gas and survived. Such bacteria have remained unchanged through the ages and are wildly successful to this day. They are the cyanobacteria1 that form the scum on swimming pools and that coat shower curtains. Certain other bacteria learned to live with oxygen and they even came to depend on it.

Life would never be the same again. The stage was set for those simplest life forms to evolve into complex cells, then into colonies of cells, and then into the overwhelming variety of animals and plants that have come and gone over the hundreds of millions of years of Earth’s history. There is a good reason for dwelling on bacteria as much as we have. In all of biology, nowhere do we find better examples of populations of organisms, small or large, adapting to environmental change as quickly or as thoroughly. And nowhere else do we find organisms as able to alter their environment from creating an environment of infection in a cut finger to altering Earth’s atmosphere by starting the oxygen revolution about 3 to 2.5 billion years ago. Those ideas are at the heart of Biodiversity: the ability of populations of organisms to bring about changes in the environment and how they adapt to those changes or perish. Following the Age of Bacteria, many kinds of single-celled organisms evolved. Certain of those organisms joined in partnerships that gave rise to colonies of cells. By some 700 million years ago there were numerous soft-bodied animals living in globelike and wormlike forms in the seas. Because they were soft-bodied, their fossils in sandstone show few details of their structure. It is likely that early relatives of starfish and sea urchins also lived in those seas. While

1Cyanobacteria are photosynthetic microorganisms that contain chlorophyll. Formerly considered blue-green algae, but actually closely related to bacteria, cyanobacteria are of special importance in the balance of nature. Cyanobacteria were the earliest oxygen-producing organisms on Earth and were responsible for converting Earth’s non-oxygen atmosphere to oxygen. Cyanobacteria are found in water and soil and can tolerate great ranges in salinity and temperature. Some species of cyanobacteria convert atmospheric nitrogen to compounds of nitrogen used by plants. Other species of cyanobacteria are grown commercially as a protein-rich human food supplement.

170 An Appeal to Save Life on Earth we do not have as much evidence of these soft-bodied creatures as we do later organisms, it appears that they lived in the time between the colonies of cells and later complex organisms, plants and animals with hard parts that became such abundant and perfect fossils 200 million years later.

Spitting Spiders and Glue Worms - In their book, “Wild Solutions,” authors Andrew Beattie and Paul Ehrlich describe many curious adaptations of animals. Some of these involve using glue for survival. One creature, the tiny velvet worm, an unlikely predator, captures and eats insects. It offensive weapons are a pair of “glue guns,” one on each side of its mouth. When it comes within range of an ant, for instance, it fires jets of glue in the form of threads that entangle the ant beyond escape. The worm then eats the ant at leisure. A spider that also lives on insect delicacies similarly spits threads of glue that entangle a hapless and helpless mosquito, which the spider promptly eats. And there are bacteria that glue themselves to their rock homes in the shallow near ocean shores. There are thousands upon thousands of other equally inventive and curious adaptations among animals and plants. We study them not only because we are curious about these behaviors that help make this or that species able to survive in the jungle of “eat or be eaten,” but because we may learn from those behaviors or the chemical agents involved. As with medicinal drugs that we have developed from certain tropical rain forest plants, it may turn out that those bacteria or velvet worms or spitting spiders may teach us about new adhesives that could be used in many difficult applications. For example, they may show us the way toward adhesives that could be used in underwater repairs of ship’s hulls, or in the repair of organs such as our liver or other soft body parts that are difficult to patch or stitch.

The actual number of plant and animal species in the world is unknown. While we are more familiar with the large creatures of the world, whales, elephants, and giant redwoods, it’s the really small species that are large in number and the most interesting. Scoop up a pinch of forest soil and examine it under a microscope. You will soon see that about half the tiny grains of soil are not lifeless bits of matter but are small organisms slowly creeping around. There may be nearly a million species of bacteria in the world and a million and half of fungi, a bit larger are those single-celled plants known as algae, of which there may be nearly half a million species.

171 Earth - Designed for Biodiversity. Life will find a Way!

And the single-celled animals called protozoa may number 200,000 species. Then, there are even larger critters, including mites and tiny worms that may contain another million species. And then there is the staggering variety of beetles, at present we know of only about half a million species. On the scale of decreasing diversity and species numbers, after the nearly one million known species of insects, we have trees and other flowering plants, of which there may be 320,000 species. Next come 200,000 species of clams, mussels, oysters, and other mollusks, followed by 150,000 species of crustaceans, which include lobsters, crabs, and crayfish. Fish species are still fewer, with about 35,000 species. At the far end of the scale of animal species diversity and numbers are those that are the least diverse but the most familiar to us, birds, with nearly 10,000 species: reptiles, with nearly 8,000 species: mammals, with about 4,800 species; and amphibians, also with almost 4,800 species. Man depends on all these species, but they don’t depend on man. These symphony of species want to live for man and sacrifice their lives if they have to for the betterment of humanity. “No one has greater love than this, to lay down one’s life for one’s friends,” comments Jesus on the note of sacrifice. Save All Ecosystems

How an Ecosystem Works? - Over the nearly four billion years since life began on this planet, the chemicals of life have been endlessly reused and exchanged by plants, animals, the soil, the oceans, and the atmosphere. Some of those chemicals are oxygen, nitrogen, carbon, phosphorus, hydrogen, and sulfur. All the chemicals that make up your body were once part of a dinosaur, a whale, a lump of coal, or some other form of matter, and they will one day in the distant future be used again by still other organisms in ecosystems very different from your own (rebirth in Hinduism). There are many kinds of ecosystems, each with distinctive communities of organisms living together and depending on one another and their surroundings for nourishment and shelter. Let’s consider some of the ecosystems in some detail.

Save Tundra - The tundra, meaning “marshy plain”, around the globe south of the arctic ice and down to about latitude 60 degrees north, a biome that includes northern Canada, northern Greenland, Iceland, Sweden, Norway, Finland, the northern half of Russia, and nearly all of Alaska. Many regions of tundra lack large trees and instead have widespread lichen growth including reindeer moss, grasses, dwarf trees

172 An Appeal to Save Life on Earth and shrubs, and spongy and hummocky soil that is poorly drained and under-laid by permanently frozen ground called permafrost1. The highest tundra temperatures average 50 degrees F (10 degrees Celsius). The main tundra animals are caribou also called reindeer, musk oxen, arctic hares, voles, and lemmings, all of which are plant eaters. The meat eaters include the arctic fox, and wolves. Reptiles and amphibians are scarce. In summer the mosquitoes and blackflies are fierce. Birds include longspurs, plovers, snow buntings, geese, snowy owls, and horned larks. This part of our world is in great danger now, because of the adverse effects of global warming, due to the concentration of greenhouse gases at the poles.

Save Boreal Coniferous Forests - As you continue your drive southward, you enter the great north woods biome, known by ecologists as the boreal, or northern, coniferous forest. Russians call it the “taiga.” It occupies a band running roughly from 57 degrees north to 45 degrees north, or from southern Alaska southward to Ottawa, Canada. Needle-leaf trees predominate, including different varieties of spruce, fir, and pine. But there are other kinds of trees as well. One tree type, the jack pine, has a cone that remains tightly closed until there is a forest fire. Although the fire burns and sometimes kills seedlings and mature trees, scorched jack pine cones open, release their seeds, and can give rise to a new generation of pine trees and an entire new community. The eastern part of the biome contains a number of other trees including quaking aspen, balsam poplar, and paper birch. These too are stubborn survivors in the face of fire. New growth sprouts quickly from the destroyed trees’ stumps and roots. Mammals in this biome vary with latitude and include moose, bears, deer, wolverines, martens, lynx, sable, wolves, snowshoe hares, voles, chipmunks, shrews, and bats. The biome also supports numerous bird species, including robins, juncos, warblers, and nuthatches. There are only a few snakes and other reptiles and there are amphibians, especially in southern regions. And there are many insects, some of them pests, mosquitoes, blackflies, sawflies, and budworms that attack people and vegetation alike. Recently, climate change has interrupted nature, driving animals and plants to the edge of extinction.

1What is permafrost? It is the layer of Earth that stays frozen for at least 2 years. The top layer soil can be soft or unfrozen in the summertime and the layer under the permafrost can be warm as it receives heat from the layers below. But the layer in between is the layer that stays frozen. Sometimes there is not only frozen soil but also a frozen wedge of water.

173 Earth - Designed for Biodiversity. Life will find a Way!

Save Temperate Deciduous Forests - Continuing your drive southward, you will enter the temperate deciduous forest biome. This biome covers most of Europe, USA, Japan, and much of southeast Asia. As you might imagine, climate is milder here than in the northern forests, and there is a much greater variety of trees, most of which are deciduous, meaning that they shed their leaves seasonally. Tree types include oak, hickory, basswood, maple, beech, elm, willow, and sycamore. The eastern United States also has areas of white pine and red pine, both conifers. The ground cover is rich and diverse and includes many flowering plants. Typically, the ground- cover plants bloom quickly in the early spring before the trees come into leaf and keep the ground mostly in shade all summer. Compared with the heavily littered floor of the north woods, the forest floor in this biome is less cluttered with dead wood and other natural litter because of a more rapid rate of decomposition. The largest animals that live in the part of this biome are deer and black bears. There used to be mountain lions and wolves until they were killed off by hunters or driven away. Smaller animals include foxes, bobcats, weasels, raccoons, squirrels, voles, and chipmunks. Birds include various woodpeckers, wild turkeys, grouse, and he red-eyed vireo. As we would expect from the warmer climate in these southern latitudes, many species of amphibians and reptiles are common. Human activity has caused problems for animals and they are dwindling down fast due to habitat destruction, deforestation, hunting, and climate change.

Save Animal Life in a Desert Ecosystem - Many people imagine deserts as relatively lifeless places with only some cactus plants and an occasional snake crawling into the shade of a large rock to escape the fierce heat of the desert sand. But if you’ve spent much time in desert country, such as that of the Sahara, you know that a desert ecosystem is home to numerous species of plants and animals that have adapted to the harsh conditions there. Even a sand dune habitat can be home to as many as thirty different species. While certain plants grow at the dune’s surface, burrowing wasps may live inside the dune. Cottontail rabbits, meadow voles, grasshoppers, and termites often make their homes in a dead and decaying tree buried in the dune. You probably have hopped around to avoid burning your feet on a hot sandy beach in the summertime. Although the air temperature might be 90 degrees F (32 degrees Celsius), the surface sand is a sizzling 120 degrees F (49 degrees Celsius). The temperature difference often is even greater in a desert environment. Although some plants thrive in such heat, animals rarely can, at least not for long. Most of Earth’s animals, including

174 An Appeal to Save Life on Earth toads, fishes, snakes, salamanders, and insects, are unable to control their body temperature, which rises and falls right along with the temperature of their surroundings. As the air around these cold-blooded animals heats up during the day or cools down at night, the animal’s body temperature changes accordingly. Since these animals can’t regulate their temperature, they must stay out of the sun during the hottest part of the day.

Mammals, which include humans, dogs, mice, and rabbits, do not have this problem. Neither do birds. They are warm-blooded animals and can maintain a constant body temperature. They can shiver to warm up or sweat or pant to cool down. But even warm-blooded animals may have trouble maintaining their body temperature when their surroundings become unusually hot or cold. Overheating can cause a person to faint or even to die. Hopping about on that sandy beach, you probably dug in your toes to feel the refreshingly cool sand just a few inches down. A kangaroo rat and other desert animals escape the heat by going below the surface. They make their burrow homes a foot or so beneath the surface, where it is comfortably cool by day and warm by night. Furthermore, these desert- burrowing animals usually are active only during the early morning, in the evening, or at night when they can avoid the intense heat. But heat isn’t the only challenge desert animal’s face. They also need to deal with a lack of moisture. Most of them have built-in ways of conserving water. Kangaroo rats get the water they need from the seeds and vegetation they eat. Their urine contains so little water that it turns into solid pellets when it comes in contact with the air. The kangaroo rat is a model of water conservation. Another of the kangaroo rat’s adaptations to desert life is its ability to jump along in 8-foot leaps at a speed of nearly 24 km an hour. The fur around a kangaroo rat’s toes turns its feet into “sandshoes” that prevent it from sinking into the sand. Its long tail helps the animal keep its balance as it bounds along, fleeing from enemies such as a sidewinder rattlesnake or a kit fox.

You often see clusters of tiny funnel-shaped pits in the desert floor. They are traps dug by insects called ant lions that lie in wait at the bottom of the pits. When an ant or other insect tumbles down the loose sand walls, the ant lion grabs it with powerful jaws and pushes into the sand where it paralyzes the unlucky guest with a poisonous fluid released from its mouth. It then relaxes and eats its victim. Other insect predators of the desert include tiger beetles that skip over the sand in pursuit of other

175 Earth - Designed for Biodiversity. Life will find a Way! insect prey, robberflies that suck the body juices out of their victims, and jumping spiders that hunt like cats. Deserts of the American Southwest have a type of toad called a spadefoot1. These animals spend ten months of the year underground, coming to the surface only during the brief summer rains. As the water wets the desert landscape and trickles into the ground, an entire population of spadefoots suddenly appears. For a few days they occupy every pool and puddle made by the rain, and their mating calls fill the air. The toads mate and the females by their eggs. Within two weeks the eggs have hatched and the pollywogs have developed into adults capable of living on dry land. Usually the young grow up just before the remaining pools are dried away by the heat. The toads then dig their way into the desert floor for another long period before the rains come again.

Save Plant Life in a Desert Ecosystem - Like desert animals, desert plants have adaptations for using water conservatively. The thin “spines” of some cactus plants are actually leaves shaped to reduce water loss through evaporation. The fleshy stems of cactus plants store water for use in times of need. For most of the year the branches of the night-blooming cereus cactus are drab green-brown twigs. However, when winter rains come, small green buds appear and continue to grow through May. Then on one, and only one, night when the humidity and temperature are just right, the buds of all the cereus plants in an area burst open and reveal a beautiful, richly scented flower the size of your fist. As if by magic, sphinx moths appear, flying from one flower to another and pollinating the plants. This is the plants’ one night of glory. Just before dawn the flowers wither, revealing a red seedpod. By sunrise the plants once again show only their drab green- brown color. When greasewood plants grow on or around a broad sand dune, they often are so evenly spaced that it seems as though they were planted that way, but they weren’t. This spacing is a result of the plant’s special adaptation to a climate where water is scarce. The greasewood plant puts out shallow roots that form a 25 feet wide circle around the plant. This root system gives off a harmful chemical that prevents the roots of other greasewood plants from growing too close. As a result, each plant is able to grow an extensive root system that collects the water it needs,

1 At 2 inches long, these toad-like frogs would be easy to miss, even if they spent most of their time above ground. They don’t. Spadefoots use horny, shovel-like plates on their feet to burrow into the sandy soil they prefer. They stay underground during the day, emerging to feed at night.

176 An Appeal to Save Life on Earth while at the same time preventing neighboring plants from competing for water. The saguaro cactus has a deep taproot that grows straight down, in addition to an extensive network of horizontal roots not far beneath the surface. The plant’s horizontal roots, which may fan out more than 75 feet, collect summer rainwater. The water is then stored in the taproot and used during times of water shortage. The taproot also firmly anchors the plant. Some dune plants, such as the smoke bush, have tough seeds that need exactly the right amount of moisture to sprout. And sometimes, the seeds lie on the ground for years. Eventually, during a fierce storm, the rushing water of flash floods picks up the seeds and dashes them against the sand and rocks. Some become trapped in crannies in the streambed, and water soaks into the seeds through cracks created during their violent journey. Only then do the seeds germinate and new plants begin to grow.

Together, dune plants and animals form a dune community. The creatures living in any ecosystem community depend on each other, much as the people in a city or town do. Desert plants provide seeds as food for kangaroo rats and certain other animals. The plants, in turn, depend on the animals of the community. The seeds of some dune plants cannot sprout until they are collected by a sand rat. The rats carry the seeds into their dune burrows, where they eat some and store the rest. Some of these stored seeds sprout, push up through the sand, and grow along the surface of the dune. The location of a sand dune, in a desert, besides a lake, by the seashore, determines the kinds of creatures that make up an ecological community. For example, strong winds often blow insects living in and near the desert dunes, out into lakes where they drown. However, their bodies are carried back to shore and serve as a source of food for dune birds of the community. So, as with ant ecosystem, the Biodiversity of a desert community is what keeps the community healthy and thriving. Reduce the Biodiversity, and the productivity of the community declines. Animals die, and plants wither away. What was once a thriving assembly of plants and animals exchanging matter and energy becomes, for a while at least, a heap of lifeless, shifting sand. Save Grasslands – A Remarkable Endurance

Vast areas of the Earth are covered by grass. Grass is a symbol of a remarkable endurance. Rain or fire, grass wins. Of the fifteen major crops that stand between us and starvation, ten are grasses. No matter where you live in the world, you would be hard put to walk outside your door and not find grasses within a very short distance. Grasses are immensely

177 Earth - Designed for Biodiversity. Life will find a Way! common and immensely important. Yet few people—even those who are passionately interested in nature—take the trouble to learn the names of grasses. Enthusiasts who will travel hundreds of miles to look at “wild flowers” ignore the grasses in their own backyard. Misconceptions about grasses abound. Grasses have flowers, just roses and daisies have flowers; the only difference is that they are small and inconspicuous, and differ slightly in structure. What is a grass? A grass is a plant in the Grass family. A family is a large group considered by botanists to have similar characteristics. To botanists, the Grass family is the Gramineae (or in some books the Poaceae). Plants in the Grass family have narrow leaves with parallel veins and small inconspicuous flowers. The stems are mainly hollow except at the point where the leaf is attached (the node). The stems have joints— easily visible bulges—where the leaves are attached. Grass stems are usually round. The bass of the leaf wraps around the stem in a structure called the sheath. The sheath is open at least part way down. The flowers are arranged on the stalks in two rows. Grasses are of vast ecological and economic importance, and they move around the Earth easily with man. Grasses are important as crops and as weeds.

Grasses cover almost one third of the area of the Earth. The Grass family has the third largest number of species in the world, exceeded only by the Orchid and the Daisy families. Of the vascular plants, grasses can be found at the outermost extremes of climatic conditions; there they are surpassed only by lichens and algae. And the fruit of the Grass family—the grain—is a concentrated source of protein, carbohydrates, and minerals. Being dry, it is easy to store and transport and thus it has become a major food source of humans. The following grains come from plants in the Grass family: wheat, rye, corn, rice, oats, barley, sorghum, and millet. The green leafy parts of the grass, which we cannot digest, can be eaten by cows and other animals, so that even if you eat nothing but meat, you are still eating grass. If you eat sugar, you are eating another product of the Grass family, the sugarcane plant. And the Far East, another grass, bamboo, is used for everything from food to a construction material.

Why are grasses so successful in covering such large areas of the globe? In the grasslands of the world, the main obstacles to a planet’s survival are drought, fire, and grazing by animals. Grasses have several features that help them to withstand these stresses and enable them to dominate large areas. In most plants, the tissue responsible for growth and cell division is located at the tip of the leaf or the shoot. This means that if the leaf or shoot is clipped, it will not grow back. In the grasses, and in a few

178 An Appeal to Save Life on Earth other plants, the growth tissue is located toward the base of the leaf or the shoot. This means that if the shoot gets cropped, burned, or grazed, it can grow back from the base. The grass plant can also send outside shoots called tillers, which grow from buds near the ground. You may have noticed that many grasses grow in clumps. This is because of tiller production. Many perennial grasses have rhizomes or stolons1, These grasses usually spread in such a way that the distance between the shoots is very short, and the plant forms a dense mat. These species are called sod formers and are good for use in lawns. Once a dense sod is formed, it is hard for other species to penetrate it.

Lastly, one of the most extraordinary features of grass growth is the root system. The stems and leaves that you see often, above ground are a small fraction of the total living weight of the plant. Sometimes as much as ninety percent of the weight of the grass plants is in the roots. This concentration of starch and energy below ground helps grasses to survive grazing and burning, and it reduces water loss. Most grasslands are in relatively dry climates where plants lose considerable amounts of water through evaporation. If most of the plant tissue were above ground, the plant would lose too much water to survive. The statistics on grass roots are staggering. In one famous study, a researcher measured all the roots of a four-month-old rye plant growth in a greenhouse and found their total combined length to be 560 km. the root system of the grasses is extensively branched, so that it makes the most efficient use possible of the available soil space. Such a dense root system also discourages competition by other species. Sometimes on the plains you will see patches of grass interspersed with patches of bare ground, but it is because the grass roots underneath have formed such a dense network that nothing else can penetrate. In many parts of the world you can find grasses growing in more or less uninterrupted stretches, meadows, pastures, prairies, plains, cultivated fields, salt marshes, and lawns. In many of these places, these grasslands would quickly turn to forest if they were not mowed periodically. Grasses grow where they do and trees do not. Trees need more water than grasses for three reasons. First they are bigger. Second, a much greater portion of their

1Here, lateral branches called stolons originate from the underground stem. The stolons grow horizontally outwards for a varying distance in the soil. Ultimately their end (terminal bud) emerges out of the ground and develops into a new plant. A runner, sucker or any basal branch which produces roots is called a stolon horizontal stems that crawl either above or below ground and send out new shoots and roots.

179 Earth - Designed for Biodiversity. Life will find a Way! living tissue is above ground and thus subject to evaporation. Third, they need water over a longer portion of the growing season because they need to produce woody tissue as well as leaves and flowers. Most grasses do most of their growing in brief periods. Their flowering shoots and only alive and green for a short time; then they are brown and dead though still on the plant.

The grasslands are generally divided into three groups: they are the short-grass prairie, the mixed-grass prairie, and the tall-grass prairie. The boundaries of these three regions are extremely fluid, subject to dispute among scholars. As it name implies, the short-grass prairie is dominated by short grasses a few inches in height. The short grass prairie is basically the same formation as the Russian steppe and could be correctly called a steppe. Most of the American short-grass prairie is referred to as the Great Plains. This is ranching country, since the most dependable use of the short-grass prairie is livestock grazing. Wheat has been grown there but rainfall is too irregular to assure a steady crop. For the short-grass prairie, the answer to why there are no trees is probably pretty simple: not enough rain. Rainfall in the Great Plains is about ten to fifteen inches per year, too little for tree growth. It is irregular through the season and varies greatly from one year to the next. Rain does not penetrate as far as the water table and there is a layer of subsoil that is permanently dry. In some areas, next to the short-grass prairies, we find the mixed-grass prairie, an area of transition between the short-grass and the tall-grass prairies, both in terms of rainfall and species composition. The grasses there grow about two to four feet tall and include little bluestem grass, June grass, needle grass, and western wheatgrass, as well as species of the short-and tall-grass prairies. The boundaries of the mixed-grass prairie are by no means stable. In the course of a few dry years mid-grasses like little bluestem grass die out and the short grasses take over. Then over a few wet years the little bluestem grasses will come back in. Much of the mixed prairie has been overgrazed and the grazing pressure has caused the mid-grasses to give way to short grasses. If grazing pressure were relaxed, then the mid-grasses could come back. The area of the mixed-grass prairie corresponds roughly to what is now called the wheat belt.

The area that most defies simple explanations is the tall-grass, or true, prairie. When people speak of the prairie, technically this is the area to which they are referring. The word is from the French word for meadow, because the area was discovered by the French explorers Marquette and Joliet in 1673. The tall-grass prairie has some of the most fertile soils on the Earth

180 An Appeal to Save Life on Earth and is now, roughly, the corn-belt. The native grasses in the tall-grass prairie grow taller than a person and the soil is black from the accumulation of centuries-worth of rotted grass roots. The climate is more humid than that of the short or mixed grass prairie and in some parts the soil is moist all the way to the water table. The tall-grass prairie also has its counterparts in many parts of the world: the pampas of Argentina and the Black Earth Belt of Russia. Some of the dominant grasses of the American tall-grass prairie are big bluestem grass, Indian grass, and switch grass.

In general, the climate seems to be humid enough to support tree growth, but there is still debate about whether trees ever grew there, and if not, why not. People often note that trees planted in the prairie do well, but this is a meaningless observation because planted trees have been protected in the seedling stage, a precarious period for a plant in the wild and they are protected from competition by having the grass around them cut. Present-day prairie reserves face constant invasion by trees and shrubs. But some people claim that trees could never invade the prairie. Measurements in adjoining tracts of prairie and forest, where the weather and the soils are the same, show that each area tends to create conditions that lead to its own perpetuation. For instance, it is windier and hotter near ground level on the prairie than in the forest because there is nothing to break the wind or shade the soil. Consequently, there is more evaporation and less soil moisture in the prairie. These conditions favor plants that are adapted to dry conditions, i.e., grasses. In the forest area it is shady and the soil is damper, conditions that favor the growth of trees. As was pointed out before, once a dense prairie sod is established, it is hard for other seedlings to compete. So it appears that perhaps a vicious-circle effect is operating that might contribute to the maintenance of the prairie.

The soils of the tall-grass prairies are among the richest in the world due to the presence of rapidly decaying organic matter that collects in the upper layers. Forests, or rather clusters of trees, across the dry grasslands biome are pretty much restricted to valleys and streambanks. Small burrowing mammals, including gophers, prairie dogs, squirrels, and jackrabbits are common and serve as prey for coyotes, wolves, and mountain lions. There also are pronghorn antelope, elk, badgers, ferrets, and bison. Grasslands birds include prairie chickens, longspurs, meadowlarks, hawks, and grasshopper sparrows. Before the waves of settlers swept westward in the 1800s, an estimated 75 million bison grazed

181 Earth - Designed for Biodiversity. Life will find a Way! the western prairies. By 1888 fewer than a hundred survived the onslaught of human activity. One theory about the origin of the prairies is that they developed after the retreat of the Wisconsin glacier1, some 18,000 years ago. The climate then was apparently much drier than it is now. Fossil records from various parts of the Midwest indicate that grasses were there after the glacier but not before, and they seem to have remained there since. Once the prairie became established, it is believed by many that it was maintained by the grazing of the buffalo and by Indian fires. Many people believe that without these fires, the prairie would have been taken over by forest. We have no way of knowing, because tall grass prairie no longer exists. It is covered with corn, soybeans, houses, and factories. In India and Africa these grasslands are known as savannas. Humanity continues to abuse grasslands through overgrazing, clearing for agriculture, and burning. With the disappearance of grasslands, river valleys, fresh water marshes, ponds along with millions of species of animals and plants are lost to the planet. There are even more biomes, some covering smaller regions than those just portrayed, although each one has its own group of animals, bacteria, fungi, and soil nutrients that fuel their energy requirements. Each is a finely woven tapestry of varied life forms and intricate dependencies. However, by far the most precious and endangered of all these biomes are the tropical rain forests. Save Rain Forests - Green Cathedrals

Tropical rain forests are the planet’s oldest, richest, and most diverse biological communities. Millions of species make up the world’s tropical rain forests. More woody plant species grow on one forested volcano in the Philippines than grow in the entire Indian subcontinent. Turn up two square feet of tropical rain forest leaf litter and fifty species of ants scurry out. For every human being there are some three-quarters of a ton of termites in the tropical rain forest biome. Amazonia has about 1,170 known bird species, but many more are still undiscovered. Central America has about 450 fish species, but there are more to be found. Compare these numbers with the total of about 190 fish species in all of Europe and only 172 in the Great Lakes. The number of species of tropical rain forest insects

1 Rise in sea level is directly related to the melting of the Wisconsin continental polar and mountain piedmont glaciers. However, the rate of melting and proportional sea level rise was not constant through time. Sea level rose quickly during warm periods, but stopped or even temporarily fell during cold periods. The character of regional and global climatic patterns, are exceedingly complex.

182 An Appeal to Save Life on Earth is unknown. They whir, whine, hum, and buzz with a million different voices. The diversity just among the palm trees of South American rain forests is staggering, more than 835 species. The world’s largest rain forest biomes are South America’s Amazon basin, the East Indies, Sumatra, Borneo, and Papua New Guinea, and Africa’s Congo basin. The global air circulation keeps these forests wet. Moist equatorial air rises from the forest canopy, is cooled aloft, condenses, and falls as rain. Meanwhile moist air is drawn in from the oceans and replaces the rising equatorial air. Biologists are alarmed by the rapid loss and degradation of the rain forests by logging, slash-and-burn agriculture, and ranching, and little is being done to stop the destruction. Although numerous patches of national parks have been established, there are neither enough money nor park rangers to protect them. So, illegal logging and land clearing continue. Biologists are concerned because of the loss of biodiversity. They are also just beginning to learn about the usefulness of rain forest plants as a source of drugs and medicines for a wide assortment of diseases.

As the Forests Fall - Almost half the planet’s rain forests have been shaved away. Every minute of the day and night nearly 150 acres (40 hectares) of rain forest fall to the chain saw or are recklessly destroyed by the bulldozer’s blade. Many experts fear that most of the remaining rain forests will be gone by 2040. Thailand lost 45 percent of its rain forests between 1961 and 1985. In the Philippines the acreage of prized tall trees called dipterocarps shrank from 40 million in 1960 to one-sixteenth that much in the 1900s. In Africa’s Ivory Coast 75 percent of the forests were cut or burned over a 30 year period beginning in 1960. In Ghana, more than 80 percent of the forests have been cut or burned. In Brazil slash- and-burn farming has been causing an estimated loss of $2.5 billion a year. All of the primary rain forests in India, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, and Haiti have been cut. According to the World Resources Institute, 30 million acres of tropical forest were destroyed in eight countries in 1987 alone. A combination of logging, slash-and-burn farming, and land clearing by ranchers has brought disaster to the forests of Indonesia and Sabah, Malaysia. Cutting on watershed areas denudes the slopes. Instead of being buffeted by the plant cover and more slowly released into rivers and streams, rain hits the ground directly. The flood of down-slope water then picks up soil, which flows into and clogs irrigation canals and floods inhabited lowland areas, driving people from their homes.

Many people who express concern over the rapid disappearance of the world’s tropical rain forests suppose that most of the trees are

183 Earth - Designed for Biodiversity. Life will find a Way! harvested for use as timber. In fact, the reckless use of tractors and other logging equipment destroys 50 to 75 percent of the trees that are not cut. Such destruction has occurred in Sabah, Indonesia, and the Philippines. A logger carelessly cuts down a marked 120 foot dipterocarp1, the only tree he is interested in. It comes crashing through the canopy and undergrowth, taking with it nine other trees. The nine other trees are left to rot. The bulldozer next smashes its way to the felled tree to cut a trail for the skidder that will haul the tree out to the road. Both bulldozer and skidder uproot, mangle, and otherwise destroy dozen more trees and churn the forest floor into mud. The manager on one logging operation in Indonesia said that his men take out only about four trees per acre. In the process the forest canopy is destroyed, and about one-sixth of the trees cut down for timber are so damaged that they are left behind to rot. Slash-and-burn farming has become one of the leading causes of tropical rain forest destruction in the world. Every hour 50 acres (20 hectares) of rain forest are destroyed by this practice. Most of the burning flares up from the matches of land-poor settlers in Amazonia’s Rondonia. In 1987 alone, 20 million acres of Rondonian forests went up in smoke. The pressure to slash and burn is greatest in those countries where population growth is highest and, therefore, the demand for land greatest.

Large numbers of Brazil’s rain forest settlers have watched their dreams of becoming independent farmers crumble, because clearing a tropical forest is hard work, malaria and other parasitic diseases are rampant, and year after year of poor crop production is discouraging, many settlers of the virgin forest give up in despair. After only a few years the nutrient- poor forest soil is exhausted. Farmers either have to move and clear a new area, or they sell their land to wealthy cattle ranchers who live far away in the cities of Sao Paulo and Rio de Janeiro. In Brazil more than six hundred cattle ranches have average more than 50,000 acres each. But the outlook for pastureland in a cleared forest is just as bleak as it is for farming. The settlers who sell their land often are kept on as paid laborers to further clear the land and plant grass for pasture. For a few years the grazing is good enough to support the cattle. Most of the cattle raised in Brazil, are ground up into hamburger meat for America’s fast food chains. After five or so years, weeds take over the pasture. Since clearing the weeds is too

1 Trees of the Dipterocarp family, such as the meranti, are a valuable forest resource. Also important are ramin, sandalwood, ebony, and teak. Teak in particular is grown in plantation forests. The government has established many national parks to conserve the natural vegetation and native wildlife.

184 An Appeal to Save Life on Earth expensive, the land is once again abandoned, this time for good. Almost every ranch that was started in the Amazon before 1978 has been abandoned. That land will not see another tropical rain forest for a million years.

Save Medicinal Plants - English explorer Charles Waterton was one of the first Europeans to test a tropical rain forest plant’s value as medicine, although rain forest people had relied on medicinal plants for thousands of years. Traveling in 1814 through what is now Guyana in South America, he witnessed the preparation of a poisonous substance the natives used to coat the tips of their arrows in order to kill game quickly. Curious about how the poison worked, he brought a sample back to London and injected some into a donkey. Within ten minutes the donkey stopped breathing, collapsed, and appeared dead. Waterton applied artificial respiration for two hours by pumping air through an opening he made in the donkey’s windpipe. Within another two hours the donkey stood up and began walking around as if nothing had happened. The mysterious substance was “curare”, the juice of a South American liana, or climbing plant. In weak doses it is safe to use as a muscle relaxant during certain delicate operations. But in strong doses curare completely relaxes muscled, including the diaphragm and heart, and results in death. In 1541 the Spanish explorer Francisco de Orellana was dumbfounded when one of his men was struck in the finger by an arrow and died within a few minutes. A dose of another drug called physostigmine, which comes from a West African bean plant, quickly reverses the effects of curare, and it is useful for treating the eye disease glaucoma. Brazilian Indians of the Uru Eu-Wau-Wau tribe1 tip their arrows and spears with a poisonous sap squeezed from the red bark of the “tiki wha tree.” The sap prevents blood from forming clots and causes victims to bleed to death. Cancer researchers have long been interested in a class of chemicals, called alkaloids, found in tropical rain forest plants. About sixty alkaloids have been found in a single periwinkle plant of Madagascar, off Africa’s southeast coast. Some are used to treat tumors, leukemia, and Hodgkin’s disease. The National Cancer Institute has identified more than 2,000 tropical plants with anticancer properties. Botanists are convinced that there are many more tropical “miracle plants” awaiting discovery, if they can get to the plants before loggers, ranchers, and farmers cut the forests down. 1The Uru Eu Wau Wau territory was signed into law by the president of Brazil in 1991. Under Brazilian law only indigenous people may occupy and use the natural resources there. The Uru Eu Wau Wau’s land has been targeted by colonists, ranchers, loggers and miners who poured into the region after a major highway, the BR 364, was paved nearby with World Bank money in the 1980s.

185 Earth - Designed for Biodiversity. Life will find a Way!

Save Microbes – Life Down Under

The decline and demise of civilizations are almost invariably linked with the devitalization of the soil and consequent malnutrition. Today this is compounded by variously denatured, deficient, refined, processed, and adulterated foods. We human beings tend to forget that we are “humus beings.” From the Earth we are born, to the Earth we return, and by the Earth we are sustained. Humility, humanity, and humus are words that connect and ground us in the reality of our being. But our rampant egotism, our pathological self-centeredness separate us from the reality of our being, and out of arrogance we neglect and abuse the Earth. Caught in the delusional realm of anthropocentrism, we fail to realize that when we harm the Earth, we harm ourselves. When the humus is depleted of microorganisms, when it becomes nutrient deficient and toxic with agrochemicals, so become our crops, farm animals, and the food we consume: and so become our bodies, minds, and spirits. In harming the Earth, we harm ourselves physically, mentally, morally, and spiritually.

When we recover our humanity and humility, we rediscover the wisdom of living in harmony with the Earth. Through the sacraments of seed and soil, and toil and food, our health and well-being and the vitality of the Earth are mutually enhanced. As we enter the deep communion of a reverential symbiosis with the Earth, human purpose and fulfillment gain greater meaning and significance. And we are secure in the knowledge that we are part of that which is forever being renewed, as the self is forever sustained, transfigured, and reborn. Through the inter-communion of reverential symbiosis we come to understand and respect, as the laws of nature, all the relationships and processes that maintain and sustain the life community. Obedience to these laws enabled us to participate in a creative and mutually enhancing way and by so doing avoid causing harm to ourselves and other sentient beings.

As we humans come to see that our arrogance and alienation arise when we forget our origins and that most evil in the world comes from our ignorant self-centeredness, we may, with nature’s help, mature into creation-centered beings. Our pathological anthropocentrism has pervaded our major religious and cultural institutions and caused great harm for millennia. The recovery of humanity and civilization lies in the anthropocosmic transformation of our consciousness, which will herald a new epoch in human evolution and in the refinement and metamorphosis of the human spirit. An auspicious beginning is to respect the living soil as a primary life giver and sustainer, and to farm and consume accordingly, with

186 An Appeal to Save Life on Earth less harm and greater care, harmony, and veneration. Bioethical Evaluation and Principles

Since genetic engineers have the power to change the future of all life on Earth profoundly and forever, we may better foresee the outcome of their influence on creation or biological evolution if we understand their worldview, or “paradigm.” After the Copernican revolution around 1500 A.D., science gradually became the new gospel. The paradigm of modern science emerged subsequently in Europe during the so-called Enlightenment Period of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. It was such a human-centered view that there were no moral or ethical boundaries to constrain and contain our actions, usually harmful, to other animals and nature, unless the animals and the land were someone’s property. We can trace this worldview of human mastery and dominion over creation, along with ethical blindness and instrumental rationalism, from one civilization to the next, from the Greek and Roman imperial empires to the pre-and post-industrial colonial empires and into the new age of global economic imperialism. Enlightenment philosophers such as Rene Descartes and Francis Bacon based their new worldviews, which helped form the basis for modern science and the industrial revolution, on the Catholic and Protestant legacy of believing that only humans were made in the image of God and have immortal souls, and that animals were created for man’s use.

They embraced the dualistic views of the separateness of humans from animals, matter from spirit, mind from body, man from nature, and nature from God. Bacon urged that we “vex Nature of her secrets, ”have“ power over her and improve upon her,” and “have commerce with her”; he gave religious sanction to man’s “endeavor to establish and extend the power and dominion of the human race itself over the universe.” He actually wrote a rare piece of fiction, a utopian saga called “New Atlantis,” in which there were bizarre human-engineered animals, as in the more recent tale of “The Island of DR. Moreau1”. He described animal parks and enclosures that were used not only for public viewing but also “for dissection and trials, that thereby we may take light what may be wrought upon the body of man … We try all poisons and other medicines upon them as well as of chirurgie (plastic surgery) and physic.” Descartes maintained that only humans can reason and that animals are unfeeling machines. He even

1Hollywood movie made in 1996, staring Marlon Brando and Val Kilmer. The film received negative reviews and barely managed to scrape back its budget.

187 Earth - Designed for Biodiversity. Life will find a Way! condoned the first biomedical experiments on animals, mainly dogs and cats, which were done without any anesthesia. He dismissed the screams of tortured dogs, convinced that animals have no real feelings of which they are aware, because to be aware means to have a conscious self and animals are not self-conscious. He contended that the screams were nothing more than the breaking down of the machinery of the dog’s body. Genetic- engineering technology, today, in the name of research, millions of innocent animals and plant species are being abused. Various developments and applications of genetic-engineering technology (GET) should be objectively and rigorously evaluated and opposed when the following bioethical criteria for acceptability are not fully met:

1. Necessity: Is the new technology, product, or service really necessary, safe, and effective, and are there alternatives of lesser risk and cost?

2. Tracking: Can released genetically engineered life forms be identified, traced, contained, and recalled if needed?

3. Oversight and Compliance: Can the new technology, product, or service be effectively regulated to maximize benefits and minimize risks, and at what cost to society?

4. Public Demand and Acceptance: Cultural, religious, ethical, health, and safety concerns must be fully considered and respected.

5. Environmental Impact: Short- and long-term consequences and influence on wild plant and animal species and microorganisms, such as microbes and bacteria, must be rigorously evaluated.

6. Economic Impact and Viability, Social Justice, and Equity: International and intergenerational issues should not be ignored when we interfere with nature. We should seek out responsible answers for the questions like who will benefit? Who might be harmed?

7. Social and Cultural Consequences: What is the impact on the structure of agriculture, nationally and internationally, and on more sustainable traditional and alternative agricultural practices at home and abroad? Is it technologically appropriate and respectful of cultural pluralism, and does it enhance the development of human capacity and potential?

188 An Appeal to Save Life on Earth

8. Animal Welfare: Will the new product or service enhance animal health and overall well being?

The ethos (intrinsic nature) and telos (natural role and purpose) of every life form are at risk of being engineered to meet the pecuniary ends of industrial society. The ecos, or natural world, to which animals, plants, and microorganisms belong and which they help maintain is at risk of being obliterated in the process. But when we expand our simplistic assessment of biotechnology from risks, costs, and benefits—from a purely economic point of corporate self-interest—and incorporate bioethical principles and criteria, the necessary paradigm shift or change in worldview will occur. This is essential if the benefits of this new technology are to be fully realized to serve the interests of nature, society, and the human spirit, precisely because biotechnology is based o the reductionist principles of the inorganic, physical, and mechanical sciences that focus on manipulating, controlling, and directing complex life processes to meet purely human ends. Save Organic Agriculture and Bioethics

According to Ken Ausubel, CEO of the seed-savers’ networking organization Seeds of Change, agribusiness today uses only 20 percent of plant varieties for 90 percent of our food, although there are an estimated 80,000 food plants. He correctly concludes that “the biggest single trigger of extinction is the introduction of hybrid seeds by the transnational corporations.” He is concerned that the common heritage of the gene pool is rapidly becoming privatized and concentrated in the few hands of the most powerful interests that control the world food supply, as well as fiber, medicine, and horticulture. In the last 20 years, more than a thousand independent seed houses have been acquired by major chemical and pharmaceutical companies such as Monsanto, Dow, UK’s International Chemical Co., and Royal Dutch Shell. Such monopolism will mean that organic farmers may be forced out of business as their seed suppliers are bought up and all seeds are genetically engineered and patented, unless seed-saving cooperatives are firmly established and organic farmers’ markets and food processors are supported by consumers who know and care. A comprehensive and objective determination of whether genetic-engineering biotechnology has any place in organic farming cannot be made without a full understanding of the philosophy and practice of organic farming systems. Several bioethical criteria can be identified as the basic principles of organic agriculture, of which livestock

189 Earth - Designed for Biodiversity. Life will find a Way! and poultry can play an integral and integrating role in appropriate biogeographic regions. The practice and philosophy of organic agriculture is commendable because it satisfies some key bioethical principles.

First is “ahimsa,” avoidance of harm or injury: Organic farming seeks to minimize harm to agricultural and natural ecosystems of wildlife, soil microorganisms, beneficial plants, insects, birds, etc.

Second is Biodiversity: Organic farming protects and actually enhances Biodiversity of both domestic and nondomestic animal and plants.

And third is transgenerational equity: Environmental quality and the productivity of the land are secured and enhanced for future generations. These and other bioethical principles and criteria of organic sustainable agriculture, notably food quality and safety, full-cost accounting (or fair- market price), and humane husbandry are all interdependent and complementary.

The vernacular definition of organic, as it relates to food production, means “relating to, produced with, or based on the use of organics as fertilizers without employment of chemically formulated fertilizers or pesticides.” Organic is defined as “a fertilizer consisting only of matter or products of plant and animal origin.” Organic farming, while in part based on the use of organic, as distinct from synthetic, chemical to maintain soil quality and productivity, involves a number of integrated practices and components “constituting a whole whose parts are mutually dependent or intrinsically related.” This holistic and ecologistic nature of organic farming, of which there are several schools or systems and philosophies, is evident in both theory and practice. But as theories are refined and practices change, so the meanings of words inevitably change and the concept of organic farming continues to evolve. A long-standing principle of organic agriculture, is derived from ecology—namely, balance. Specifically, it is the maintenance of balance between inputs, productivity, and the agri-ecological resource base.

The principle is loosely termed sustainability but bears the following caveat: All basic inputs are natural/organic, rather than synthetic chemicals and genetically engineered products. All outputs and products are bioregionally appropriate, in terms of maximizing productivity and profitability without depleting the resource base beyond its capacity to regenerate naturally or be restored by appropriate human intervention. This may include the emergency use of specifically approved synthetics.

190 An Appeal to Save Life on Earth

Depending on the bioregion, farm animals play an integral role in helping maintain balance and optimal biodiversity. In sum, organic farming means the use of natural and appropriate synthetic products, by products, and processes and entails the design and adoption of cost-efficient crop, livestock, and poultry production practices that are analogous models of natural ecosystems in terms of energy flow, conservation, and sustainable productivity. It precludes the adoption of products, processes, and other inputs such as chemical pesticides, fertilizers, antibiotic feed additives, and hormone implants. With these basic philosophical and scientific criteria concerning the structure and function of organic farming systems in mind, we will now look at the relevance and acceptability of biogenetic engineering to these systems.

Transgenics1: Agricultural Biotechnology – Save us from Evil

Recent advances in genetic-engineering biotechnology are being developed for commercial application in animal agriculture. There are three basic approaches to enhance animal health and productivity using this new technology.

The First Approach: In the first, gene-spliced bacteria have been engineered to manufacture new-generation animal vaccines, and also pharmaceuticals, such as synthetic growth hormone to boost growth rates and milk yield. These latter products are claimed by manufacturers to be analogs of natural compounds already present in the animals’ bodies. But the safety and efficacy of these products of biotech “farming” await verification. They are analogous (as distinct from homologous) products— that is, not entirely natural. Their use in farm animals to artificially enhance immunity, disease resistance, growth rate, muscle mass, milk yield, etc., should be questioned in terms of improving overall animal health and well-being, since they will be utilized primarily in intensive-confinement animal-production systems. Long-term social and economic consequences to the structure and future of agriculture are also considerable. The use of all genetically engineered production-enhancing products, such as growth hormones, in organic animal agriculture (with the possible exception of approved new-generation genetically engineered vaccines) should be prohibited on the grounds that they are non-natural, analog products. 1 A transgenic animal is one that carries a foreign gene that has been deliberately inserted into its genome. The foreign gene is constructed using recombinant DNA technology. In addition to a structural gene the DNA usually includes other sequences to enable it.

191 Earth - Designed for Biodiversity. Life will find a Way!

The Second Approach: In the second approach, gene-spliced microorganisms are being developed and soon will be marketed for feeding to pigs and poultry, and for injection into the rumens (stomachs) of cattle to help improve digestibility of feed (including such non-natural ingredients as sawdust and newspaper pulp) and to reduce nitrate levels in manure. From an organic perspective, this is wholly unacceptable, no matter what efficiencies and cost savings might be claimed. To so alter the internal physiology of farm animals by bacterial manipulation is the antithesis of organic animal agriculture.

The Third Approach: The third approach is to develop gene-spliced farm animals, but their commercial future is at least five to ten years away. By inserting the genes of other species, or extra genes of their own kind, into developing embryos, so-called “transgenic” farm animals (including fish) have been created. Some of them are able to transmit these additional genes to their offspring. With the exception of some poultry, these transgenic farm animals have been created either to be more productive, rather than disease-or stress-resistant, or to produce pharmaceutical products in their milk. Other developments in biotechnology include embryo transfer, cloning and DNA mapping, which have been criticized as leading to a potential loss of genetic diversity in the already threatened farm-animal gene pool, and to the selection of varieties of livestock and poultry that are suited only for intensive production systems.

Gene mapping to identify desirable and undesirable genetic traits in animals and plants is a costly and time-consuming process. Its promised benefits will be limited, however, by the reductionism of genetic determinism. In other words, the belief that gene mapping and identifying genetic markers will enable us to improve the health, productivity, and disease resistance of animals and plants is a science-based concept that may be true in theory but not in practice. Many traits that we judge good or bad involve a complex interplay of many genes, some of which are expressed only under certain environmental circumstances or at a particular time during the organism’s development or life cycle. What we judge as good traits from the narrow measure of productivity such as egg or milk production, rate of growth, or ratio of fat to muscle and muscle to bone, may not be so good from the measure of stress and disease resistance. Traits believed to be good may not be good in different farming systems, climates, and biogeographic regions. Furthermore, the consequences of genetic screening and sequencing the genomes of domesticated animals

192 An Appeal to Save Life on Earth and plants could be extremely harmful in that the resultant genetic uniformity of commercial varieties will increase the likelihood of serious disease wipe-outs as well as the development of new disease.

This production-focused selection for commercially desirable traits using new technology may not only have undesirable biological and ecological consequences, it is also likely to have undesirable social and economic consequences, as when “improved” varieties of crops, live stock, and poultry are patented and contract growers use them, resulting in the competitive extinction of other varieties and farming systems. Processor, retailer, and consumer demand for uniformity of produce, from apples to pork, has stimulated the loss of genetic diversity. The resultant plant and animal “genetic monocultures” are more susceptible to diseases, thus stimulating and justifying the use of agrichemicals, veterinary drugs, and using biotechnology to try to make crops and livestock more resistant to stress and disease. As Vandana Shiva in her book, “Monocultures of the Mind,” comments that “Perspectives on Biodiversity and Biotechnology, the north India’s approach to scientific understanding has led to industrial monoculture farming, which is foisted on the south India, and which may well result in a sterile planet.” Bioethical Determinants

From the bioethical perspective of what I call natural philosophy, the creation of transgenic animals, plants, and other life forms is unacceptable because such action violates the sanctity of life and may be regarded as an act of violence. To change the intrinsic or inherent nature of distinct and unique species for purely human ends is unethical to those who embrace the philosophy of reverential respect for all life. None of the ends that transgenic life forms serve are essential or basic to our survival, but instead serve primarily pecuniary interests. The creation of life forms purportedly better designed to serve human ends, be it through traditional breeding methods or new bioengineering techniques, must be opposed if those ends cause life forms to suffer, or harm natural ecosystems or put them at risk. Because of the lesser risk of suffering, conventional breeding techniques, refined by genetic screening or DNA sequencing and utilizing the untapped genetic resources of rare livestock breeds and plant varieties through conventional cross-breeding, should take preference over gene splicing.

The utilitarian argument that genetic engineering and other biotechnologies could make plants and animals more productive and efficient, thus requiring less land so that more can be saved for nature

193 Earth - Designed for Biodiversity. Life will find a Way! and wildlife, is unconvincing. It lacks a bioethical framework and totally ignores the potentials of organic and other ecologically alternative farming systems. These more natural “whole” systems are antithetical to the ethos of industrial agriculture and agri-biotechnology, in which the production of biomass commodity monocrops, and of animal protein and fat from intensive-confinement factories and feedlots, is considered progressive and not pathogenic. From an organic and holistic animal- agriculture perspective, the creation of transgenic farm animals is an unnecessary and unacceptable alternative to traditional selective breeding and other biotechnologies to make them more productive, disease-resistant, or heat or cold tolerant are not acceptable substitutes for humane farming practices, and should be opposed if they encourage intensive, “factory” production methods and other inhumane farming practices.

The major components of disease prevention are the basic principle of organic animal agriculture and the “pillars” of veterinary holistic medicine, namely, right breeding, right environment, right nutrition, and right understanding and attitude. Raising animals under optimal social and environmental conditions is the best way to avert the inappropriate and wholesale use of antibiotics and other drugs. It is also the best way to discredit the economic rationale for selective breeding and for even creating transgenic livestock and poultry that are better suited for intensive-confinement system. As these developments now stand, and judging from the direction being taken by the biotech, livestock, and poultry “improvement” ideology, transgenic livestock and poultry have no place in organic agriculture and no place in any truly sustainable farming system. Our Food is not “Natural”

Agribusiness biotechnologists reason that since one of the criteria for organic farming is the use of natural products, then transgenic crop varieties should be eligible for organic certification since the foreign genes they contain are from other life forms and thus are natural in origin. This same line of reasoning would accept such genetically engineered products as biopesticides and bovine and porcine growth hormone as natural and thus acceptable under organic farming and food standards. This reasoning is flawed, however, because such bioengineered products and processes either do not naturally exist in conventional crops and animals that are part of an organic farming system, or occur at much lower concentrations

194 An Appeal to Save Life on Earth within the normal homeostatic range of the plant or animal’s natural physiology and metabolism. There is no scientific evidence that genetically engineered crops are the answer to world hunger. But there is clear evidence that solutions include sustainable organic agriculture, with the adoption of integrated pest-management practices and the practice of growing a diversity of crops and growing different crops (crop rotations) in different seasons. But sustainable agriculture is a threat to the agribusiness multinationals, and what they offer is the antithesis.

If a farmer plants a genetically engineered crop of corn or soybeans with herbicide resistance, he can’t plant any other crops unless they too are resistant to the herbicide used on the new wondercorn or supersoy. The use of genetically engineered microorganisms for deactivating pollutants and toxic wastes through so-called bioremediation and biodegradation, to improve animals’ digestive efficiency, and to reduce waste-emission problems in livestock and poultry is not organic farming. These kinds of high-cost inputs and correctives, even if they are, as living processes, analogs of natural organic processes, are not naturally intrinsic or ecologically sympatric, and their short-and long-term risks are unknown. New developments on the horizon to modify animals’ metabolism and to modify their feed so as to enhance its nutritive value, as by genetically engineering the amino acid content for specific species to create “human corn,” “swine corn,” or “poultry corn,” may soon become a reality. Genomic research on crops raised to feed livestock in focusing even on reducing pollution. Engineering corn, for example, that contains digestible phosphate would save hog farmers having to supplement their hogs’ diets with extra phosphate, and being highly digestible would mean less phosphate in pig feces and thus less pollution, according to advocates of enhanced foods for livestocks.

But is this the direction to take, even engineering livestock feed-crops with new-generation proteins that may enhance animals’ disease resistance, when the intrinsic problems of intensive livestock production systems and overconsumption of animal fat and protein are not addressed and actually become, in their perpetuation, a source of profit for the food and drug industry? The acceptability of these developments, along with various new feed additives, is debatable for organic agriculture. The need for such feed additives betrays the inherent limitations of intensive, animal-based agriculture, and may well have adverse animal health and ecological consequences. Likewise, the use of new drugs such as beta- adrenergic antagonists, somatotropins, and anabolic steroids to increase

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“protein deposition” (as animal production scientists call potentially pathological muscular hyperplasia in livestock and poultry) is likely to result in a host of harmful consequences, as already evidenced by dairy cows injected repeatedly with synthetic bovine growth hormone. Metabolic manipulation of farm animals cannot be considered ethical or relevant to the advancement of sustainable agriculture or the attainment of food security in the near or distant future. In sum, all developments in biotechnology should, from an organic farming and sustainable- agriculture perspective, be subjected to rigorous objective and scientific evaluation on the basis of the bioethical principles and criteria. Changing the Nature of Creation

There is a distinction between using an animals’ end or telos for one’s own benefit and disregarding and manipulating its telos and ethos (or intrinsic nature) for exclusively human benefits, as in factory farming and genetic engineering. The good farmer and pastoralist knew how best to profit from the telos of plants and animals without harming either their ethos or the ecos—the ecosystem. This is the distinction between sustainable and non-sustainable living, and between treating animals and other life forms as ends in themselves, respecting their ethos and ecological role, and using them as a means to satisfy purely human ends. The consequences of this latter utilitarian attitude and relationship are potentially harmful economically, environmentally, socially, and spiritually. The essence of right livelihood is surely to accommodate the interests and intrinsic value of other members of the biotic community and to enable those species whom we have domesticated—as well as ourselves— to live according to their natures, with ethos, telos, and ecos fully integrated and harmoniously actualized. In sum, natural living, like natural or organic farming, has its own integrity. Ironically, in the process of “denaturing” animals under the dehumanizing yolk of industrial-scale domestication, we do no less to ourselves and suffer the consequences under the guise of “civilized” necessity and progress. But there is nothing civilized or progressive in this utilitarian attitude toward life, since it ultimately reduces the value of human life and all life to sheer utility, which is the nihilistic telos of the life-science industry. Addendum: 7 Principles of Humane Sustainable Organic Agriculture 1. Humane Sustainable Organic Agriculture (HSOA) entails the production of domestic animal protein and fiber on the

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economically prudent basis of an ecologically sound animal husbandry and the wise and appropriate use of natural resources. Such husbandry aims to enhance or at least protect the natural biodiversity of indigenous wild plant and animal species and does not result in environmental degradation and pollution. 2. HSOA is socially just, respecting human rights and interests, especially those of indigenous peoples and native, peasant, and family-farm cultures and traditions, since the preservation of cultural diversity has inherent value just as does the preservation and enhancement of natural biodiversity. 3. HSOA recognizes the connections between farm worker health and safety, consumer health, and farm-animal health and well- being. It respects the right of consumers of animal protein to wholesome and healthful produce derived from animals whose basic physiological, behavioral, and social needs and requirements, which are integral to their overall health and well- being, are fully satisfied by the methods of husbandry that are practiced. The use of veterinary drugs to maintain animal health and productivity is minimized by the adoption of humane animal husbandry practices, which in turn lowers consumer health risks. Furthermore, animals’ health and overall well-being are maximized rather than sacrificed to maximize productivity. Optimal productivity is linked with maximal animal welfare, which in turn is linked with the optimal carrying capacity of the environment and availability of renewable natural resources. 4. HSOA is bioregionally appropriate, if not autonomous, linking livestock and poultry production with ecologically sound, organic crop and forage production systems and/or environmentally sound rangeland management. 5. HSOA does not engage in the import or export of any agricultural commodities, especially meat, wool, hides, and animal feedstuffs, that have been produced at the expense of natural Biodiversity and nonrenewable resources, and that undermine the rights and interests of local farmers and other indigenous people who practice sustainable, ecologically sound, and socially just agriculture. 6. Philosophically, HSOA is based on the aphorism that we do not inherit the land, we borrow it from our children; it is ours only in

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sacred trust. This means, therefore, that HSOA entails respect and reverence for all life, its philosophy being creation-or Earth- centered. It therefore embraces concern for the rights and interests of people, animals, and the environment. By so doing, it reconciles conflicting claims and concerns with the absolute right of all life to a whole and healthy environment and to equal and fair consideration. 7. HSOA provides the foundation for a community of hope and of a planetary democracy, whereby world peace, justice, and the integrity of creation may be better assured. It leads to the recovery of culture, agriculture being the cultivation of the land and the production of food based on a hallowing covenant that commits us to the sacred obligation of caring for the Earth by farming with less harm and eating with conscience. Save Humanity from Spiritual Corruption “You are a God only insofar as you recognize yourself to be a human being,” wrote Plutarch. “Three kinds of progress are significant for culture: progress in knowledge and technology; progress in the socialization of man; progress in spirituality. The last is the most important,” wrote Albert Schweitzer.

We are crossing the boundaries that separate us from other species, not by way of empathy but through genetic engineering. Instead of contemplation, we engage in manipulation. Where there was once communion and wisdom, there is now control and information. Life, once held sacred, is now a patentable commodity. Biotechnology, applied with reverence and humility, may do some good, but lacking empathy and ethical sensibility and serving as a means to gratify pecuniary ends and insatiable wants, it can only do more harm. Animals, trees, certain rock formations, and other natural creations had such great intrinsic value and empowering qualities that our ancestors were moved to awe and reverence. Where is the awe and reverence in the genetic engineers’ laboratory, where human beings play God, putting their own genes into other creatures? Where is the awe and reverence in the bio-concentration camps and fields of corn and cows, pigs and pines? Where are the voices that cry “obscene” and call for an end to keeping animals so confined that they cannot even walk or turn around? What of the silence of the birds in these agro-forests and over the plains and prairies now almost all gone under the plow? What will be left soon to sustain the human spirit? The appetites that corrupt our souls do no less to the soul of the Earth.

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The fruits of the tree of life will be ever fewer and more bitter and the false fruits of the virtual reality of the emerging biotechnocracy— genetically engineered and irradiated foods—will not sustain us in either body or spirit. An imperialistic biotechnocracy can never see why respecting animals’ rights and having a sacramentalist attitude toward nature and all of God’s earthly creation are keys to our own health and the realization of our intrinsic divinity. I feel a growing sense of urgency over the closely linked spiritual, social, and environmental crisis of these times because the corruption of individuals, institutions, public-interest organizations, industry, commerce, politics, and governments worldwide is intensifying. I see corruption being dismissed as greed and rationalized as the means of doing business to achieve justifiable ends. Having worked in one developing country (India) and also being involved in parish activities to protect environment in other parts of the world, where—on planet Earth—corruption is either denied or fatalistically accepted as normal. I am more aware than ever of the consequences of confronting and exposing corruption in whatever form it may take.

Fear, as well as arrogance and greed, corrupt the spirit. Fearing losing influential political allies and corporate sponsors, leaders of public-interest organizations, from animal and environmental protection to consumer health and worker safety, become corrupted. They rationalize their “neutrality” and diminishing advocacy by claiming “scientific” objectivity and “political correctness.” So I appeal to those who dare to be politically and ecclesiastically incorrect, who see ethical consistency as a virtue, and who still find in nature, animals and plants, their sacraments and a heart for communion, to stand up and be recognized—we are not alone! Artist, philosopher, and physician Frederick Frank puts it this way: “Reverence for life implies the insight, the empathy and compassion that mark the maturation of the human inner process and that implies overcoming the split between thinking and feeling that is the bane of our scientism and the idolization of technology that distances—estranges—us from all emotional and ethical constraints. This same distancing, the objectification of the unobjectifiable, is characteristic of all Realpolitik, racism, ethnic cleansing, cruelty and exploitation of the other by political, racial, religious collectivized in-group egos, including that free-market mentality for which all that is, is looked upon as mere raw material-for-profit, even if it ruins our species and our Earth for generations to come.”

The corruption of the human spirit—of our humanity, our dignity, and our integrity—by a powerful few who seek control over the economy or over our religious and political beliefs, and thus over our lives, must be

199 Earth - Designed for Biodiversity. Life will find a Way! fought on all fronts lets we lose all that makes us human and gives life meaning. This battle has confronted every human civilization since the beginnings of agriculture and recorded history. How well educated we are and from what culture and socioeconomic class we make little difference for those of us who share the kinship of having enjoyed the affection of animals and the intimacies and mysteries of wild nature. I have sat with Indian jungle tribals and rejoiced with them over saving a valuable and beloved old milk cow from a difficult labor; stood beside an Eskimo whale hunter in communion with the Arctic summer night; and played in the boundless circle musicians make, beating drums and bowing flutes and didjeridoos (Australian aboriginal music instrument) with indigenous peoples from around the world to celebrate the life and beauty of the Earth. The spirit of humanity is not yet dead. But I wonder what will become of us as a species when the materialistic monoculture of consumerism spans the globe.

Many children already have no real closeness with any animals, wild or tame, except in picture books and in the virtual realities of zoos and videos. Even the parts and products of the animals they consume seem to have no connection with laying hens, milk cows and fat pigs, chickens, lambs, and young cattle, or with the living soil. Would it be a reality check— or psychologically harmful—for them to see just how these animals are raised today in factory farms and feedlots? And to see just how they are transported for slaughter and killed? A few fortunate children have animals as companions, not just as “pets” or toys. Their parents love and value animals in and for themselves and see the animals as part of the family and deserving of respect and equal consideration. Few children ever see wild nature, and they have decreasing contact with the natural world. Few parents teach their children reverence for all life, opening their hearts to the wonders and mysteries of wild nature. Few children now go out to hunt and trap and fish with their friends. Few parents dare to show their loving concern for an injured fawn or hunting dog—or for a child confused by the sudden realization that we must all kill to live. It can be difficult to empathize with those who never learned why they must kill a deer swiftly with one arrow, and not just for sport; and with those people who still eat other animals without a second thought. But empathize we must help restore our “collective humanity.”

Those awakened by the intimacies of a participatory relationship with the natural world—with wild nature and all our animal and plant relations, wild and tame—recover the spirit of their humanity. The more our hearts

200 An Appeal to Save Life on Earth open to the sacramental powers of the natural world, the more we must be prepared to suffer the pains and sorrows of a sentient world that is subjected to the cruel and selfish dominion of our fallen species, which Frederick Frank sees as being afflicted by the spiritual virus of contempt for life. Only then, I believe, can we be effective in confronting industrial agriculture’s biotechnology and multinational corporate hegemony and have the vision and passion to implement alternatives such as organic agriculture and bioregionally autonomous stewardship and protection of cultural and natural resources. It is not mere nostalgia for the cry of the loon and the howl of the wolf that calls us to preserve the wilderness. It is a deeper, atavistic wisdom. When our minds are no longer stopped or our hearts filled by sunsets and loving dogs, by flying geese and waterfalls, will we still be human? What would we care about then? What will become of us in the world we are now creating, where there will be no wild nature left on a human-infested, plundered, and poisoned planet?

What is to become of us we are witness to now: The more disconnected from nature and the land we become, the more violence and destruction we see, and the more our youth feel disconnected, alienated, unfocused, and uninspired by the shallow market-driven values of a consumptive culture. One man I know, who as an adolescent had his first epiphany in a redwood forest, now leads a North American Indian coalition to save the last of the U.S. Northwest’s old-growth rain forests. These ancient, natural forests around the world could soon be logged and seeded with new transgenic super-trees, all of one kind, but without natural forests there might be no corn in American Midwest, the White House could be under water, and populations could be devastated by global warming’s new diseases. Save the forest for our own sake? Or for the forest’s sake? Either way it is right as long as we all unite against the dark side of human nature that can rationalize the obliteration of the old-growth forests, the depletion and pollution of the oceans, and the end of the wild; sanction the wholesale exploitation and suffering of animals; permit the subjugation and annihilation of indigenous peoples and cultures; and even sanctify the bioengineering of new life to serve the needs and wants of its depraved appetites. How indeed will future generations judge these times? What values will they derive from the kind of world and culture they inherit, or will they too, like most of us, their forebears, choose to live in ignorance and denial? Enjoying the sacraments of creation and communion with nature

201 Earth - Designed for Biodiversity. Life will find a Way! are not ends in themselves; otherwise, they amount to nothing more than self-indulgence and idolatry. Communion with the God of nature and with the nature of God as manifest on Earth and in all creatures and for creation; to help save the last of the wild; and to alleviate and prevent the suffering of other sentient beings. This fight for justice for all that is sacred is the fight for the truth of “equalitarianism.” Since all of life is sacred, all living beings should be given equal consideration. This calls for radical compassion, nonviolent action, and spiritual anarchy in our personal lives and in our communities. We see it as a quickening and “greening” grassroots movement today. It goes beyond the polemics of animal rights versus human interests, and nature-conservation versus economic growth and material affluence, because the fight for truth redefines what it means to be human. To be human means to be a part of the whole, part holy, part human. We cease to be well and to be human when we wantonly destroy the whole and when our chauvinism defiles all that is holy, including our own humanity. So to be human means to realize the divinity of nature and self, and to be mindful of the God in all, as we are all in God. With great genetic expectations, the life-science industry is playing monopoly with mother Earth and all of God’s creation. At least they think they are. In actuality, they are playing Russian roulette. Without a radical change of consciousness, as the poet T.S. Eliot warned, we will go out “not with a bang but a whimper.” Former UN secretary general U. Thant saw the whimper as a “planet running out of air, food, and pure water.” We know what is happening, and I do not believe that we need be fatalistic. Nor are we helpless. We must not become callous or indifferent, live in denial, or even rationalize one protective and destructive belief system after another, such as the importance of industrial and economic growth and other forms of insanity including racism, speciesism, and dominionism. We can stop the “bang” through global conciliation, and address the “whimper” with immediate planetary CPR: conservation, preservation, and restoration of the natural world. Genetic engineering and other technologies could play a role in saving the Earth via CPR. But they will not and cannot until we utilize such instrumental and empirical knowledge within a framework of bioethics. Several basic bioethical principles have been identified in the field of religions. A spiritual awakening and redefinition of what it means to be human are also imperative. When we reaffirm the sacramental value and powers of plants, animals, and the rest of God’s creation the seeds of our humanity may be saved. With the passionate light of radical compassion in action that is our reaffirmation

202 An Appeal to Save Life on Earth to help prevent animal suffering and the loss of natural Biodiversity, these seeds will be saved, along with all of nature, which connects our spirits with the manifest divinity of a living Earth. An Appeal to Pontiffs to Save Life on Earth

If a pontiff speaks, people listen and show their good will of cooperation. On the other hand when a politician speaks, people ignore him. Therefore the pontiffs of different religions become the instruments of transformation and need to speak out boldly and urgently on behalf of saving environment, ecology, Biodiversity and saving life on Earth. The great religions, Hinduism, Buddhism, and Jainism already practice vegetarianism, along with non consumption of alcohol, and non-smoking. Their pontiffs and monks practice vigorous vegetarianism. Vegetarianism is the key when it comes to the respect for life which has been practiced in India from Vedic times, practiced not only by monks and pontiffs, but also practiced by followers, kings and queens. Only few religious pontiffs and their monks on this planet eat meat, smoke and consume alcohol, obviously their followers naturally eat meat, because leaders eat meat, so it is not wrong. Smoking is become increasingly a history now, no pontiff can claim responsibility for its demise even though it would have been the religious pontiff’s responsibility in the first place to speak against smoking. There has been increasing popular global support for vegetarianism in recent years especially among the younger generation, definitely it is not out of any religious persuasion, but out of spiritual- innate-human respect that demands the rightful existence for life. If the pontiffs change, then the whole followers change. Life is sacred and it is so with every pig, chicken, cow, fish and rabbit. They have their own intrinsic value in nature and they have a place and a name in grand saga of life. They have existed before us millions of years ago, that leaves us as the younger children of Earth and they have the same right of existence as any other human being can claim for its own. It’s a very primitive human understanding that when you talk about “pro-life,” you mean “saving all life,” not only human life. Even the practice of fast and abstinence in some religious practices indirectly suggest the unconscious guilty verdict of non-vegetarian lifestyles of their adherents. Therefore this appeal is to all the pontiffs to reconsider the value of life, their significant importance to ecology and their intrinsic value when they formulate their edicts, teachings or dogmas which would enable their followers to change their life styles that would result in the biospheric preservation and conservation of life on Earth.

203 Chapter V

Planet Earth is Designed for Biodiversity Every country has three forms of wealth: material, cultural, and biological. The first two we understand well because they are the substance of our everyday lives. The third, is the most important of the three, because there’ll be no life at all, hence no material and cultural, without the biological. The essence of the Biodiversity problem is that biological wealth is taken much less seriously. This is a major strategic error, one that will be increasingly regretted as time passes. Biodiversity is a potential source for immense untapped material wealth, which is in the form of food, medicine, and amenities. The fauna and flora are also part of a country’s heritage, the product of millions of years of evolution centered on that time and place and hence as much as reason for national concern as the particularities of language and culture.

“The biological wealth of the world is passing through a bottleneck destined to last another fifty years or more” wrote Edward O. Wilson. The human population has moved past 6.5 billion, is projected to reach 8.5 billion by 2025, and may level off at 10 to 15 billion by mid-century. With such a phenomenal increase in human biomass, with material and energy demands of the developing countries accelerating at an even faster pace, far less room will be left for most of the species of plants and animals in a short period of time. The human juggernaut creates a problem of epic dimensions: how to pass through the bottleneck and reach mid-century with the least possible loss of Biodiversity and the least possible cost to humanity. In theory at least, the minimization of extinction rates and the minimization of economic costs are compatible: the more that other forms of life are used and saved, the more productive and secure will our own species be. Future generations will reap the benefits of wise decisions taken on behalf of Biodiversity by our generation.

What is urgently needed is knowledge and a practical ethic based on a time scale longer than we are accustomed to apply. An ideal ethic is a set of rules invented to address problems so complex or stretching so far into the future as to place their solution beyond ordinary discourse. Environmental problems are innately ethical. They require vision reaching simultaneously into the short and long reaches of time. What is good for individuals and societies at this moment might easily seen in ten years hence, and what seems ideal over the next several decades could ruin future generations. To choose what is best for both the near and distant futures is a hard task, often seemingly contradictory and requiring knowledge and ethical codes which for the most part are still unwritten.

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If it is granted that Biodiversity is at high risk, what is to be done? Biology, anthropology, economics, agriculture, government, and law will have to find a common voice. Their conjunction has already given rise to a new discipline, Biodiversity studies, defined as the systematic study of the full array of organic diversity and the origin of that diversity, together with the methods by which it can be maintained and used for the benefit of humanity. The enterprise of Biodiversity studies is thus both scientific, a branch of pure biology, and applied, a branch of biotechnology and the social sciences. It draws from biology at the level of whole organisms and populations in the same way that biomedical studies draw from biology at the level of the cell and molecule. Where biomedical studies are concerned with the health of the individual person, Biodiversity studies are concerned with the health of the living part of the planet and its suitability for the human species. What follows, then, is an agenda on which I believe most of those who have focused on Biodiversity might agree. All the enterprises Edward O. Wilson will list are directed at the same goal: to save and use in perpetuity as much of Earth’s diversity as possible. 1. Survey the world’s fauna and flora. 2. Create biological wealth. 3. Promote sustainable development. 4. Restore the wild lands. 5. Save what remains.

Biodiversity can be saved by a mixture of programs, but not all the programs proposed can work. Consider one often raised in discussions by futurists. Suppose that we lost the race to save the environment that all natural ecosystems were allowed to vanish, could new species be created in the laboratory, after genetic engineers have learned how to assemble life from raw organic compounds? It is doubtful. There is no assurance that organisms can be generated artificially, at least not any as complex as flowers or butterflies, or amoebae for that matter. Even this godlike power would solve only half the problem, and the easy one at that. The technicians would be working in ignorance of the history of the extinct life they presumed to simulate. No knowledge exists of the endless mutations and episodes of natural selection that inserted billions of nucleotides into the now-vanished genomes, nor can it be deduced in more than tiny fragments. The neo-species would be creations of the human

205 Earth - Designed for Biodiversity. Life will find a Way! mind, plastic, neither historical nor adaptive, and unfit for existence apart from man. Ecosystems built from them, like zoos and botanical gardens, would require intensive care. But this is not the time for science-fiction dreams.

On then to the next technical remedy that springs up in scientific conferences and corridor arguments. Can extinct species be resurrected from the DNA still preserved in museum specimens and fossils? Again the answer is no. Fractions of genetic codes have been sequenced from a 2400- year-old Egyptian mummy and magnolia leaves preserved as rock fossils 18 million years ago, but they constitute only the smallest portion of the genetic codes. Even that part is hopelessly scrambled. To clone these organisms or a mammoth or a dodo or any other extinct organism would be, as the molecular biologists Russell Higuchi recently said, like taking a large encyclopedia in an unknown language previously ripped into shreds and trying to reassemble it without the use of your hands. Deciphering the Design of Biodiversity

If life on Earth has a single outstanding property, it is that it exists in an enormous variety of forms. This was evident to Charles Darwin during the famous voyage that led to his theory of evolution to explain the seemingly unending diversity of life forms that he observed. It is even more evident to those evolutionists who have studied the fossil records and proposed new theories that modify or counter Darwinism. It is sobering to read that more than 99 percent of all the species that have ever lived on Earth are now extinct. Nevertheless, the array of extant species is enough to amaze anyone who explores the living world on land and within the ocean. Yet, despite this obvious and scientifically tantalizing variety, only a fraction of the species living today are known to science, and many will never be known as living species because they will disappear before they are discovered. This is by now a familiar story for the tropical rain forests, but the story of Biodiversity in the oceans is all but untold.

The term Biodiversity has more than one interpretation, so it is important to understand how the term is used in a particular context. The purist would use Biodiversity to refer only to their number and identification of different species present in a particular ecological system. Because the species is the evolutionary unit, diversity at this level has special importance. Since it is difficult to count all the species in an entire ecosystem, several diversity indexes include both the species richness

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(numbers of species per area) and the evenness (or patchiness) of their distribution. Each mathematical index has its inherent strengths and weaknesses, but they offer a way to compare species diversity from one ecosystem to another. In a similar vein, higher levels of classification of animals and plants may be considered in relation to Biodiversity in such as genus, family, order, and phylum, in ascending rank. These levels are important when comparing marine with terrestrial Biodiversity.

When comparing species diversity of different ecosystems, it is important to identify characteristic diversity, which is the species diversity typical of the unstressed or normally stressed ecosystem. There are significant differences in characteristic diversity of different types of ecosystems and different geographical locations. However, it is important not to place greater value automatically on ecosystems that have higher diversities than others. For example, a salt marsh with a relatively low diversity is not less important to the living biosphere than a coral reef with a high diversity. In this sense, all life found in your back and front yard in A. Kattupadi1, is equally as important as life in Serengeti or Amazon. What is important is that severely stressed ecosystems tend to have significantly lower species diversity than their unstressed counter-parts, and a high value should be placed on maintenance of the greatest diversity characteristic of a particular system. Recognizing that taxonomic classification is not the only way of categorizing the biological world, scientists now often view Biodiversity in terms that include more than just species diversity. For example, Indian department of Biodiversity has defined biological diversity to include the following:

1. Species Diversity: That which refers to the variety of species in an ecosystem.

2. Ecological diversity: That which refers to the variety of types of Biodiversity communities found on Earth.

3. Genetic diversity: That which refers to the genetic variation that occurs among members of the same species.

4. An additional means of categorizing Biodiversity is often discussed; functional diversity. This term refers to the variety of biological

1A. Kattupadi is a village near Vellore, India, nestled in between Easter Ghats. It is known for its milder temperatures year around, supporting hundreds of endemic species of animals and plants.

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processes, or functions, characteristic of a particular ecosystem. This may or may not reflect the species diversity, but it does reflect the biological complexity of an ecosystem and it does identify the nature of processes that may be impacted by human activities.

This fourth category may, in some cases, provide a useful way of assessing Biodiversity in the oceans while avoiding the quagmire of cataloging all species, many if not most of which have not yet been identified. By assessing functional diversity, the important biological processes in marine environments can be protected, thereby protecting the organisms performing these functions without having to know how many species there are or what their names are. This may be useful for decision makers, since endangering an ecosystem function may be viewed as more important than endangering a species for which nobody has a particular use. The drawback, however, is that it is likely that some functions of a system will be missed in any inventory. Thus it likely depends upon the ecosystem and the environmental circumstances whether an assessment of species or functions or both would be most useful.

As human beings have populated the lands of the Earth, we have pushed out other forms of life. It seemed to some that our impact must stop at the ocean’s edge, but that has not proved to be so. By over- harvesting the living bounty of the seas and by flushing the wastes and by- products of our societies from the land into the ocean, we have managed to impoverish, if not destroy, living ecosystems there as well. The oceans cover 70 percent of the Earth’s surface and, when depth is considered, contain on the order of one hundred times more inhabited space than the continents. Unfortunately, so little is known about the variety and distribution of ocean species and about the living processes characteristic of marine ecosystems that it is not yet possible to assess the losses, either qualitatively or quantitatively. We do know that there is a broader spectrum of different types of life forms in the ocean than on land. This is reflected not in the number of species but in the numbers of higher taxa (families, orders, and phyla), which represent larger genetic differences than occur at the species level. If there are more species on land than in the ocean, as is currently thought to be true, it only means that there are more closely related species on land. How should we weigh the importance of small genetic variations versus very large genetic variations between species?

208 Planet Earth is Designed for Biodiversity

Besides, the list of marine species that exist has not yet been compiled. Certainly, the number known to science is growing, and it appears that early estimates are far too low. For instance, we are discovering that the deep-ocean floor, originally thought to be biologically poor, supports a diversity of species that may be comparable to that of the tropical rain forests. Almost nothing is known of the numbers and the distribution of species of many microbial organisms that live in the ocean, and recent research has revealed instances where a species described as a single species on the basis of form has turned out to be several species on the basis of molecular genetics. Also, rare species may not be as uncommon in the marine environment as has been assumed; it is more likely that many have simply not been found or identified, because marine ecosystems are so vast, varied, and unexplored compared to terrestrial ecosystems. Species may disappear within the sea without a ripple observed by the human eye. It is also easier to estimate the damage done by habitat destruction in most terrestrial environments than it is to estimate the damage caused by an alteration in the biological and chemical dynamics of underwater ecosystems. The genetic variety and the vitality of marine ecosystems are suppressed by toxic chemical pollution, eutrophication1 leading to anaerobic conditions, and over-fishing. Impoverished ecosystems can be pushed to the brink of collapse. In such an unhealthy state, relatively small environmental stresses may trigger widespread biological losses, including extinction of species. However, because threats to marine biological diversity are difficult to quantify, they are often simply overlooked.

A major problem in assessing both marine and terrestrial Biodiversity is the scarcity of scientists who study the genetic and ecological relationships among living organisms, systematists,2

1 Even pollution that is not toxic can kill. Phosphates and nitrates, usually harmless, can fertilize the algae that grow in lakes or rivers. When algae grow, in the presence of sunlight, they produce oxygen. But if algae grow too much or too fast, they consume great amounts of oxygen, both when the sun is not shining and when the algae die and begin to decay. Lack of oxygen eventually suffocates other life; some living things may be poisoned by toxins contained in the algae. This process of algal overgrowth, called eutrophication, can kill life in lakes and rivers. In some cases, particular algae can also poison the drinking water of people and livestock.

2In Biology, it means someone classifying organisms: somebody who classifies organisms according to a taxonomic system.

209 Earth - Designed for Biodiversity. Life will find a Way! taxonomists1, and ecologists. Science has recently awarded so much money and prestige to unraveling the secrets of life at the molecular level (where all life is similar) that we have almost forgotten that the differences among Earth’s life forms are as important as the similarities. However, recent global views of the “living planet” have turned attention to the importance of the variety of biological functions performed by various species, since these functions maintain the geochemical cycles that make Earth hospitable to life as we know it. Until we understand these functions more fully and identify then different species, we will not be in a strong position to regulate human activities that are potentially harmful to important elements of the biosphere. In the meantime, it would be prudent for human societies to regulate the activities of their citizens with a precautionary approach, if there is a reasonable chance that an activity will cause serious environmental harm, even in the absence of scientific proof, the activity should be prohibited or modified to eliminate the potential for harm.

An immense and expensive scientific research and training effort lies ahead. Geneticists, taxonomists, and systematists are needed to describe and identify new species in marine ecosystems and to study their distribution, life stages, and gene pools. Ecologists and biographers are needed to define the biogeographic boundaries of major ecosystems and to determine the complex biological processes that regulate them. Meanwhile, it is imperative that we restore and preserve their good health and inherent diversity, for they may prove to be the most important regulators of Earth’s life support system as terrestrial ecosystems are depleted by human expansion and development. Efforts by science and government combined with environmental awareness and self-regulation by the public will be needed to accomplish the task.

1Classification, in biology, identification, naming, and grouping of organisms into a formal system based on similarities such as internal and external anatomy, physiological functions, genetic makeup, or evolutionary history. With an estimated 10 million to 13 million species on Earth, the diversity of life is immense. Determining an underlying order in the complex web of life is a difficult undertaking that encompasses advanced scientific methods as well as fundamental philosophical issues about how to view the living world. Among the scientists who work on classification problems are systematists, biologists who study the diversity of organisms and their evolutionary relationship. In a related field known as taxonomy, scientists identify new organisms and determine how to place them into an existing classification scheme.

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Species Design – How Many Species?

Species come in all shapes and sizes. The largest organism now alive is a giant Sequoia tree1, estimated at 6265 metric tons. The oldest is probably a Japanese cedar2, believed to date from roughly 7,200 years ago. The shortest lifespan is probably that of the colon bacterium, which divides under favorable conditions after 20 minutes. This also places the bacterium among the most fecund of species: within 3 hours it can increase its numbers 1000- fold, and within 1 day throw off billions of progeny. The human body contains more bacteria than there are humans on Earth. A bacterium is also small: the virus that causes foot-and-mouth disease, roughly spherical in shape, is about one-millionth of a millimeter in diameter. If the period at the end of this sentence represents an average-sized virus, then a German shepherd dog magnified by the same factor, times 5000, would be about five and half km long. By contrast, the largest animal is the blue whale, weighing 150 tons. It is not only the largest animal now alive, but the largest animal ever, 3 times heavier than the largest land animal, the brontosaurus3.

Organisms exist in clusters, apparently in accord with their biological characteristics. At a level where these differentiating characteristics become significant, clusters of organisms can be classified as species. To put it more precisely, a species is a natural biological group united by the sharing of a common pool of genes. All members of the group can interbred, and they cannot generally breed with other species in the wild to produce

1 Sequoia (tree), also known as redwoods, common name for a group of huge, majestic evergreen trees characterized by a columnar, reddish-brown trunk that can grow 30 m (100 ft) or more above a buttressed base. Sequoia species are conical in shape, with needlelike leaves and small, oval cones. The trees grow best in regions with relatively mild temperatures and moderate humidity year-round. The trees are named for the Cherokee leader Sequoyah.

2 Japanese Cedar, common name for an evergreen tree native to Japan and China. The Japanese cedar has a pyramidal shape and typically reaches a height of over 38 m (125 ft). Its dark green leaves turn reddish brown in winter. In Japan, the tree is sometimes planted around temples and tombs. A valuable timber tree, it is also used for reforestation.

3 Apatosaurus, formerly known as Brontosaurus, huge plant-eating dinosaur that lived during the late Jurassic Period, about 150 million years ago. The name Apatosaurus (Greek apatao, “deceive”; sauros, “lizard”) may refer to an early mistaken identification of Apatosaurus fossil remains with those of other extinct reptiles.

211 Earth - Designed for Biodiversity. Life will find a Way! fertile offspring. This, of course, limits the definition to bisexual organisms, so does not apply to those “lower” species that reproduce by asexual or vegetative means. There are anywhere from 5 to 10 million species on Earth. This represents a culmination of around 3.5 billion years of evolution of life forms, and 700 million years of diversification among most modern categories of life-plants, insects, mammals, birds and the rest.

Until the mid-1960s the number of species on Earth was estimated at around 3 million. Of this total, about half had been identified. That is, they had been found to exist, they had been given scientific names, and they had been described, even though 99 percent of them were known only in terms of an occasional locality and a few physical characteristics. The Earth was considered to support about 4100 known species of mammals, 8700 birds, 6300 reptiles, 3000 amphibians, 23,000 fishes, roughly 800,000 insects, and over 300,000 green plants and fungi, plus several thousand micro- organisms such as bacteria and viruses. Of these identified species, around 1 million were known to exist in temperate zones and half a million in tropical zones. As for the other one and half million species, they were believed to exist somewhere on the planet, mostly in the tropics, though no field researcher had actually come across them. To arrive at the overall figure, scientists would examine, for example, a patch of forest. They would document the number of species in it, and then make heroic generalizations about species totals in other areas of similar forests. This process enabled them to come up with informed estimates for numbers of species in all forests of that type. They did the same for all categories of global environments, or “biomes,” and thereby arrived at a figure of 3 million.

By the early 1970s a new figure was being proposed for the total number of species on Earth: 10 million. If a total figure of 10 million is accepted, almost 8 million species, or roughly six out of seven, do not have a name. Ironically, the question of how many species actually exist on Earth will probably never be resolved. The past 10 years have seen only another 100,000 species identified, bringing the total to 2 million. If an overall figure as low as 5 million is accepted, then another 3.4 million remain to be discovered, more than twice as many as have already been listed, and if the actual total is 10 million, then roughly five out of six species remain completely unknown to us. Even were the number of specialist scientists to be increased tenfold, it is doubtful if they could do more than take a

212 Planet Earth is Designed for Biodiversity solid poke at the problem before the end of the century. By that time, it is virtually certain that, unless there are massive changes in conservation attitudes and activities, a sizable proportion of all present species will have disappeared, forever.

Majority of species: Insects - Some categories of species are more numerous than others. The phylum of Arthropods (jointed feet), comprising insects, arachnids, such as spiders and ticks, millipedes and centipedes, mites and others, plus their sea-living counterparts, the lobsters, crabs and other crustaceans, accounts for four out of five of all known animal species. Among the Arthropods, around 90 percent are currently considered to be insects, while among the recognized insects, around 40 percent are beetles, and another 40 percent are made up of moths and butterflies, ants, bees, wasps and true flies.

The best-known category of Species: Vertebrates - Much better recorded, and much more regretted when they disappear, are the higher creatures, the vertebrates. Yet, even the mammals and birds are not all know to science. At least 90 percent of reptiles are thought to have been listed. By contrast, new species of fish are constantly being discovered.

Distribution of Species - By far the richest biological region on Earth is the tropics, comprising only 42 percent of the Earth’s land area, and 12 percent of the planet’s surface. This tropical diversity is due to a number of factors, notably exceptional amounts of light, warmth and moisture that foster favorable conditions for speciation, such as the large number of micro-habitats leading to a strong probability of adaptive radiation of species’ populations. Not surprisingly, the tropics are believed to contain the great bulk of all species on Earth. Similarly, the tropics feature a rich array of animal species. Roughly speaking, and as demonstrated by the evidence of well studied groups such as mammals, birds, amphibians, reptiles and butterflies, it is reckoned that for every one higher plant species there are between ten and thirty animal species. This means a planetary total of between 3 and 9 million animal species, with at least 2 million and possibly as many as 6 million of them in the tropics. In terms of plant and animal species together, the richest area anywhere is probably Amazonia, with possibly 1 million altogether. India and Southeast Asia must be reckoned a close rival, whereas tropical moist Africa is a good way behind. Biosphere – The Fragility of Our Natural Heritage

The immense diversity of the insects and flowering plants combined

213 Earth - Designed for Biodiversity. Life will find a Way! is no accident. The two empires are united by intricate symbiosis. The insects consume every anatomical part of the plants, while dwelling on them in every nook and cranny. A large fraction of the plant species depend on insects for pollination and reproduction. Ultimately they owe them their very lives, because insects turn the soil around their roots and decompose dead tissue into the nutrients required for continued growth. So important are insects and other land-dwelling arthropods that if all were to disappear, humanity probably could not last more than a few months. Most of the amphibians, reptiles, birds, and mammals would crash to extinction about the same time. Next would go the bulk of flowering plants and with them the physical structure of most forests and other terrestrial habitats of the world. The land surface would literally rot. As dead vegetation piled up and dried out, closing the channels of the nutrient cycles, other complex forms of vegetation would die off, and with them all but a few remnants of the land vertebrates. The free-living fungi, after enjoying a population explosion of stupendous proportions, would decline precipitously, and most species would perish.

The land would return to approximately its condition in early Paleozoic times, covered by mats of recumbent wind-pollinated vegetation, sprinkled with clumps of small trees and bushes here and there, largely devoid of animal life. Biologists measure the diversity of life not only by species, but by genera, families, and other higher categories of classification up to and including phyla and kingdoms. Each such higher unit is a cluster of species that resemble one another and are thought to share a common ancestry. In particular, a genus is a group of species placed together in the classification because they are very similar and of more or less immediate common ancestry. A family is a group of similar, related genera (its species overall are more distantly related than those within a genus); an order is a group of similar, related families; and so on through the hierarchy of classification all the way up to kingdoms, which embrace plants as a whole, animals as a whole, and so on. Here in briefest form is the complete taxonomic placement of the domestic cat, Felis domestica: Species – domestica: Genus – Felidae: Order – carnivore: Class – Mammalia: Phylum – Chordata: Kingdom – Animalia.

Niche - A crucial characteristic of a species is that each one occupied a particular subdivision of the environment, which supplies all of its needs.

1More formally, the niche includes how a population responds to the abundance of its resources and enemies.

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The ecologist calls this the niche1 of the species. In the classical concept of the niche, developed by Joseph Grinnell, nature was visualized to consist of numerous niches, each suitable for a particular species. Charles Elton had a similar idea: the niche is a property of the environment. Evelyn Hutchinson introduced a different concept of the niche. Although he defined it as a multidimensional resource space, his school, if I understand their writings, considered the niche more or less a property that its niche was also absent. But any naturalist studying a particular locality may discover insufficiently used resources or other wise seemingly empty niches. This is well illustrated by the complex absence of woodpeckers in the forest of New Guinea, forests that in general structure and botanical composition are very similar to the forests of Borneo and Sumatra, where, respectively, 28 and 29 species of woodpeckers occur. Furthermore, the typical woodpecker niche does not seem to be filled in the New Guinea area by any other kind of bird. The same availability of unfilled niches is demonstrated by cases where an invading species seems to have little or no impact on the population size of the previously existing members of the community. When one of a species’ requirements is not adequately met—for instance, a chemical is missing from the soil, or heat is excessive—this “limiting resource” or “limiting factor” may prevent the existence of the species at that locality. The borders of a species’ range are usually controlled by such limiting factors as temperature, rainfall, soil chemistry, and the presence of predators. On continents, as Darwin well knew, species borders often seem to be due to competition with another species.

Competition - When several individuals of the same species or of several different species depend on the same limited resource, a situation may arise that is referred to as competition. The existence of competition has been long known to naturalists; its effects were described by Darwin in considerable detail. Competition among individuals of the same species known as; intra-species competition, one of the major mechanism of natural selection, is the concern of evolutionary biology. Competition among the individuals of different species known as; interspecies competition, is a major concern in ecology. It is one of the factors controlling the size of competing populations, and in extreme cases it may lead to the extinction of one of the competing species. This was described by Darwin in the Origin for indigenous New Zealand species of animals and plants which died out when European competitors were introduced.

No serious competition exists when the major needed resource is in

215 Earth - Designed for Biodiversity. Life will find a Way! superabundant supply, as in most cases of the coexistence of herbivores. Furthermore, most species do not depend entirely on a single resource, and if the major one becomes scarce they shift to alternative resources and, in the case of competing species, usually to different ones. Competition is usually most severe among close relatives with similar demands on the environment, but it may also occur among totally unrelated forms that compete for the same resource, such as seed-eating rodents and ants. The effects of such competition are graphically demonstrated when entire faunas or floras come into competition, as happened at the end of the Pliocene when North and South America were joined at the Isthmus of Panama. It resulted in the extermination of a large fraction of the South American mammal fauna, apparently unable to withstand the competition from invading North American species, although added predation was also an important factor.

To what extent competition determines the composition of a community and the destiny of particular species has been the source of considerable controversy. The problem is that competition ordinarily cannot be observed directly but must be inferred from the spread or increase of one species and the concurrent reduction or disappearance of another species. The Russian biologist Gause performed numerous two- species experiments in the laboratory, in which one of the species became extinct when only a homogenous resource was available. On the basis of these experiments and of field observations, the so-called “the law of competitive exclusion” was formulated, according to which no two species can occupy the same niche. Numerous seeming exceptions to this “law” have since been found, but they can usually be explained as revealing that the two species, even though competing for a major joint resource, did not really occupy exactly the same niche.

Competition among species is of considerable evolutionary importance. It exerts a centrifugal selection pressure on coexisting species, resulting in morphological divergence among sympatric species as well as in a tendency to expand their niches into non-overlapping areas. Darwin referred to this as the principle of divergence. Where the competition leads to the extinction of one of the species, it has been referred to as “species selection.” However, species replacement or species turnover may describe the situation better, because selection pressures are brought to bear on the individuals of the competing species, even though the well-being and existence of entire species are affected. “Species selection” is actually a result of individual selection. Competition may occur for any needed resource. In

216 Planet Earth is Designed for Biodiversity the case of animals it is usually food; in the case of forests plants it may be light; in the case of substrate in habitants it may be space, as in many shallow-water benthic marine organisms. Indeed, it may be for any of the factors, physical as well as biotic, that are essential for organisms. Competition is usually the more severe the denser the population. Together with predation, it is the most important density-dependent factor in regulating population growth.

Plant and Animal Relationships - The relationship between the plants and animals is called symbiotic relationship, which means that both are dependent on each other. For example, the plants give off oxygen which the animals intake and the animals give off carbon dioxide, which the plants need. Many animals eat only plant materials. The energy derived from plants goes into building the bodies of these animals, and is transferred to the bodies of animals that prey on them. There are some plants that capture and digest insects. Some animals—such as aphids and certain roundworms—live in or on living plant tissues. In the food-making process, plants release free (uncombined) oxygen, without which animals could not live. In the process of respiration, animals in turn release carbon dioxide, which plants use in making food. When plants and animals die, the various chemical compounds of which their bodies are composed become part of the soil that nourishes new plants and, eventually, other animals. Many animals can live in otherwise unfavorable areas because of the moisture and shade provided by trees and other plants. Numerous insects breed under the bark of trees and shrubs. Some animals help plants to reproduce. Certain insects, birds, and mammals (bees, hummingbirds, and some bats, for example) that visit plants for food or shelter carry pollen from one flower to another, bringing about fertilization. Seeds of plants are often widely distributed by being carried in or on the bodies of animals.

Symbiosis - Sometimes animals of different species, or an animal and a plant, live together in a special relationship. Symbiosis is the general term for relationships of this type. If both partners benefit from the association, it is called mutualism. An example is the relationship between the clown fish and the sea anemone. The bright colors of the clown fish attract prey to the stinging tentacles of the sea anemone. In turn, the clown fish, which is immune to the anemone’s deadly sting, receives shelter from predators. If one partner only benefits, it is called commensalism. Barnacles, for example, live on the skin of whales. The whales are not harmed, but the barnacles are benefited by being carried to fresh feeding grounds. If the relationship benefits one and harms the other, it is called parasitism. Tapeworms are parasites that live in the intestinal tract of humans and

217 Earth - Designed for Biodiversity. Life will find a Way! other animals. Free Services from Nature – The Life Sustaining Matrix

It is easy to overlook the services that ecosystems provide humanity. They enrich the soil and create the very air we breathe. Without these amenities, the remaining tenure of the human race would be nasty and brief. The life-sustaining matrix is built of green plants with legions of microorganisms and mostly small, obscure animals, in other words, weeds and bugs. Such organisms support the world with efficiency because they are so diverse, allowing them to divide labor and swarm over every square meter of the Earth’s surface. They run the world precisely as we would wish it to be run, because humanity evolved within living communities and our bodily functions are finely adjusted to the idiosyncratic environment already created. Mother Earth, lately called Gaia, is no more than the commonality of organisms and the physical environment they maintain with each passing moment, an environment that will destabilize and turn lethal if the organisms are disturbed too much. A near infinity of other mother planets can be envisioned, each with its own fauna and flora, all producing physical environments uncongenial to human life. To disregard the diversity of life is to risk catapulting ourselves into an alien environment.

Humanity coevolved with the rest of life on this particular planet; other worlds are not in our genes. Because scientists have yet to put names on most kinds of organisms, and because they entertain only a vague idea of how ecosystems work, it is reckless to suppose that Biodiversity can be diminished indefinitely without threatening humanity itself. Field studies show that as Biodiversity is reduced, so is the quality of the services provided by ecosystems. Records of stressed ecosystems also demonstrate that the descent can be unpredictably abrupt. As extinction spreads, some of the lost forms prove to be keystone species, whose disappearance brings down other species and triggers effect through the demography of the survivors. The loss of the keystone species is like a drill accidentally striking a power-line. It causes lights to go out all over.

These services are important to human welfare. But they cannot form the whole foundation of an enduring environmental ethic. If a price can be put on something, that something can be devalued, sold, and discarded. It is also possible for some to dream that people will go on living

218 Planet Earth is Designed for Biodiversity comfortably in a biologically impoverished world. They suppose that a prosthetic environment is within the power of technology, that human life can still flourish in a completely humanized world, where medicines would all be synthesized from chemicals off the shelf, food grown from a few dozen domestic crop species, the atmosphere and climate regulated by computer-driven fusion energy, and the Earth made over until it becomes a literal spaceship and touching buttons on the bridge. Such is the terminus of the philosophy of exemptionalism: do not weep for the past humanity is a new order of life, let species die if they block progress, scientific and technological genius will find another way.

But consider: human advance is determined not by reason alone but by emotions peculiar to our species, aided and tempered by reason. What makes us people and not computers is emotion. We have little grasp of our true nature, of what it is to be human and therefore where our descendents might someday wish we had directed Spaceship Earth. The primary cause of this intellectual failure is ignorance of our origins. We did not arrive on this planet as aliens. Humanity is part of nature, a species that evolved among other species. The more closely we identify ourselves with the rest of life, the more quickly we will be able to discover the sources of human sensibility and acquire the knowledge on which an enduring ethic, a sense of preferred direction, can be built.

The human heritage does not go back only for the conventionally recognized 6,000 years or so of recorded history, but for at least 2 million years, to the appearance of the first “true” human beings, the earliest species composing the genus Homo. Across thousands of generations, the emergence of culture must have been profoundly influenced by simultaneous events in genetic evolution, especially those occurring in the anatomy and physiology of the brain. Only in the last moment of human history has the delusion arisen that people can flourish apart from the rest of the living world. Preliterate societies were in intimate contact with a bewildering array of life forms. Their minds could only partly adapt to that challenge. But they struggled to understand the most relevant parts, aware that the right responses gave life and fulfillment, the wrong ones sickness, hunger, and death. The imprint of that effort cannot have been erased in a few generations of urban existence. Biosphere is Designed for Biodiversity

Biosphere, the Earth’s relatively thin zone of air, soil, and water that is

219 Earth - Designed for Biodiversity. Life will find a Way! capable of supporting life, ranging from about 10km into the atmosphere to the deepest ocean floor. For example, near the tops of the highest mountains live lichens, crust-like combinations of primitive fungi and algae that grow on rock faces, even in the harshest of weather. Lichens are able to stand great extremes of cold, dryness, and heat. They absorb water from the air and extract nourishment from the rocks to which they cling. By secreting acids, they are able to eat into the rock face, both to secure a foothold and to gather minerals for survival. Storms help them to spread by blowing their spores to other rocks. Occasionally, whole pieces may be carried by the wind from one place to another. Lichens live at the upper limit of the biosphere, just as starfish, worms, and some other simple creatures survive at the bottom of the deepest part of the sea. Between these two extremes are the rest of the plants, mammals, fish, birds, microorganisms, and many other forms of life that populate the biosphere. For the biosphere is filled with life. Indeed, its very reason for being is to nourish and continue life. Were it not for the interplay between plants and animals, the biosphere would cease to function as a place where living things can survive.

Yet despite the presence of life in almost every part of the atmosphere, the sea, and the continents, life is not distributed uniformly over the Earth’s surface. Nor can much of it live at every level of altitude or at every depth in the sea. Because life is dependent on the driving forces of the biosphere, its winds, waters, the circulation of its gases, and on the heat of the sun, it flourishes only where these factors are most favorable. It is only a generalization to say the biosphere is filled with life. It would be more correct to say life is distributed through the biosphere and that this distribution tends to change as the forces that nourish it change. As one examines the location of life on Earth, two things become clear. The first is that life is located in regions or zones. The second is that like kinds of creatures tend to group together and to be associated with other groups of creatures necessary for survival. One group tends to live upon another. Because this is so, it is possible to look at the biosphere with two different sets of standards. One is based on the kinds of life, the other on where they are located on the Earth’s surface.

In general, life is most abundant and varied near the Earth’s equator, because the middle of the Earth is generally warmer than other regions, receives more rainfall, and hence is more hospitable to life. As one moves away from the equator toward the poles, life tends to decrease both in numbers and in numbers of species. This is true both of plant and of animal

220 Planet Earth is Designed for Biodiversity life. Such a general view of the biosphere, however, does not tell much about specific places on the Earth’s surface. To understand individual parts of the biosphere better, scientists have sought to relate similar kinds of communities and their place in the biosphere into a unified view of the living world. This study is called ecology1. Ecology is a much-used and much- abused word. Often taken to mean the conservation of natural life, strictly defined it is the science of examining the places where life exists and the different, but often interrelated, kinds of life in such places. The first great ecological division of the Earth’s surface is that of realms. Realms are geographic divisions based on the species found in them and not duplicated in other realms. They were first suggested by the English naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace, one of the proposed, with Charles Darwin, of the theory of natural selection. Wallace was able to draw a line dividing parts of Asia and parts of the East Indies (now Indonesia) by charting the location of species within them. The line separated one set of species from another. Since then, ecologists have defined six realms:

1. The Nearctic – All of the lands of North America roughly north of Central America.

2. The Palaearctic – Europe, most of Asia (except parts of the Arabian Peninsula, India, and the Malay Peninsula), and including North Africa, north of the Sahara.

3. The Oriental – India, the Malay Peninsula, Western Indonesia, a small part of Southern China, and the Pacific Islands north of New Guinea.

4. The Australian – Australia, New Zealand, New Guinea, and adjacent islands, including eastern Indonesia.

5. The Ethiopian – Africa south of the Sahara and parts of the Arabian Peninsula.

6. The Neotropical – South America, the West Indies, and Central America.

Though ecological realms are of importance to ecologists, they have

1 Ecology is the relationship of living things to each other and to what’s around them. So, if you are learning about what kinds of relationships fish have with other animals (including us!) and plants in their neighborhood, then you are learning about ecology.

221 Earth - Designed for Biodiversity. Life will find a Way! little meaning to the average person. What is more understandable to them are the zones within each realm, called biomes. There are eight biomes: coral reef, desert, tropical forest, temperate deciduous forest, rocky coast, tundra, grasslands, and the sea. Although not all realms contain all eight biomes, where biomes exist they are similar in climate, plant and animal life and geologic conditions. Within biomes are the habitats, the ecological niches where individual species exist. Habitats may be very small, many different kinds of mites, for example, may be found on a single bird, or they may be quite large. Habitats should not be confused with communities, places where combinations of different species live together in the same general area, often dependent upon one another for survival. Communities usually are in a state of constant change. Often one species is arriving as another is disappearing. Change may result from the natural forces of the environment or, more frequently today, from the intervention of man, a creature which transcends all realms, biomes, habitats, and communities.

When change takes place and one species follows another in a community, a succession is said to have occurred. Succession is taking place all the time in the biosphere. It usually is unpredictable. When it causes the disappearance of a species, it is said to have caused extinction. Extinction does not take place frequently, but it, too, is happening all the time. Not all successions are destructive to a community, however. In some cases, its various members are able to achieve an equilibrium; a balance, in which the different life forms can exist side by side in a habitat, each with a stable population. When this happens, a community is said to have achieved climax state. Nature seems to seek the establishment of a climax community1, although it seldom achieves it. Even when it does, the balance between the forces of the biosphere and the various populations in the community often is a fragile one, easily disturbed by the removal or addition of only a few factors.

The balance of natural forces in communities affects life in the biosphere not only horizontally, but also vertically. Life is much more limited vertically, however, than it is laterally over the Earth’s surface. In general, land life is more abundant at sea level and declines in variety and numbers as one rises above this point. Many species of both plants and animals live at or

1 A climax community is a stable group of plants and animals that is the end result of the successional process.

222 Planet Earth is Designed for Biodiversity near sea level on most of the continents, but the higher one climbs along the sides of mountains, the less likely are there to be many different kinds of life. At the upper edge of the vertical development of life, mostly lichens and low shrubs, mountain sheep, and a few other hardy animals are likely to be found. Beyond this, the highest mountains are mostly sterile, except for some microorganisms. Just as it is possible to outline life zones horizontally on Earth, so can the levels of life on mountainsides be studied. Life zones on mountainsides sometimes are named for their dominant tree, but this is only one system of naming vertical divisions of life.

The vertical zones of life on mountainsides tend to overlap. And sometimes creatures and plants in one zone may be found on the edges of another, but plants, at least, are confined to their levels by sunlight, temperature, and the availability of water and animal life often is limited by the plant life available for food. Mountain life zones, however, are not always uniform. Because mountain slopes tend to cut off rainfall by precipitating clouds as clouds are pushed upward by the shape of the mountain itself, often the side of the range away from the prevailing storms is arid. This is true of the Sierra Nevada of California. Its western slopes receive much more rain and snow than its eastern sides. The result is a much thinner distribution of life on the mountainside away from the prevailing moisture, a distribution that finally trails off into desert.

The direction of the prevailing wind, the location of mountains near the ocean, the amount of annual sunlight and other similar factors make for great differences in the ability of many parts of the Earth to sustain life. The Sahara Desert, for example, lies near the equator in Africa, but is dry, hot, and desolate. One other major biome exists in the world, the ocean. It is very special part of the Earth. Not only is it vast, but much of it remains unexplored. The Earth’s last great frontier, it contains an immense variety of life and many different kinds of conditions. Only in the past half century have men learned much about its depths. At times the ecology of the sea seems confusing and changeable, but like the land surfaces of the world, it is as ordered and zoned as the rest of the biosphere.

Levels of life in the upper ocean, the easiest to sample, have been the first to be explored, and some knowledge of the near surface creatures of the sea is now available. Surface life depends on how vertical ocean currents move. During winter months, storms churn the sea, transferring sediments near the bottom of the surface, where they can be consumed by creatures there. Surface life then becomes more abundant. In the spring as storms abate, food begins to sink to the bottom again, and life declines.

223 Earth - Designed for Biodiversity. Life will find a Way!

In the fall, the churning of the ocean begins again, and a new food supply arrives. During the late fall and winter, sunlight reaching the sea is less, however, because of shorter days, and the simple plantlike creatures of the surface grow more slowly because of this. Humus: Detritus – Resurrection Factory

“Worms have played a more important part in the history of the world than most persons would at first suppose,” Darwin wrote in the conclusion of his book, “The Formation of Vegetable Mould.”

When a plant or animal dies, it leaves behind nutrients and energy in the organic material that comprised its body. Scavengers and detritivores can feed on the carcasses, but they will inevitably leave behind a considerable amount of unused energy and nutrients. Unused energy and nutrients will be present both in the unconsumed portions (bones, feathers or fur in the case of animals, wood and other indigestable litter in the case of plants) and in the feces of the scavengers and detritivores. Decomposers complete decomposition by breaking down this remaining organic matter. Decomposers eventually convert all organic matter into carbon dioxide (which they respire) and nutrients. This releases raw nutrients (such as nitrogen, phosphorus, and magnesium) in a form usable to plants and algae, which incorporate the chemicals into their own cells. This process resupplies nutrients to the ecosystem, in turn allowing for greater primary production. Although decomposers are generally located on the bottom of ecosystem diagrams such as food chains, food webs, and energy pyramids, decomposers in the biosphere are crucial to the environment. By breaking down dead material, they provide the nutrients that other organisms need to survive. As decomposers feed on dead organisms, they leave behind nutrients. These nutrients become part of the soil. Therefore, more plants can grow and thrive.Bacteria are the primary decomposers of dead animals (carrion) and are the primary decomposers of dead plant matter (litter) in some ecosystems.

Humus - Compost that is readily capable of further decomposition is sometimes referred to as effective or active humus, though again scientists would say that if it is not stable, it’s not humus at all. This kind of compost, rich in plant remains and fulvic acids, is an excellent source of plant nutrients, but of little value regarding long-term soil structure and tilth. Stable (or passive) humus consisting of humic acids and humins, on the other hand, are so highly insoluble (or so tightly bound to clay particles and hydroxides) that they cannot be penetrated by microbes and therefore

224 Planet Earth is Designed for Biodiversity are greatly resistant to further decomposition. Thus stable humus adds few readily available nutrients to the soil, but plays an essential part in providing its physical structure. Some very stable humus complexes have survived for thousands of years. Microscopic world of soil and the microscopic ecology—the earthworms and other invisible and invisible creatures that inhabit the Earth is largely a mystery. Over the years, the study of earthworm behavior was eclipsed by the study of its role in the soil. To understand what’s happening underground, we have to know more about this creature that lives below our feet, selectively drawing organic matter down from the surface creating pockets of air everywhere it goes, sifting and digesting particles of Earth. The first time I held a worm in my hand, I was surprised at how light it was, how harmless. It didn’t slither around or try to get away. Instead it lay curled in a near-perfect circle, as if it had already accepted its fate. The worm I held was a red wiggler, Latin name Eisenia fetida. It is in many ways a quintessential worm, small and reddish pink, with faint stripes between each segment. It is a master composter, preferring a heap of rotting garbage to just about anything else. Dig around in pig slop, barnyard manure, or a mound of damp leaves, and you’ll probably find red wigglers, eating and laying cocoons in the mess. But the worms themselves are not messy; this one slipped out of its pile of rubbish perfectly clean. With one finger, I poked at the worm in my hand. It was completely limp. I could see a purplish vein running along the length of it, just beneath the skin. I curled my palm around the worm, folding it in half and in half again. It didn’t react. I began to wonder how a creature this weak could do anything, even move through dirt. Then a few seconds later, it seemed tired of this expedition. It raised one end up—the head, I suppose—and extended one segment at a time into the air. Now, finally, it moved and left a little slime in my palm. I shuddered but didn’t drop it. This slime, this worm mucus, was its way of reacting to stress—stress that I had brought on by pulling it out of its bedding and exposing it to light. The worm moved to the edge of my hand, and this time pointed its head down toward the bin, towards home. It was intent on getting back. Just then it looked as if it were capable of doing something after all. It moved with purpose, seeking to escape, trying to return to its familiar habitat. I dropped it into the bin, where it ducked under a layer of damp newspaper and disappeared.

I held worms quite often after that—not just from the bin, although I did get into the habit of pulling four or five out at a time and letting them

225 Earth - Designed for Biodiversity. Life will find a Way! wiggle through my fingers. How could such an insignificant creature capture the attention of a distinguished scientist like Darwin? He knew from an early age that earthworms were capable of far more than most scientists gave them credit for. He recognized, in a way that no scientists before him had, that they possessed an ability to bring about gradual geological changes over decades, even centuries. This notion—that the smallest changes could result in enormous outcomes—fit perfectly with his work on evolution and the origin of species.

Of the three major categories of earthworms, endogeic earthworms are probably the least familiar to most people, for good reason: they rarely come to the surface. Many endogeic species inhabit the rhizosphere1, the area immediately around the plant’s roots, where they feed on soil that has been enriched by decaying roots, bacteria, and fungi. Worms in this category are mainly geophagous, meaning that they feed almost entirely on soil, although they do seek out Earth that is relatively higher in organic matter. Because they stay below the surface, they are less likely to be harmed when agricultural fields are tilled or when the ground is disturbed during planting. That makes them a popular choice for farmers who want to inoculate their soil with earthworms. These worms can build tunnels ten feet belowground, where they may encounter tree roots but few other plant roots. These deep burrowing worms are among the only living creatures that can survive at such a depth. Beyond that, only microscopic organisms like bacteria are found, and they disappear almost three km below the Earth’s surface, where temperatures reach 160 degrees Celsius and life in any form is difficult to support.

Deep-burrowing worms, then, inhabit a world that would seem stark and barren to us. For their size, they are surprisingly delicate. One such worm, Megascolides australis, can grow to several feet in length but its skin is so fragile that it could burst if it is handled too much. Its tunnels are so large and well lined with coelomic fluid that some Australian farmers can hear a gurgling sound coming from deep within the Earth when the worm is on the move. Another giant worm in Oregon, Driloleirus macelfreshi, measures two or three feet long and is known for its coelomic fluid, which smells distinctly of lilies. Both of these species survive only in

1 When we think of plants we generally think only of what we see above ground level: leaves, stems, flowers, etc. However, just beneath the soil surface lies a stupendous factory buzzing with life-essential biological processes of incredible complexity. This zone of intensive activity is called the rhizosphere (“root-zone”).

226 Planet Earth is Designed for Biodiversity undisturbed habitats; both are nearing extinction due to the encroachment of cities and roads. They are sensitive to vibrations on the surface of the soil and can detect a bulldozer at work. They move quickly through their burrows to escape notice, making it nearly impossible for scientists to collect specimens or study them in the wild. Still, they can live for many years, possibly decades.

It has taken over a hundred years for scientists to put together this portrait of earthworm’s life. Now what emerges about life underground is an image like a map of a city in which the inhabitants build roads as they go, choose neighborhoods based on the abundance of food and availability of damp, dark quarters, and carry microorganisms in their guts like passengers on a bus. Earthworms have been used as biomonitors at toxic waste sites, where they quickly take up pollutants into their bodily tissue, they are particularly known for their ability to absorb metals like lead, often surviving long enough to be collected by monitors and tested. In this way, worms become the canary in the coal mine, giving a clear picture of the extent to which chemicals present in the soil or groundwater are affecting soil organisms and, by extension, other animals living at the site. Over the years, protocols have been developed for introducing earthworm species into contaminated areas and testing them for exposure to pollution. Some of the most exciting new work with earthworms goes beyond using them simply to monitor pollution. Scientists are now exploring ways in which they can be used to break down toxins and actually clean up pollution. Earthworms may be perfectly suited to play an even more intimate role in the lives of humans—that is, to help process sewage.

Sometimes I wonder if it is too much of an imposition on earthworms to push them into polluted ground, or to force-feed them a particular bacteria because we’d like to see it spread around. Darwin noticed that humans tend to exploit any characteristic for their own good, writing that “in the process of selection man almost invariably wishes to go to an extreme point.” Are we taking advantage of earthworms? Shouldn’t we clean up our own messes, or learn not to make them in the first place? Earthworms are the custodians of the planet and he is the real steward of the Earth. They were here for millions of years before we came along. They survived the extinction that killed off the dinosaurs; I imagine they’d do just fine if something came along and wiped us out, too. Darwin realized that earthworms, collectively, were a force to be reckoned with. Whether or not it is ethical or wise for us to enlist their help in fertilizing our farms, or cleaning up our pollution

227 Earth - Designed for Biodiversity. Life will find a Way! and garbage, we should remember one thing: we need worms more than they need us. Magic Kingdom of Marine Biodiversity

James E. Lovelock’s Gaia hypothesis views the Earth, with its biota, rocks, air, and oceans, as a single intercordinated entity and suggests that the Earth’s environment has coevolved with its biota. Although much of the theory is controversial and it is better applied on geologic time scales, it provides a useful metaphor for considering interactions between the Earth’s environment and biota in the short term. There are numerous important feedback mechanisms between the living and nonliving components of the Earth. In the face of environmental change, the loss of genetic diversity weakens a population’s ability to adapt; the loss of species diversity weakens the community’s ability to adapt; the loss of functional diversity weakens an ecosystem’s ability to adapt; and the loss of ecological diversity weakens the whole biosphere’s ability to adapt. Because biological and physical processes are interactive, losses of biodiversity may also precipitate further environmental change. The progressively destructive routine results in impoverished biological systems, which are susceptible to collapse when faced with further environmental changes.

In terrestrial system, among the better-known examples of feedback mechanisms is the potential role of the forests, especially tropical rain forests, in regulating Global Warming. Forests move vast volumes of water from the soil to the atmosphere through the process called evapo- transpiration: roots absorb water, which is then moved through the trees to the leaves, where it evaporates through minute openings in the leaf surface. The rate of this process will increase in response to global warming of the atmosphere. This process is predicted to give rise to more clouds, which shade the Earth and reduce temperatures, thus moderating the warming effect. When these forests are destroyed, the capacity of the biosphere to maintain favorable conditions is lost. As a result, global warming can proceed at an accelerated pace, and species unable to tolerate or adapt to the temperature change will be lost.

There are numerous examples like this in both terrestrial and oceanic systems. One marine example comes directly from Lovelock and his collaborators. When the theory was introduced, it was proposed that a mechanism to account for the unexplained but measurable movement of sulfur from the sea to the land would be the production of a volatile sulfur compound by marine organisms. Indeed, it has now been discovered that

228 Planet Earth is Designed for Biodiversity certain species of photoplankton (floating microscopic algae) in the sea produce just such a compound, dimethyl sulfide (DMS), in large quantities. Furthermore, it has been suggested that production of this compound will increase an average global temperatures rise due to the greenhouse effect; the substance in turn, forms an aerosol with droplets that act as nuclei for cloud formation, and the increased cloud cover will have a cooling effect. There is further evidence of the interaction between ocean biota and global climate change. The geological record in ocean sediments and polar ice sheets suggests that variations in both the carbon dioxide and the climate are linked in some way to changes in the amount of carbon being taken out of the atmosphere and laid down, as organic matter or shells, in marine sediments.

It is not known just how climate change and change in the ocean carbon cycle are related, but there has been scientific speculation that increased productivity of the oceans has caused global cooling by reducing atmospheric carbon dioxide. In light of biological feedback mechanisms and the importance of marine biological communities to the geochemical cycles of the planet, efforts to save Biodiversity at some level can be justified on stronger grounds than the one often proposed, e.g., the potential sources of food and medicines for humans. The very existence of life as we know it, and certainly the human species, depends on the ability of the biosphere to tune the chemical and geochemical cycles of the Earth. In addition to the ecological importance of maintaining the diversity of biological functions in ecosystems, both terrestrial and oceanic, there are more specifically human-centered arguments for maintain Biodiversity. Among the potential uses of a wide variety of species are the following source of food; genetic stock for agricultural. Aquacultural, and silvicultural breeding1; source of genetic material for

1 Silvics is the study of individual tree species. When we study silvics, our goal is to understand how a tree species grows, reproduces and responds to environmental factors. You can also call this “autecology,” which is the ecology of an individual species or taxonomic group and how it responds to changes in the environment. Silviculture is the application of silvics knowledge to manipulate forest stands. Silviculture is also called applied forest ecology. Think of silviculture as the theory and practice of controlling forest establishment, composition, structure, and growth. Lots of natural resource managers practice silviculture – wildlife biologists, park and campground managers, and of course, foresters. Silviculture concepts and principles aren’t just for growing timber; for example, you might want bigger trees in your picnic area, or want to attract certain species of wildlife to your woodlot. You are using silviculture to achieve these non-timber forest management goals.

229 Earth - Designed for Biodiversity. Life will find a Way! biotechnology applications; source of important drugs and other medical uses; and source of materials used in food processing and other industrial applications.

The importance of food from the sea varies considerably from nation to nation. In the west, for instance, seafood tends to be highly priced and is generally not a staple food item, but it provides a livelihood for many fishermen serving both local and export markets. Coastal fisheries are seasonal and often local, and are highly susceptible to human impacts, especially pollution. Offshore fisheries supply national and international markets and suffer more and more from over-fishing. In contrast, in many of the coastal and insular developing countries, seafood is a staple and constitutes a large portion of the economy. These fisheries are susceptible to over-fishing, bad management practices and pollution from development. Six of the top 11 fish-harvesting nations are developing countries such as China, India, Peru, Chile, Korea and Indonesia. The most heavily fished areas in the world oceans are the northeast Atlantic and the northwest Pacific, which are fished by technologically advanced fishing fleets from Europe and Japan, respectively. In fact, the top five fish-harvesting countries of the developed world such as Japan, Soviet union, Norway, Denmark and USA, frequent these waters.

The world Resources Institute estimates that about 9,000 species of fish currently are exploited, with only 22 of these harvested in global-scale quantities (exceeding 100,00 metric tons annually). Five types of fish such as, herring, cod, jack, redfish, and mackerel account for about half of the annual world catch. There was a tremendous growth in fisheries in the sixties and seventies, but that growth has slowed down or reversed due to over-fishing. Coral reefs are ecosystems of the highest Biodiversity that support fisheries, and fishing pressures are intense in most reef areas of the world. Unlike the fisheries based on populations of schooling fish, such as sardines and tuna, the reef fisheries are based on numerous non-schooling species, each of which exists in relatively small populations. Although these systems support a high diversity, the productivity of any one species is not high enough to support intensive fishing. This is especially a problem where an export fishery is focused on only a few species, such as jack, grouper, snapper, and lobster, which are rapidly over-fished. However, this is not the only problem coral reefs are facing. Fish and invertebrate communities is nearly all reef areas are being overexploited because local fisheries are feeding expanding populations and because of extensive collecting for aquarium and seashell trade.

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During the fifties and sixties, there was a great deal of public speculation about how the oceans would solve future world’s food problems! It was predicted that new food sources would be exploited and that large-scale sea farming would become popular. This prophecy has not turned out to be true, and such speculation is no longer popular. Most fisheries have reached or surpassed their sustainable yield and many are severely depressed. A few species formerly treated as “trash fish” have been marketed, but there has been little other development of new food sources. Sea plants have not proved to be a major food worldwide, as once hypothesized, but they continue to be harvested and marketed in cultures that have historically used them (e.g., Japan). The market for sea plants in other countries has increased, but primarily as a speciality item in “health food” or “gourmet food” outlets. It is uncommon for marine organisms to produce toxins; these are functional in repelling predators or in giving the species a competitive advantage by releasing a substance that retards the growth of another species. As a direct consequence of this “chemical warfare,” there is a wide variety of biologically produced substances from the sea that have medicinal value for humans. Derivatives from marine flora and fauna include numerous drugs with various properties; antibiotics (both antimicrobial and antiviral), tumor inhibitors, coagulants and anticoagulants, and substances used in treating heart or nerve ailments.

Examples of marine organisms with potential medicinal substances include several algae that have antibiotic and anticarcinogenic properties. Corals, sea anemones, sponges, and mollusks all include species exhibiting antibiotic activity. The porcupine fish and the puffer fish have yielded symptomatic treatments for terminal cancer, and shark’s liver contains substances that enhance resistance to cancer. Sea cucumbers, sea snakes, menhaden, and stingrays produce materials useful in the treatment of an array of cardiovascular ailments, and extracts from seaweeds and octopus treat hypertension. Antiviral substances isolated from seaweeds are active against viruses causing cold sores, eye infections, and venereal disease, and a sponge has yielded a substance effective against Viralm encephalitis1. It is usually caused by one of several viral infections, so it’s sometimes referred

1 Encephalitis, or inflammation of the brain tissue, is rare, affecting about 1 in 200,000 people each year in the United States. When it strikes, it can be very serious, causing personality changes, seizures, weakness, and other symptoms depending on the part of the brain affected. Children, the elderly, and those with a weak immune system are most vulnerable.

231 Earth - Designed for Biodiversity. Life will find a Way! to as viral encephalitis. Thus, it may be that the sea will lead the way to the successful treatment of viruses, including the common cold. Seaweeds have proven particularly useful to humans even beyond their importance as sources of drugs. Their nutritive properties, especially their vitamin and mineral content, make them useful as food or as food additives.

Other seaweed derivatives are used in food processing, alginates, agars, and carageenans being the most common of these, and in the production of cosmetics, shampoos, and detergents. In these applications, seaweed extracts are most commonly used as thickening agents and emulsifiers. They are also found in pharmaceutical products as non-active ingredients or digestive aids. In addition, seaweed tissue may provide a source of fibers, plastics, waxes, lubricants, and even paper. With the advent of genetic engineering there is an opportunity to enhance production of marine metabolites useful in medicine. Of the ten the need for important genes for biotechnology is used as a justification for preserving genetic and species diversity. For example, one scientist has written that biotechnology offers a “strong foundation for exploitation of biologically active compounds already known to occur in the sea and for further exploration into the recesses of the world oceans for compounds and food sources as yet undiscovered.” However, the dangers of genetic manipulation should be recognized, and biotechnology may prove to be as much a threat to natural species and genetic diversity as it is a justification for maintaining that diversity. The release of individuals with artificially composed genetic makeup into wild populations of the same species could upset the natural distribution of that species as well as the competitive interactions with other species, destabilizing natural biological communities. Terra Incognita and Vita Incognita

Coincident with concerns about the accelerating loss of species and habitats has been a growing appreciation and awareness of the importance of biological diversity to planetary health and thus to human survival and well-being. Much has been written recently about the diversity of terrestrial organisms, particularly the exceptionally rich life associated with tropical rain-forest habitats. This is understandable, given the rapid destruction of these areas coupled with the knowledge that, while about 7 percent of the land is occupied by tropical rain forests, about half the known species occur within these extraordinarily diverse systems. Relatively little has been said, however, about diversity of life in the sea,

232 Planet Earth is Designed for Biodiversity although coral reef systems are sometimes favorably compared to rain forests as aquatic examples of species-rich ecosystems. Aliens exploring Earth would probably give priority to the planet’s dominant, most distinctive feature, the ocean. As terrestrial residents, our understandably biased perspective sometimes gets in the way of a true evaluation of global issues. From afar, it is easy to see that land masses occupy only about one-third of the surface. Measured from the standpoint of three-dimensional living space, the ocean part of the biosphere is more than two orders of magnitude larger than the terrestrial part and contains more than 90 percent of life on Earth, the bulk of the planet’s biomass. Viewed historically, the Earth’s oceans dominate again, with life in the sea preceding the appearance of terrestrial life by several hundred million years.

One of the great wonders of life is that every individual is different from every other individual. Not just every human being, but every ant, every octopus, and perhaps every leaf on every tree has distinctive quirks and characteristics. There are patterns, of course, and within members of a given species, genetic information flows and maintains a degree of relatedness, of similarity that is perpetuated. The fact that half of the known species are thought to inhabit the world’s rain forests does not seem surprising considering the huge numbers of insects that comprise the bulk of species. Entomologist E.O. Wilson reports finding forty-three ant species belonging to twenty-six genera from a single rain-forest tree in Peru. Every species is different from every other species may be from every other ant genus or species, their genetic makeup constrains them to be “anta” and, in a broader sense, to share with the 750,000 or so species of insects information that insists they must be insects. The tremendous diversity all reflects variations on the limited themes available and special to the insect.

If this broad categories, phyla, classes, and such are given somewhat greater weight than the splintery ends of diversity recognized as species, then the greatest diversity of life is unquestionably in the sea. Nearly every major division of plant and animal kind has at least some representation in the sea, and many are principally or wholly, marine. In contrast, only about half the major divisions of life are represented in terrestrial habitats. As an example of this broad-division diversity, consider a bleak-appearing rock, measuring about 20 centimeters by 20 centimeters by 10 centimeter and brought to the surface from 200 meters depth along a steep ocean wall in the Bahamas. At first glance, the rock looks as though it might have been brought from the moon, but upon close inspection, representatives

233 Earth - Designed for Biodiversity. Life will find a Way! from eleven animal phyla and three divisions of plants are inventoried: several foraminifers, sponges, coral, a nematode, lamp shells, encrusting bryozoans, a tiny snail, an isopod and several amphipods, polychaete worms, a sipunculid worm, and a kind of flat crinoids. Plants include filamentous bluegreens, red algae, and at least three species of green algae.

In a microcosm, this small rock contains much of the history of life on the planet, reflected in the genetic codes of creatures that were more than just a little different from one another. Such large scale diversity cannot be found in any non-marine area of comparable size. To appreciate fully the diversity and abundance of life in the sea, it helps to think small. Every spoonful of ocean water contains life, small bacterial cells, plus assorted microscopic plants and animals, including larvae of organisms ranging from sponges and corals to starfish and clams and much, much more. In effect, the entire liquid mantle embracing the planet is a living minestrone, with most of the bits small or microscopic, in addition to a fine assortment of more obvious ocean dwellers, seaweed, shrimp, krill, crabs, fish, dolphins, and a host of little-known categories of plant and animal life.

Most people ignore microbeasts in part, perhaps, because of the size bias that comes from being larger than most creatures. Humans are giants, among the upper 5 percent of species in terms of size, along with whales, horses, and hippopotamuses. Yet, as microbiologists are fond of pointing out, most of the biochemical action that shapes the biological and much of the physical and chemical character of the planet is accomplished by microbes, largely ocean-dwelling microbes. Physiologically, these small creatures, above water and below, are more diverse than plants and animals combined, with capabilities and life-styles that range from being free-living, photosynthetic, and chemosynthetic autotrophs to those that live on and decompose all naturally produced organic materials. Even on land, the diversity of life is dominated by small, if not microscopic, creatures. Among the nearly million and a half organisms identified, classified, and dignified with a name as distinctly recognized species, insects outnumber all others combined. Some scientists believe that there may be many millions of insect species not yet described, based on the incredible diversity discovered in certain recently explored rain-forest habitats and recognizing that relatively little effort has been concentrated on surveying micro-fauna, as compared to the attention given to certain favored groups such as mammals and birds.

234 Planet Earth is Designed for Biodiversity

What new discoveries await? As biochemical techniques are refined for determining what constitute plant and animal “species” will the sea be found to contain significantly higher species diversity than presently imagined? Are more “living fossils,” cruising the great depths or perched within as-yet-to-be-discovered deep-sea crevices? Will the special kinds of physiology, life-style, reproductive strategies, behavioral patterns, complex interrelationships, and other such factors special to marine organisms be counted as significant diversity issues? Most important, perhaps, may be the discovery of an enhanced awareness of the need to protect marine biodiversity described by scientists. In a frightningly short time, the accumulated heritage of all Earth history is being modified; some of it is used up, rendered extinct, gone forever. Life is change, and extinction is by no means a new phenomenon, but a single species causing swift and widespread destruction appears to be unique. This type of extinction is surely not in the best interests of that species or of the planet as a whole.

Geologist Don Eicher, in his slim volume “Geologic Time,” suggests a time model with special reference to the significance of life in the sea that gives us a perspective on where we are now. He compresses all of the 4.5 billion years of history into a single year. On that basis, the oldest rocks known date from mid-march. Living things first appeared in the sea in May. Land plants and animals emerged in late November and the richly vegetated swamps that formed the Pennsylvanian coral deposits flourished for four days in early December. Dinosaurs became dominant in mid-December, but disappeared on the twenty-sixth, at about the time that the Rocky Mountains first uplifted. Manlike creatures first appeared sometime during the evening of the thirty-first, and Columbus discovered America about three seconds before midnight. Viewed this way not only humankind but all land creatures relatively speaking are newcomers. Broad categories of plants and animals were thriving in the world’s oceans long before insects evolved, before birds, mammals, ferns, flowers, trees, and other creatures that most tend to think of as “Life on Earth.”

At least some representatives of most of the divisions of life that have occupied space on Earth are still represented in the sea, although in some cases by only a few kinds, which are precariously vulnerable to what we do to them, don’t do during the next few decades. Ammonites, once a large and diverse group of marine mollusks, are now known only from fossils and, by inference, from a few living relatives, the Nautilus species. Unfortunately, Nautilus shells are considered beautiful, and huge numbers are taken for decorative purposes. Merostomates, once a dominant group of marine arachnids and perhaps the ancestors of spiders, are presently

235 Earth - Designed for Biodiversity. Life will find a Way! known only from four species of the horseshoe crab. Alas, they reproduce in shallow, now largely polluted bays, and the adults are gathered for fertilizer and animal food with little respect for their ancient heritage or precious cargo of distinctively different genetic information. They have persisted miraculously through hundreds of millions of years but may not survive the century. Most people, even dedicated conservationists, do not view protection of marine species and ecosystems, except perhaps dolphins, seals, whales, and now some coral reefs, with the same sense of urgency accorded to more familiar, seemingly more threatened terrestrial species and systems. The magnitude of ignorance about the ocean and the diverse life therein is vast; the losses are real, immanent, and permanent. With care, we urge, we can, we must, find ways to maintain this irreplaceable living heritage. Estuaries and Wetlands – Biodiversity’s Nightmare

Estuaries and associated wetlands lie at the fringes of the marine environment, inlets, embayments, river mouths, lagoons, and small enclosed seas, where influences of inflowing river water as well as ocean tides are at play. These ecosystems are individually characterized by relatively low species diversity, but they are functionally complex. Collectively, estuaries around the world support an important diversity of plant and animal species, some of which include early life stages of migratory species. In fact, much of the biological production of an estuary or wetland is carried out of that system by tides or migrating animals. Estuaries and wetlands have been extensively studied because of their high productivity, their importance to commercial and sport fisheries (and “game” birds), and their use and abuse by coastal developers. The species diversity of most of these systems is well known because it is relatively easy to study. Most ecological studies have focused on the productivity and the variety of biological processes occurring in these ecosystems. There has also been some discussion about the processes that control species diversity.

As is generally the case with low diversity ecosystems, the physical environment dominates the biology. It has been suggested that the low species diversity characteristic of estuaries can be attributed to the relative inconsistency and unpredictability of the physical environment. There are generally large gradients of salinity, which may fluctuate with the tides, and at middle to high latitudes there are large seasonal variations in temperature and light. In addition, there may be periods of anoxia as well as fluxes of suspended sediments. The fluctuating environmental

236 Planet Earth is Designed for Biodiversity conditions lead to physiological stress, so the species that do well in these systems must be highly adaptable to varying physical conditions. It is, however, important to emphasize that the low diversity does not imply lack of stability. On the contrary, estuarine systems are considered highly resilient and resistant and therefore stable. Another factor hypothesized to explain the low species diversity in estuaries is their relatively short geological life span. Due to waxing and waning sea levels and ice ages and the drift of continents, estuaries tend to be quite young geologically, so that they have not had enough time to establish more complex communities.

A consistent gradient of species diversity is associated with the salinity gradient in estuaries. Diversity declines progressively from the coastal sea into less saline (brackish) waters. Most of the decline is due to the disappearance of whole families of species. Once fresh water is reached, the diversity increases again. A few estuaries have salinities higher than typical ocean waters, and these also tend to support lower species diversity. Salt marshes, mangroves, and eelgrass beds may be viewed as special kinds of estuaries, each dominated by seed-producing, vascular plants specially adapted to living partially or entirely submerged in shallow saline waters. They are often located along the edges of large estuaries such as bays and inland seas. The dominant plants are more highly evolved than algae and come from plants more commonly terrestrial. In addition to the one or few species of dominant vascular plants, there may be many species of attached or drifting algae, which contribute significantly to the species diversity. There may be hundreds of species of algae associated with salt marshes, but they do not support a diverse consumer fauna.

Among the most important characteristics of the various types of estuarine biomes is their role as nursery grounds for many species of coastal and oceanic fish and shellfish. Consequently, environmental changes that affect larvae and juveniles here can greatly impact the populations and distribution of species found as adults in other biomes. As a result of their shallow waters and restricted circulation and the coastal developments often associated with them, these ecosystems are highly susceptible to environmental degradation from human activities. Habitat destruction from channelization, drainage, filling, and water diversion is not uncommon. In addition, eutrophication and toxic pollution have become extreme in many cases, and turbidity is increased with the influx of suspended sediments from erosion and construction along inflowing rivers and on the

237 Earth - Designed for Biodiversity. Life will find a Way! estuaries themselves. These disturbances generally limit species diversity and reduce ecosystem stability. Many salt marshes, mangroves, and eelgrass beds have permanently disappeared because of human activities, and countless estuaries are impoverished or dying. Biodiversity- The Apex of Evolution

All life on Earth is the result of evolution by natural selection. When humans talk about age, we talk about an individual’s life from birth to death. But, our real biological age tells altogether a different story. Each one of us, is the result of 15 billion years of evolution, therefore when someone asks you next time, how old are you? You better say that you are fifteen billion years old. Our life started in the big bang, nurtured in hydro thermal vents, almost dead in extinctions, but rose in speciation; here we are from one cell to 10 trillion cells. From here, obviously life’s journey will continue to explore new frontiers. The word “evolution” was introduced into science by Charles Bonnet for the pre-formational theory of embryonic development, but developmental biology no longer uses the word in this sense. Evolution has also been used for three concepts of the history of life on Earth and is still used for one of them.

Transmutational Evolution – It is also known as transmutationism. It refers to the sudden origin of a new type of individual through a major mutation or saltation; this individual becomes the progenitor of a new species through the descendants. Saltational ideas, although not under the designation evolution, had been proposed from the Greeks to Maupertuis (1750). Even after the publication of Darwin’s “Origin,” saltational theories were adopted by many evolutionists—including Darwin’s friend T.H. Huxley—who could not accept the concept of natural selection.

Transformational Evolution – By contrast, it refers to the gradual change of an object, such as the development of a fertilized egg into an adult. All stars experience transformational evolution, as from a yellow to a red star. Nearly all changes in the inanimate world, such as the rise of a mountain range owing to tectonic forces or its subsequent destruction by erosion, are of this nature, if they are directional at all. As for the animate world, Lamarck’s theory of evolution, which preceded Darwin’s, was transformational. According to Lamarck, evolution consists of the origin by spontaneous generation of a simple new organism, an infusorian, and its gradual change into a higher, more perfect species. Lamarck’s theory of transformational evolution, as presented in his “Philosophic Zoologique”

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(1809), although at one time widely adopted, has been replaced in most parts of the world by Darwin’s theory.

Variational Evolution – It is the concept represented by Darwin’s theory of evolution through natural selection. According to this theory, an enormous amount of genetic variation is produced in every generation, but only a few survivors of the vast number of offspring will themselves reproduce. Individuals that are best adapted to the environment have the highest probability of surviving and producing the next generation. Sociobiology by Edward O. Wilson

The publication in 1975 of Edward O. Wilson’s book “Sociobiology - The New Synthesis,” created a heated controversy around the question of what role evolution played in social behavior. Wilson, one of the foremost students of the behavior of social insects, came to the conclusion that social behavior merited far more attention than it had so far received, and that, indeed, its study deserved to be the subject matter of a special biological discipline which he baptized sociobiology. He defined it “as the systematic study of the biological basis of all social behavior.” Ruse, in his book “Sociobiology: Sense or Nonsense” (1970), defined it as “the study of the biological nature and foundations of animal behavior, more precisely, animal social behavior.”

Wilson’s work became highly controversial for two reasons. First, he included human behavior in his treatment and frequently applied the findings he had made in animals to the human species. The other reason was that both he and Ruse used the phrase “biological basis” in a somewhat equivocal manner. For Wilson, a biological basis for behavior meant that a genetic disposition make a contribution to the behavior phenotype. For his politically motivated opponents, however, a biological basis meant “genetically determined.” Of course we humans would be mere genetic automata if all our actions were strictly and exclusively controlled by genes. Everyone including Wilson knows that this is not the case, and yet we also know, particularly from twin and adoption studies, that our genetic heritage makes a remarkably large contribution to our attitudes, qualities, and propensities. The modern biologist knows far too much to want to revive the old polarized nature-nurture controversy, because he knows that almost all human traits are influenced by the interaction of inheritance with the cultural environment. The most important point made by Wilson is that, in many respects, the same problems are encountered in human behavior studies as in animal ones. Likewise, many of the answers

239 Earth - Designed for Biodiversity. Life will find a Way! that have been found to be correct for animal behavior are applicable also in the study of human behavior.

According to the definition of sociobiology offered by Wilson and Ruse, one would think that the field encompasses all social actions and interactions found in animals. This would include, for instance, all social migrations, such as those of African ungulates, of migratory social birds, the spawning migrations of horseshoe crabs and many invertebrates and vertebrates (such as a gray whale). These and many other social phenomena, however, are not dealt with by Wilson and Ruse. Rather the subject matter of sociobiology is, according to Ruse, aggression, sex and sexual selection, parental investment, female reproductive strategies, altruism, kin selection, parental manipulation, and reciprocal altruism. Most of these relate to the interaction between two individuals and deal either directly or indirectly with reproductive success. They all represent activities ultimately enhancing or reducing reproduction success, and they are, broadly speaking, related to sexual selection.

Sociobiology, thus circumscribed, is obviously a very special segment of the whole field of social behavior, and as such it raises all sorts of questions. Which kind of interactions between two individuals qualify as social behavior? When, if ever, is competition for resources social behavior? If sibling rivalry, which is competition for resources, qualifies as social behavior, when is competition not social behavior? Most of the attacks against sociobiology were directed against its application to man. In Ruse’s treatment, two-thirds as many pages were devoted to human social behavior compared as to that of animals. This is the major reason for the controversial status of sociobiology and explains why most active people who work on the problems listed by Wilson and Ruse under sociobiology do not use that term for the type of work they do; they do not call themselves socio-biologists. Sacred Depths of Nature is Designed by God

We need a planetary ethic and it is obvious that we need but list a few key words: climate, ethnic cleansing, fossil fuels, infectious disease, nuclear weapons, oceans, ozone layer, pollution, population. Without common religious orientation, we basically don’t know where to begin, nor do we know what to say or how to listen, nor are we motivated to respond. My agenda for this book is to outline the foundations for such a planetary ethic, an ethic that would make no claim to supplant existing traditions but would

240 Planet Earth is Designed for Biodiversity seek to coexist with them, informing our global concerns while we continue to orient our daily lives in our cultural and religious contexts. The big bang, the formation of stars and planets, the advent of human consciousness and the resultant evolution of cultures—this is the story, the one story that has the potential to unite us, because it happens to be true.

But that potential can be realized under only one condition. A cosmology works as a religious cosmology only if it resonates, only if it makes the listener feel religious. To be sure, the beauty of nature—sunsets, woodlands, fireflies—has elicited religious emotions throughout the ages. We are moved to awe and wonder at the grandeur, the poetry, the richness of natural beauty; it fills us with joy and thanksgiving. A key component of any religious cosmology is its human focus. Even as we now understand that our advent on the planet was but a moment ago, even as we now gaze into the heavens with new and urgent questions about our significance, the significance and future of humanity remain central to our religious concerns. We need to bring in all the religions to save life on Earth. We can call forth appealing and abiding religious responses—an approach that can be called religious naturalism1. Religious naturalism has lots of potential. Being at home with our natural selves is the prelude to ecology, both environmental and cultural, and there are many ways to see human beings as noble and distinctive even as we are inexorable part of the whole. A global ethic must be anchored both in an understanding of human nature and an understanding of the rest of nature.

Mystery generates wonder, and wonder generates awe. The gasp can terrify or the gasp can emancipate. As we allow ourselves to experience cosmic and quantum mystery, we join the saints and the visionaries in their experience of what they called the Divine, and we pulse

1Religious Naturalism is a philosophy which seeks to live a religious life without a Supreme Being that is superior in power and value to the natural world. It is the attempt to think about life and live a religious orientation without a God, soul or heaven. It is the attempt to find in the natural world, inspiration and resources for their religious life.

2 According to the worshipers of Visnu, the cosmic egg (also known as the golden womb) emerges from the world ocean at the beginning of the ever-recurring cycle of creation as a result of the friction produced by wind and water. Visnu then enters the cosmic egg and, after a period of quiescence, the creator of the god Brahma is born from his navel. With this, the creation of the manifest universe begins.

241 Earth - Designed for Biodiversity. Life will find a Way! with the spirit. Every religion has an account of the origins of life. Most familiar to western traditions is Genesis chapter 1, a spare, poetic account of the six days of creation. Certain Hindu teachings speak of the Brahmanda, the Cosmic Egg2 from which all creatures came forth. These are wonderful stories that still work for us as stories, but we recognize their cultural origins and their contradictions with our present understanding of what happened.

We take the concept of miracle and use it not as a manifestation of divine intervention but as the astonishing property of “emergence.” Life does generate something-more-from-nothing-but, over and over again, and each emergence, even though fully explainable by chemistry, is nonetheless miraculous. The celebration of supernatural miracles has been central to traditional religions throughout the millennia. Emergence is inherent in everything that is alive, allowing our yearning for supernatural miracles to be subsumed by our joy in the countless miracles that surround us. We can steep ourselves in cosmic mystery. But the workings of life are not mysterious at all. They are obvious, explainable, and thermodynamically inevitable, and relentlessly mechanical, and bluntly deterministic. My body is some 10 trillion cells. My thoughts are a lot of electricity flowing along a lot of membrane. My emotions are the result of neuron-transmitters squirting on my brain. I look in the mirror and see the mortality and I find myself fearful, yearning for less knowledge, yearning to believe that I have a soul that will go to heaven and soar with the angels.

I have come to understand that the self, myself is inherently sacred, by virtue of its own improbability, its own miracle, its own emergence. I start with my egg cell, one of 40,000 in my mother’s ovaries. It meets with one of the hundreds of millions of sperm cells produced each day by my father. And then I cleave, I gastrulate, I implant, I grow tiny fetal kidneys and a tiny heart. The genes of my father and the genes of my mother switch on and off and on again in all sorts of combinations, all sorts of chords and tempos, to create something both eminently human and eminently new. Once I am born, my unfinished brain slowly completes its maturation in the context of my unfolding experience, and during my quest to understand what it is to be a person, I come to understand that there can be but one me. With this comes the understanding that I am in charge of my own emergence. It is not something that I must wait for, but something to seek, something to participate in achieving, something to delight in achieving.

So, all the creatures on the planet today share a huge number of

242 Planet Earth is Designed for Biodiversity genetic ideas. Most of my genes are like most gorilla genes, but they’re also like many of the genes in a banana. I have more genes than a banana, to be sure, and some critical genes are certainly different, but the important piece to take in here is our deep interrelatedness, our deep genetic homology, with the rest of the living world. Religion, from the Latin “religio,” means to bind together again. It is the same linguistic root as ligament. We have throughout the ages sought connection with higher powers in the sky or beneath the Earth, or with ancestors living in some other realm. We have also sought, and found, religious fellowship with one another. And now we realize that we are connected to all creatures, not just in food chains or ecological equilibria, but we share a common ancestor. This is what I call “enlightenment.” We share genes for receptors and cell cycles and signal-transduction cascades. We share evolutionary constraints and possibilities. We are connected all the way down.

I walk through my village A. Kattupadi, India and see organisms everywhere, seen and unseen, flying about or pushing through the soil or rummaging under the leaves, adapting and reproducing. I open my senses to them and we connect. I no longer need to anthropomorphize them, to value them because they are beautiful or amusing or important for my survival. I see them as they are; I understand how they work. I think about their genes switching on and off, their cells dividing and differentiating in pace with my own, homologous to my own. I take in the mango tree by the lake and I think about its story, the ancient algae and mosses and ferns that came before, the tiny first progenitor that gave rise to it and to me. I try to guess why it looks the way it does—why the leaves are so serrated and the bark so white—and imagine all sorts of answers, all manner of selections and unintended consequences that have yielded this tree to existence and hence to my experience.

The wonders and majesty of nature have been deep resources for religious reflection throughout human history. Particularly integral is the relationship between the natural world and the native people in India, Amazon, and Africa. The outpouring of Biodiversity calls us to marvel at its fecundity. It also calls us to stand before its presence with deep, abiding humility. Earlier we sanctified the self, and soon we will consider ways to think about our humanness with reverence and pride. But these affirmations must coexist with an understanding that all of us humans are but a tiny part of an enormous context. We are one of perhaps 30 million species on the planet today, and countless millions that have gone before. We occupy, temporally, the very last moment of the animal radiation; our

243 Earth - Designed for Biodiversity. Life will find a Way! species appeared only some 130,000 years ago and the cave painters 35,000 years ago. And, while we animals were radiating so too were all the other lineages of the biosphere generating more complexities.

We are called to acknowledge our dependency on the web of life both our subsistence and for countless aesthetic experiences: spring birdsong, swelling treebuds, and the dizzy smell of honeysuckle. We are called to acknowledge that which we are not: we cannot survive in a deep-sea vent, or fix nitrogen, or create a forest canopy, or soar 300 feet in the air and then catch a mouse in a spectacular nosedive. Most religious traditions ask us to bow and tremble in deference to the divine, to walk humbly with thy God. Religious naturalism asks that we locate such feelings of deference somewhere within the earthly whole.

is a pluralistic paradigm that proposes a spiritual/intellectual approach to life devoid of supernatural assumptions. Religious naturalism is the view that nature is metaphysically ultimate and that nature or some aspect of nature is religiously ultimate. There is nothing beyond, behind or below nature. Nature requires no explanation beyond itself. It always has existed and always will exist in some shape or form. Its constituents, principles, laws and relationships are the sole reality. This reality takes on new traits and possibilities as it evolves inexorably through time.

Humanistic Religious Naturalism – Humanistic Religious Naturalism is an appreciation and celebration of the human as the portal to the infinity of nature, the grandeur and tragedy of life, William Murray coined the term as the subject matter of his book “Reason and Reverence.” Humanistic Religious Naturalism is non-theistic, contemplative, engaged. It draws its inspiration from nature, art, music, and literature. Awareness and Consciousness – The Latest Designs of Biodiversity

A locus of human pride is our sense that we posses the capacity for a special kind of awareness, often called consciousness or self-awareness, that distinguishes us from the “dumb creatures” over which we have been assured we “have dominion.” But no question also, these capacities are deeply homologous to the awareness inherent in all of life, and absent from non-life. Indeed, the Earth can be wonderfully thought of as a planet shimmering with awareness. Perhaps there are other planets that so shimmer, or perhaps this is the only one. In any case, awareness is integral to life, and integral as well to our religious lives.

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Is an amoeba aware? Of course; but is it conscious? Is a plant conscious of light as it bends toward its source? Most of us would say no; we would reserve the term consciousness for the mental states of animals with nervous systems. But this leaves plenty of room for disagreement as to how to define consciousness. Is my cat conscious? Well, yes, I would say that she is: She takes in what she experiences and responds to it. Then how about a snail? Well, I’m not so sure. Part of the problem, of course, is that my cat seems a lot more like me than a snail, so all of my cat/snail judgments will be laden with anthropocentrism. Granted such difficulties, I remain deeply convinced that my cat does not reflect on her self, on her own cathood, even though there is no obvious way to prove that this is so. Self-awareness is a trait that appears to have originated in the apes and has come to dominate human mentality. Awareness of our mental selves, our thoughts and feelings, awareness of awareness: We all know exactly what this means, even if none of us can describe it very well.

Neuroscience is still far from being able to explain how human self- awareness works, but some general ideas are emerging. A key concept is that we are spectators to our own awareness. We witness mental activity, represented in symbolic form that is delivered to the “working memory” by domains obscurely called the lateral prefrontal cortex and the orbital and anterior cingulated cortices. This delivery system handles many neuronal inputs at once: inputs from long-term memory domains, emotional domains, and immediate sensory stimuli which we perceive. Such inputs are “sub-symbolic,” meaning that we cannot decipher them consciously. They are then integrated and presented to the working memory as symbolic entities. No one yet understands what this means, nor where the working memory “is” nor what is involved in accessing these symbolic representations. The working memory can hold about seven pieces of information at once. These can be trivial, such as my awareness of what time it is, or they can be large “chunks” of information, such as the many memories that surround and concept of my grandmother or the many plans that constitute my schedule for the rest of the day. And then there is the “I” that witnesses this information, the “executive” that feels it has control over the material experienced.

The fact that we take in, reflect, and encounter an “I-ness” is apparently at the core of religious experiences that we call mystical. Western traditions describe a sense of Immanence or Presence; Asian traditions variously describe states of Nirvana, of liberation, of living with the Tao. Albert Einstein underscores its centrality: “the most beautiful emotion we can experience is the mystical. It is the source of all true art and science. He to 245 Earth - Designed for Biodiversity. Life will find a Way! whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead.” Throughout religious history, mystical experiences have often been interpreted as the apprehension of the divine within or the numinous other, and they are actively sought in prayer and ritual. In western traditions we say that we are aware of a spirit, that we are comprehended by something much larger, deeper, more valuable, and more enduring than ourselves and the finite universe. The encounter is inward, intensely personal, and described, if at all, with halting tongue. In Asian traditions the religious person seeks in meditation an emptying out, a receptivity, in order to experience an at-one-ness, a spiritual communion with the universe: Enlightenment.

So we raise our eyes to the heavens and we ask, Is this other? Is this God? Is this the perfection of understanding? Or are these overwhelmingly powerful mental experiences, with immanence a particularly intense form of self-awareness and Enlightenment a detachment from self-awareness so that all else can penetrate? How can we tell? And then: Does it matter? We nurture our children selflessly. But we also recognize them as our most tangible sources of renewal—for a child, the world is always new. Renewal has been a religious theme throughout the ages, be it the Jews exhorted by Isaiah1 to return to Jerusalem after their exile in Babylon2 or the disciples exhorted by Jesus to seek the redemption of the spirit. Theists find that they can renew their personal sense of worth through petitions to God for atonement and grace. All of us see in children—our own and all children— the hope and promise of what we humans can become. As the forebears of our children we are called to transmit to them a joyous and sustainable vision of their future—meaning that we each called to develop such a vision.

Distinctiveness: We have encountered this concept several times. We

1This prophet lived in the eighth century BC during the reigns of the Judean kings Uzziah, Jotham, Ahaz, and Hezekiah. He was also the author of the Bible book of Isaiah. Isaiah was the son of Amoz (Isaiah 1:1) and may have been a relative of King Amaziah. Growing up in Jerusalem, Isaiah received the best education the capital of Judah could supply. He was deeply knowledgeable about people, and he became the political and religious conscience of the nation. He was able to communicate with the kings of Judah easily and may have been the historiographer (official history-writer) at the Judean court for several reigns (2 Chronicles 26:22; 2 Chronicles 32:32).

2During this period many inhabitants of Judah, the southern kingdom, were exiled in Babylonia after Nebuchadnezzar’s conquest of Jerusalem (sixth century BC).

246 Planet Earth is Designed for Biodiversity have celebrated our individual selves as organisms, as self-aware creatures, and as recipients of immanence and grace, even as we have also honored the experience of humility, of being but a part of the whole and yet connected to the whole. Here we can life up our distinctiveness as a lineage and as a species. Our hominid relatives—the Neanderthals and Homo erectus—are no longer with us, but we are privileged to share the planet with our next of kin, the orangutans and gorillas and chimps and bonobos. We have much to learn from one another, and the preservation of their habitat and dignity emerges as a commandment. Race - Designed by Natural Selection

Each individual is uniquely designed and everyone is special. And then we turn to ourselves, a few concentrated in particular geographic groups we call races, which means that each of us is distinctive, and each of our children will be distinctive. There are races but there are no high or low races, as misinformed section of humanity thinks. Each race is crafted by an ancient master sculptor called “natural selection.” Race is not the product of five or 10 thousands of years, on the other hand race is the product of hundreds and millions of years. But all of us are also members of the human species and hence share the distinctiveness of our species. Indeed, species and specialness come from the same linguistic and cultural roots. Hence race is an inconvenient truth, whether you like it or not, race is part of us, not to trample on others but to realize the richness of diversity among us. So, race has been misunderstood in the past, but on a better note, race can be seen as a variation in Biodiversity, biological variation, and genetic variation. This genetic outlook perhaps, has more reliability and potentiality to solve the problem of race misinterpretations. Each race has their own characteristics, attributes and traits, made possible by nature, such as weather, geography, language and culture. The word race has been abused, and still continued to be abused by some ill-informed sectors of humanity.

Race, term historically used to describe a human population distinguishable from others based on shared biological traits. All living human beings belong to one species, Homo sapiens. The concept of race stems from the idea that the human species can be naturally subdivided into biologically distinct groups. In practice, however, scientists have found it impossible to separate humans into clearly defined races. Most scientists today reject the concept of biological race and instead see human

247 Earth - Designed for Biodiversity. Life will find a Way! biological variation as falling along a continuum. Nevertheless, race persists as a powerful social and cultural concept used to categorize people based on perceived differences in physical appearance and behavior. Interest in defining races came from the recognition of easily visible differences among human groups. Around the world, human populations differ in their skin color, eye color and shape, hair color and texture, body shape, stature, limb proportions, and other physical characteristics. However, most anthropologists and biologists regard these differences between populations as largely superficial, resulting from adaptations to local climatic conditions during the most recent period of human evolution. Genetic analysis, which provides a deeper and more reliable measure of biological differences between people, reveals that overall, people are remarkably similar in their genetic makeup. Of the genetic differences that do exist, more variation occurs within so-called racial groups than between them. That is, two people from the same “race” are, on average, almost as biologically different from each other as any two people in the world chosen at random.

This high degree of genetic diversity exists within populations because individuals from different populations have always intermingled and mated with each other. Given that populations have interbred for most of human history, most anthropologists reject the idea that “pure” races existed at some time in the distant past. Today, genetic analysis has replaced earlier methods of comparing color, shape, and size to establish degrees of relationship or common ancestry among human populations. The term race is often misunderstood and misused. It is often confused with ethnicity, an ambiguous term that refers mostly, though not exclusively, to cultural (non-biological) differences between groups. An ethnic group derives its identity from its distinctive customs, language, ancestry, place of origin, or style of dress. For example, the Hispanic ethnic group comprises people who trace their ancestry to Spanish-speaking countries in the Western Hemisphere. Although some people assume Hispanics have a common genetic heritage, in reality they share only a language. Members of an ethnic group with a common geographic origin often do share similar physical features. But people of the same ethnic group may also have very different physical appearances, and conversely, people of different ethnic groups may look quite similar. People may also mistakenly use the term race to refer to a religion, culture, or nationality— as in the “Jewish race” or the “Italian race”—whose members may or may not share a common ancestry.

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The term race is also sometimes used to refer to the entire human species, as in the “human race.” In everyday language, the distinction between race and ethnicity has become blurred, and many people use the terms to mean the same thing. Many people believe, falsely, that differences in physical appearance have something to do with differences in the behavior, attitude, intelligence, or intrinsic worth of people. These beliefs promote racism, prejudice or animosity against people perceived to belong to other races. At its worst, racism has inspired the abuse and extermination of enormous numbers of people. Recent historical examples included the near-extermination of Native Americans by European settlers of the Americas between the 16th and 20th centuries, the capture and export of Africans for use as slaves in the Americas from the early 17th to the mid-19th century, the extermination of Jews in Europe by German Nazis during World War II (1939-1945), and the system of apartheid perpetrated by Afrikaners against all nonwhite peoples in South Africa. The ultimate example is the misinterpretation of race has resulted in racism in the time of Vedas in the Indian subcontinent, which continues to haunt humanity to this present day.

Many religions and social organizations portray that they would show a way out of racism, but those religions and outfits are addicted to power and authority on the basis of hierarchy, again you end up in another sort of a racist infrastructure. Again we allow ourselves to be ruled over and get entangled in the power struggle, waiting desperately for higher position, meantime Vedic caste system is being replayed globally in more shuttle ways and it all becomes another ball game. Trying to pursue a successful career you want to be again enslaved, compromising yourself spiritually, philosophically, economically and socially. Therefore, racism is being replayed in more complex ways, while it offers a temporary solace, but leaves humanity nonetheless vulnerable. Despite of its controversial misinterpretations, we can still find a common ground where we can learn to reinterpret the appropriate meaning to the word. Therefore we need to educate ourselves in ecology and understand how nature intends all these differences through its engine of natural selection. In short race is created by natural selection such as genetic variation, genetic diversity, for example, is good and beautiful. (You are the chosen race, royal priesthood …) But racism designed by humanity to rule and suppress other human beings is something disgusting and inhuman. Religious naturalism exhorts us to celebrate human distinctiveness with the same full-throated thanksgiving that we celebrate the whale and the spotted

249 Earth - Designed for Biodiversity. Life will find a Way! owl. The whale and the owl are magnificent, but so are we. As environmentalists we have learned to defend the diversity of species in general, and endangered species in particular, while we reframe our attitudes and paradigms to recognize and maintain the biological diversity, difference, and intrinsic beauty in every species and race.

1. We are a symbolic species, unique in our capacity to engage not just in communication but in language. As neurobiologist Terrence Deacon puts it, “Biologically, we are just another ape. Mentally, we are a new phylum of organisms.” Our symbolic language allows us to build scenarios, plan for the future, and articulate and transmit our cultures. It is the wellspring of our uniqueness.

2. While all creatures have the capacity to interpret the reality that they perceive, we also have the capacity to analyze reality, to ask questions that yield answers that generate new questions. All of us, that is, are scientists, even as very young children, we construct hypotheses and test them out. We resonate with the imperative to understand how things work, including our universe and planet and brains and emotions and sexuality and cultures, and we use these understandings to generate our technology and our social system.

3. We have as well the capacity to take off from reality molding it into the distinctively human forms we call art. It is as we respond to the understandings and feelings inherent in our art that we acquire much of our truth, much of our nobility and grace, and much of our pleasure. And finally, we are uniquely religious. Anthropologists have given the name “Homo religiosus1” to our forebears who first buried their dead and set flowers and icons beside the graves. We need answers to existential questions. We need to believe in things, to structure and orient our lives in ways that make sense and offer hope, to identify values and

1 Worship is important. It impacts every aspect of our existence. And don’t let anyone fool you: We all worship something or someone! We are homo religiosus, that is, worshiping beings. We are wired to praise that which we find true, good, or beautiful. Praise comes naturally to us because we are, by nature, worshipping beings. The truth is clear: In the presence of truth, goodness, and beauty, we find ourselves inexplicably driven to voice our approval and bear witness of this approval to others. Why? Because we are homo religiosus -- worshipping beings.

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ideals, to transcend and interconnect. And happily, we have the capacity to transmit our accumulated religious understandings to one another and to our children through our languages and our arts, allowing them to endure and evolve. The Credo of Continuation – We are Designed to Believe

Our story tells us of the sacredness of life, of the astonishing complexity of cells and organisms, of the vast lengths of time it took to generate their splendid diversity, of the enormous improbability that any of it happened at all. Reverence is the religious emotion elicited when we perceive the sacred. We are called to revere the whole enterprise of planetary existence, the whole and all of its myriad parts as they catalyze and secrete and replicate and mutate and evolve. We have thought of evolution as being about prevalence, about how many copies there are of which kinds of genomes. But it is quite as accurate, and we believe more germinative to think of evolution as being about the continuation of genomes1. Genomes that create organisms with sufficient reproductive success to have viable offspring are able to continue into the future; genomes that fail, disappear and fade away into obscurity.

Reproductive success is governed by many variables, but key adaptations have included the evolution of awareness, valuation, and purpose. In order to continue, genomes must dictate organisms that are aware of their environmental circumstances, evaluate these inputs correctly, and respond with intentionally. And so, we profess our faith. For me, the existence of all this complexity and awareness and intent and beauty, and my ability to apprehend it, serves as the ultimate meaning and the

* The human genome contains 3.2 Billion base pairs, the exact sequence of which varies from person to person. Most of the trillion cells in a human being have a ‘nucleus’ that harbors an individual’s DNA inside. Hypothetically, if a human being is a Building, DNA is the biological equivalent of the blueprints for that building. i.e. DNA contains all the information required for the construction of a human being. This blueprint is responsible for the synthesis of all protein components in the body, and as such, contains the genetic data for reproduction of life. Every different type of cell in a biological organism contains all the genetic data needed for its replication, that is, each cell is capable of reproducing itself when it is necessary. During conception, maternal and paternal DNA is combined to create a new genome that is inherited by their child, and in doing so they are ‘passing on’ their genetic material to a new generation, this is why children look, and sometimes act like their parents, because they share much of the same genetic material and thus express many similar physiological traits.

251 Earth - Designed for Biodiversity. Life will find a Way! ultimate value. The continuation of life reaches around, grabs its own tail, and forms a sacred circle that requires no further justification, no creator, no super-ordinate meaning of meaning, no purpose other than that the continuation continue until the sun collapses or the final meteor collides. I confess a credo of continuation.

And in so doing, I confess as well a credo of human continuation. We may be the only questioners in the universe, the only ones who have come to understand the astonishing dynamics of cosmic evolution. If we are not, if there are others who know, it is unlikely that we will ever encounter one another. We are also, whether we like it or not, the dominant species and the temporary stewards of this planet. If we can revere how things are, and can find a way to express gratitude for our existence, then we should be able to figure out, with a great deal of work and good will, how to share the Earth with one another and with other creatures, how to restore and preserve the elegance and grace, and how to commit ourselves to love and joy and laughter and hope. So we extract from reality all the meaning and guidance and emotional substance that we can, and we bring these responses with us we set out to chart global paths. And then we come back to our religions of origin, the faiths of our mothers and fathers. What do we do with them? What have I done with mine?

Theologian Philip Hefner offers us a weaving metaphor. The tapestry maker first strings the warp long strong fibers anchored firmly to the loom, and then interweaves the weft, the patterns, the color, the art. The epic of evolution is our warp, destined to endure, commanding our universal gratitude and reverence and commitment. And then, after that, we are all free to be artists, to render in languages and paintings and song and dance our ultimate hopes and concerns and understandings of human nature. Throughout the ages, the weaving of our religious weft has been the province of our prophets and gurus and liturgists and poets. The texts and art and ritual that come to us from these revered ancestors include claims about nature and agency that are no longer plausible. They use a different warp. But for me at least, this is just one of those historical facts, something that can be absorbed, appreciated, and then put aside as I encounter the deep wisdom embedded in these traditions and the abundant opportunities that they offer to experience transcendence and clarity.

I love traditional religions. Whenever I wander into distinctive churches or mosques or temples, or visit museums of religious art, or hear performances of sacred music, I am enthralled by the beauty and

252 Planet Earth is Designed for Biodiversity solemnity and power they offer. Once we have our feelings about nature in place, then I believe that we can also find important ways to call ourselves, Jews, or Muslims, or Taoists, or Hopi, or Hindus, or Christians, or Buddhists, or some of each. The words in the traditional texts may sound different to us than they did to their authors, but they continue to resonate with our religious selves. We know what they are intended to mean. Humans need stories—grand, compelling stories—that help to orient us in our lives and in the cosmos. The epic of evolution in such a story beautifully suited to anchor our search for planetary consensus, telling us of our nature, our place, our context. Moreover, responses to this story—what we are calling religious naturalism—can yield deep and abiding spiritual experiences. And then, after that, we need other stories as well, human- centered stories, a mythos comes to us, often in experiences called revelation, from the sages and the artists of past and present times.

What are Organisms Aware of? - The first cells, bathed in the Eden of the primal soup, may not have been programmed to be aware. But this could not have lasted too long. Once they were forced to make ribonucleotides for themselves, for example, they would have had to locate some source of energy flow in the environment so that they could carry out this biochemistry, and throughout evolution, sets of genes have been selected that allow organisms to be aware of their circumstances and act accordingly. Awareness is modulated by receptors and their associated signal transduction cascades. Olfactory and taste receptors respond to various forms of energy: Visual organs are stimulated by bombardments of photons; auditory organs are sensitive to the vibrations produced when air is compressed; heat receptors distinguish levels of molecular motion.

A critical focus of evolution has been the modulation of receptors such that they pick out shapes and energies of use to the organism. Plants, algae, and cyanobacteria, for example, are equipped with all manner of photoreceptors that detect and absorb those wavelengths and intensities of light that are of use to their photosynthetic pathways. They also possess the means to shield themselves from light that might damage their light- harvesting systems. More generally, much of biological evolution can be said to entail the evolution of what organisms are aware of. The first awareness systems focused on the physical and chemical properties of the planetary environment, but once a sufficient number of organisms came into existence, they became intensely aware of one another as prey or predators or symbionts. And once eukaryotic sexuality was invented, sometime around the Cambrian, countless systems were devised to recognize a mate

253 Earth - Designed for Biodiversity. Life will find a Way! of the correct species and the correct gender. All sexual eukaryotes are aware of their environment, potential mates, and potential pathogens. In addition, early members of the animal radiation devised the neuron, a cell type specialized for awareness, and this made possible the avenue of awareness called consciousness. Ethical Argument – Advocate for Biodiversity

As implied, the aesthetic argument quickly shades off into an ethical one. Briefly stated, this argument urges that all forms of life on Earth have a right to exist. Conversely, humanity has no right to exterminate a species. To push the point a stage further, one could well ask whether humanity has the right to precipitate, through the elimination of large numbers of species, a fundamental and permanent shift in the course of evolution. While the aesthetic argument is virtually a prerogative of affluent people with leisure to think about such questions, the ethical concept of man’s “stewardship” for Earth’s other creatures is inherent in many religious and cultural traditions around the world. Yet even this argument needs to be looked at carefully. Are we so sure that we wish to preserve all forms of life for their own intrinsic worth? Would many people not be glad to see the end of the virus that causes the common cold? And would the same not apply to whatever organisms contribute to cancer? These are unique forms of life with just as much “right” to existence as the giraffe or the whooping crane. We have now reached a stage when the smallpox virus has been backed into a corner, to the extent that no human being suffers from the disease and the organism exists only in the laboratory. Should man, by conscious and rational decision, obliterate this manifestation of life’s diversity?

Similarly, it is unrealistic to postulate that a species represents an absolute value, and cannot be traded off against other values on the grounds that a unique irreplaceable entity is beyond measurement of “worth”. In point of fact, virtually no value is considered by society to be absolute. Not even human life qualifies. To be sure, an individual person views his own life as an untradeable asset. But as a member of the community, he does not view human life in general as anywhere near an absolute (for example, people die in accidents). Presumably there is only one value which represents an absolute, and that is the survival of life on Earth. To this absolute value, species makes an absolute contribution: when there are no more species left there will be no more life. But not all species make the same amount of contribution, since some are considered by

254 Planet Earth is Designed for Biodiversity ecologists to be more important for the workings of their ecosystems, by virtue of their numbers, biomass and energy flow. So the value of a species, far from being absolute, is very much a relative affair.

Especially difficult is the question of relative value between human life and other species. Already the conflict is plain to see in many localities, where people compete with wildlife for living space. This conflict is going to get worse, fast. True, in a few instances there is no clash; the blue whale encroaches on no human environment for its survival needs, and thus its demise would be all the more regrettable. For most species, however, the problem is basic: sufficient habitat for them means less habitat available for human communities with their growing numbers. How is this conflict to be resolved? The problem raises complex ethical issues that deserve in-depth treatment elsewhere. Suffice it to say here that many conservationists could probably accept the elimination of a species if it could be finally demonstrated that the creature’s habitat would produce crops to keep huge communities of people alive. If the situation were reduced to bald terms of one species against one million people, it might well be viewed as a tolerable if regrettable tradeoff.

But the prospect facing humankind in the next few decades is a whole different ballgame. In order to allow expanding numbers of people the amount of living space they seem to think they need, at least one-fifth, possibly one-third, conceivably one-half, of all species on Earth may well be driven extinct. Would this be in the best interests of human communities within the short-run future, let alone generations of the longer-run future? In view of the utilitarian benefits for agriculture, medicine, industrial materials that stem from species’ genetic resources, it is virtually certain that humankind would suffer greatly through the disappearance of, say, one million species. Such, then, is the nature and scale of the ethical conflict we now confront. It is a challenge that merits much more attention than it has hitherto received from conservationists, technologists, political leaders, economist planners and whoever else determines the future course of our planet Earth. We need more world heritage sites, tucked away for future generations.

World heritage Trust - The world Heritage Trust was established through UNESCO’s 1973 Convention for the Protection of the World Cultural and Natural Heritage. Under the Convention, “Natural Heritage” includes “National features … and areas … which are of outstanding universal value … and … habitats of certain species of outstanding value”. The institution

255 Earth - Designed for Biodiversity. Life will find a Way! provides international financial support to those countries unable to ensure protection on their own for unique items of humanity’s natural and cultural heritage within their national territories.

What Developing Countries can do for the Global Heritage - Developing countries can do much to safeguard the global heritage in species. At least two-thirds, and possibly three-quarters, of all species on Earth are found in the domain of tropical developing countries. Yet, while the tropics merit exceptional efforts at conservation, they have hitherto received exceptionally meager measures. Moreover, pressures of growing human numbers with growing aspirations are causing natural environments to be degraded at ever-more rapid rates. So what can developing countries do to turn around the adverse trend? A long list of possibilities is available. They can set aside more wild-land territories in order to protect representative ecosystems. They can clamp down on illegal hunting and trade in wildlife products. They can reduce conflict between wild creatures and domestic livestock. They can boost tourism as a support for parks and reserves. Above all, they can stem the wholesale conversion of virgin landscapes to croplands and the like by making sure that development projects are the right ones at the right time and right place. They can pursue all these initiatives, plus a good many more. New Design – A New Heart and a New Soul

“Create in me a clean heart, O God, and renew a new and right spirit within me. Do not cast me away from your presence, and do not take your holy spirit from me,” prayed the psalmist (Psalm 51:10-11)1.

Create—a work of almighty power establishing something totally new within him. Create in me a clean heart—bestow as a gift, a heart free from the taint of sin (Psalms24:4; 73:1). Renew—implies that he had formerly possessed it. The essential principle of a new nature had not been lost, but its influence had been interrupted (Luke 22:32). A right spirit means— i.e., a “willing spirit” (NIV). He requests the renewal of desire within him to willingly follow God’s law so he would be firm in a right course of conduct. The Holy Spirit—the personal presence of the Holy Spirit in the OT was

1The Hebrew Bible credits David with 73 psalms, compared with 84 in the Septuagint and 85 in the Latin Vulgate. Many of the titles refer to specific events in the life of David.

256 Planet Earth is Designed for Biodiversity not unknown (1 Samuel 16:13; Isaiah 63:10, 11). Although he had lost the “joy of his salvation” (51:12), he prays for the return of spiritual communion. This is the new design we are waiting for, a clean heart infused with right spirit. The future belongs to people whose community spirit incorporates both sustainable and exciting ideas and actions. Accordingly, the fellowship of humanity is in process of developing a spirituality in harmony with the ecology of the Earth. It is important to fulfill the natural yearnings of human beings to comfort one another and all life around them; to be sensitive, responsive, and helpful to the needs of others—including those in the plant and animal kingdoms; to solve problems that make a difference between life and death, to heal not only ailments but sufferings and conflicts; to enjoy being alive among others; to play with everyone and everything, to engage oneself in intriguing, challenging, stimulating, and rewarding activities, and to believe that one’s own life has a good purpose.

We remember we belong to the animal kingdom and the Earth. We advocate living a natural life. Equipped with the new heart and new soul, a new attitude if you will, we become almost ethereal beings. Fortunately, a new attitude is emerging. We need a new design of attitude towards nature and life. When religions talk about “Pro-life,” it is not only human life; we should be consistently supporting all life. We want to save human fetus, but what about capital punishment? Great religions talk about “ahimsa” which means not hurting life; if we call ourselves religious people, please stop eating animals. Younger generations are already leading the way! Forestry is no longer seen as something confined to chainsaws, lumber, and pine seedlings. It is increasingly viewed as an activity that contributes to a broad range of needs and not just for people in the vicinity of forests but for communities much further afield? Nature is seen as sacrament and plants and animals become our sacred neighbors.

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War on Biodiversity and Extinctions “There is on Earth no diversity; He gets death after death; Who perceives here seeming diversity; As a unity only is It to be looked upon—This indemonstrable, enduring Being.” (Brihad-Aranyaka Upanishad 4. 4. 19-20)

The current decimation of species is commonly called the Biodiversity crisis. Edward O. Wilson himself wrote a book about this crisis entitled “The Discovery of Life.” Published in 1992, a clarion call for urgent, high-priority work to be done by biologists and for swift and effective conservation action based on their results. Subsequently there have been many books, including one that “The Biodiversity Crisis: Losing What Counts,” that have addressed this problem. Majorities in a diverse 15 of 20 countries surveyed believe that “if no action is taken to reduce species loss, 20 years out, species loss will severely threaten Earth’s ability to sustain life.” Overall, 52 percent of respondents believe that inaction will threaten Earth’s ability to support life. By comparison, 26 percent of citizens surveyed expect there to be significantly fewer species, but with no significant effect on the planet overall. Just 12 percent anticipate that only a small percentage of species will be lost. The opinion that failing to address species loss will soon imperil Earth’s survival is progressively more pervasive among younger age groups, suggesting growing realization that Biodiversity and human well- being are inherently linked.

Nature is a quality-of-life issue for people around the world. Strong majorities in all countries surveyed, ranging from 24 percent in India to 94 percent in Canada, agree that “experiencing nature and wildlife is one of the best experiences [they] can have.” According to GlobeScan1 recent poll, people in Germany (91%), Great Britain (90%), South Africa (91%) and China (92%) are among the most likely to agree that nature has an important experiential value for them. Those in Nigeria (67%), India (76%), Russia (70%), and Italy (70%) are among the least likely. Beyond nature’s experiential value, similarly strong majorities say that nature has a special spiritual quality for them personally. Humanity’s connection to nature is multidimensional. This personal stake that citizens have in nature suggests there is latent potential for social mobilization around nature issues— especially if those personal interests come to be perceived as threatened.

1According to the GlobeScan /BBC world service poll, nearly two-thirds of people now consider climate change is a “very serious” problem. This year’s results indicate the greatest overall concern for the climate since GlobeScan began international tracking in 1998.

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The world is divided on the extent to which individuals have the capacity to contribute meaningfully to curbing species loss, with 44 percent disagreeing that “the current threat to species and their habitat is such a big problem that there is very little the individual can do about it.” While 59 percent of people in wealthy countries disagree that individuals can do little about species loss, only 32 percent of those in developing countries feel similarly empowered. Citizens of the G7 countries, especially the United States (77%) and Canada (74%), are most inclined to deny that there is little the individual can do to counter species loss. People in Indonesia (11%), Russia (15%) and China (23%) feel least empowered. Latin Americans, who are most likely to anticipate a catastrophic outcome if no action is taken on species loss by the international community, tend be divided on this issue. “Given the practical and spiritual importance of nature felt globally, societal leaders would do well to foster social initiatives designed to unlock the potential for behavioral change—especially in jurisdictions where citizens believe that they have personal efficacy,” Doug Miller of GlobeScan added. Man has Declared War on Biodiversity

Humanity has declared war on Biodiversity. The world is now undergoing the fastest mass extinction in its entire history, according to seven out of ten biologists interviewed for a poll taken by the American Museum of Natural History in New York. The scientists said that the Biodiversity loss the planet is now experiencing is more serious than global warming or pollution. One out of three of the scientists polled believe that half of all species now on Earth will die out by 2028. the survey is a “wake- up call” to all of us “that we are facing a serious threat not only to the health of the planet but also to humanity’s own well-being and survival”, says Ellen V. Futter, the museum’s president. Results of the poll show that majorities across the 20 countries surveyed by GlobeScan believe that failure to address species loss within 20 years will imperil Earth’s ability to sustain life. Moreover, citizens report constantly having a deep, practical, and even spiritual relationship with nature.

But belief that individuals have the capacity to help reverse species loss varies extensively from country to country, primarily by levels of economic development. Commenting on the survey results, Doug Miller, President of GlobeScan said “We knew from our prior research that nature issues had come to dominate the public’s environmental agenda in the industrialized world, while pollution remained the dominant concern in

259 Earth - Designed for Biodiversity. Life will find a Way! developing countries. But the current findings reveal a powerful element of self-interest on the part of citizens of both North and South. People all over the world are saying loudly that they care deeply about what society does to address species loss, because they believe the future of our species is at risk.” Extinctions Cascades– Old and New

There are millions of different species of animals and plants on Earth— possibly as many as forty million. But somewhere between five and fifty billion species have existed at one time or another. Thus, only about one in a thousand species is still alive—a truly survival record: 99.9 percent failure! This chapter examines two primary questions: Why did so many species die out? How did they die out? We can learn to avoid extinction problem—and therefore this chapter—by arguing it away. We could note that the average plant or animal species has a geologic life span of only four million years and that life goes back thousands of millions of years. On this basis, we could assert that it is nature’s way for species to have short life spans. Willam Cuppy, in his delightful volumes of essays entitled “How to Become Extinct,” wrote, “The Age of Reptiles ended because it had gone on long enough and it was all a mistake in the first place.” If we accept that turnover in species is merely nature’s way, just as nature has given humans a limited life span, then there is nothing in species extinction worthy of wonder. But there is absolutely no basis for equating the life spans of species with those of individual humans. There is no evidence of aging in species or any known reason why a species could not live forever. In fact, virtual immortality has been claimed for the so-called living fossils (cockroaches and sharks, for example).

We could also get rid of the problem by arguing that species don’t go extinct, that they merely evolve into other species, presumably better ones, by natural selection. The essence of Darwin’s book was that species change gradually into new species. When a new species is formed in this way, the ancestral species does not die: it is merely transformed into another species. The ancestral species is then said to have undergone “pseudoextinction”— as opposed to “true extinction.” Although pseudoextinction1 certainly occurs in nature, we also know that true extinction has eliminated countless species. Many major groups of plants and animals that were once important parts of the global biota no longer exist and left no

1Extinction of a present species where daughter species or subspecies are still alive is also called pseudoextinction. It is difficult to demonstrate unless one has a strong chain of evidence linking a living species to members of a pre-existing species.

260 War on Biodiversity and Extinctions descendants. Much of the debate in evolutionary biology over the “punctuated equilibrium1” theory, championed by Stephen Jay Gould, has centered on the question of proportions of true and pseudo extinctions in the history of life.

Another kind of false extinction has been claimed. It has been argued that dinosaurs did not die out, but just evolved wings and flew away. At a certain level, this reasoning is sound. Birds evolved in the Jurassic period, about 150 million years ago, from dinosaurs of the time. The first fossil birds are hardly distinguishable from some smaller Jurassic dinosaurs. So birds, as a group, did descend from dinosaurs and have many anatomical similarities to show for it. All 8,600 species of birds living today carry some inheritance from their reptilian ancestors. But the bird lineage split off millions of years before the dinosaurs died out in the mass extinction that ended the Cretaceous period. Cretaceous dinosaurs died without issue! Their extinction was final. We cannot escape the fact that true extinction has claimed a large fraction of the evolutionary progeny of life on Earth— even though the size of that fraction is not known accurately.

We know of five mass extinctions that have wiped out anywhere from 50 to 90 percent of all living things. And there may have been as many as twelve or more such periods, some caused when gigantic sheets of ice up to 2 miles (3 km) thick covered parts of the planet. Other mass extinctions were caused by comets and asteroids smashing into the planet and filling the air with so much dust and debris that sunlight was seriously blocked and the lives of many animals and plants snuffed out. But characteristically, each time life recovered and bounced back, with millions of new species replacing those that could not adapt to the environmental changes that triggered the mass extinction and the wholesale loss of biodiversity. Such recoveries seem to take anywhere from five million to ten million years. If Earth is now heading into a sixth, and worst ever, period of mass extinction, we humans with our mushrooming world population may well be the cause. The Five Mass Extinctions

1Known also as “punctuated equilibria” is a theory in evolutionary biology which states that most sexually reproducing species will show little to no evolutionary change throughout their history. When evolution occurs it happens sporadically or by splitting and occurs relatively quickly compared to the species’ duration on Earth. Punctuated equilibrium is commonly contrasted against the theory of phyletic gradualism, which hypothesizes that most evolution occurs uniformly and by the steady gradual transformation of whole lineages or anagenesis.

261 Earth - Designed for Biodiversity. Life will find a Way!

The word extinct comes from the Latin “stinguere” (to quench), which is the verb of choice for killing the flame. The evolution of life has been punctuated by several mass extinctions that have, at times, wiped out more than half of all living organisms. The best known of these, although not the largest, occurred at the end of the Cretaceous Period, famously marking the disappearance of the non-bird dinosaurs, flying pterosaurs and most marine reptiles. In the aftermath, surviving animal groups diversified rapidly and a new biota rose to prominence, setting the stage for the Cenozoic Era. Debate about the mechanisms behind such evolutionary crises is intense, but the evidence points to a range of different causes, each cataclysmic in its own right. Debates over the cause of these catastrophic events became very public in the 1980s when two American scientists, Walter and Luis Alvarez, suggested that the extinction of the dinosaurs was caused by the impact of a large object from space, a comet or asteroid that scattered debris around the world. The theory polarized geological opinion, and the crucial discovery of a crater with the right age only came in the 1990s.

By this time it was clear that the End-Cretaceous extinction was by no means the biggest suffered by life in the past, the end of the Permian, for example, saw 70 percent or more of all life become extinct. Inevitably, another impact event was suggested, but the tell-tale evidence was not forthcoming, instead, the End-Permian extinction seems to be linked to extensive volcanism and sea-level changes, events that also occurred at the end of the Cretaceous. Meanwhile, some paleontologists have questioned just how an impact event could selectively kill off certain groups of organisms while leaving others largely unscathed, and there are also suggestions that the dinosaurs were in decline for some time before their ultimate extinction. Whatever the truth, it seems that extinction events have a complex range of causes.

Ordovician-Silurian Extinction: 439 million years ago – when the Ordovician Period started 505 million years ago, animal life was found only in the sea. By the time it ended animals had taken their first steps onto land. During this period almost of the world’s land was south of the equator. Africa sat over the South Pole, joined to South America, Antarctica, Australia, and India. Together this massive land masses created what is known as Gondwana1. Animal of this period dwell in the shallow seas.

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Conditions became cold and half of the world’s animal species became extinct. Ancient scratch marks created by glaciers show that a large ice cap developed over Gondwana. These extinctions affected the trilobites, which had become the most important anthropods of the time. One of the group animals that started to appear were the nautiloids. Unlike earlier mollusks, which lived on the seabed, nautiloids were able to swim. They could hover motionless above the seabed, watching prey with well developed eyes. They used a jet-like system like to dart quickly through the sea. During the Ordovician a rare event took place on the ocean’s floor. A completely new group of animals appeared after the Cambrian explosion. Known as bryozoans, were small invertebrates which were protected by boxlike skeletons. They formed colonies, forming shapes that often looked like plants. Bryozoans proved to be a very successful addition to the animal kingdom and are still widespread today.

End Ordovician Extinctions and related environmental changes: Recent work has shown that the stable isotopic record from sediments and fossils can provide a global chronostratigraphic ruler that enables global correlation of biotic events and environmental change. The biotic changes, which together comprise the end-Ordovician mass extinction is concentrated in two main phases associated with the most rapid environmental changes. The isotopic data provide key evidence for the magnitude of environmental change and the relationship with faunal occurrences enables the detailed ‘architecture’ of the biotic changes to be determined. Despite the massive scale of the environmental disruption at the end of the Ordovician the degree of ecological disruption was relatively small. Isotopic records used to distinguish between mass extinction events where environmental changes accompany, and potentially drive, biotic change (such as the end-Ordovician) from those events where the isotopic values, environmental and faunal changes are responses to an external driving mechanism. In short, The Ordovician Mass Extinction probably caused by a lowering of the oceans because water became locked up as glacial ice and killed off numerous marine species. Later, sea levels rose as the glaciers melted and changed the environment again. Death toll: 85 percent of marine organisms became extinct.

1Gondwana existed many hundreds of millions of years ago, and the break up of the continent into what we now see as Antarctica, South America, Africa, Madagascar, India, Arabia, Australia, New Guinea and New Zealand occurred over many millions of years.

263 Earth - Designed for Biodiversity. Life will find a Way!

Late Devonian Extinction: 364 million years ago – By the Devonian period, fish were a common part of the marine biological communities. Particularly important were the jawed fish. These were predators and they must have had quite an impact on the marine communities during the Devonian period. The first fossil evidence of insects and terrestrial trees comes from Devonian age rocks. The Devonian is thought to have been quite warm. Evidence of this comes from the extensive amount of tropical- like reefs. The climate is also thought to have been quite dry. Evidence of this comes from extensive evaporate (salt deposits) that have been found dispersed much more broadly than any time in the earlier Paleozoic. Today, for example, evaporates are restricted to the mid latitude belt where dry sinking air from the Hadley cells make these regions dry. During the Devonian these evaporate deposits were found well beyond 30 degrees north and south. Particularly important was the position of the southern land masses. There was a big southern land mass was formed by the late Devonian Period. Near the end of the Devonian there was another extinction event that affected mostly the tropical communities, especially the reefs. This extinction event has been attributed to the development of glacial conditions once again over the south Polar Regions and the cooling of the oceans which resulted from the glaciation. The glacial deposits have been found in northern South America which was located over the pole in the late Devonian period. Death toll: about 80 percent of marine life perished. Nothing is known about extinctions of life on land.

Permian-Triassic Extinction: 251 million years ago – Roughly 251 million years ago, life on Earth nearly ceased to exist— as much as 90 percent of marine life and 70 percent of terrestrial life died out. At around the same time, a vast up swelling of magma covered between one million and four million cubic kilometers of what is now Siberia. The eruption continued off and on for about a million years, with basalt lava and poisonous gases seeping up through cracks in Siberia’s mantle. Now rocks from Italy may have linked the two events. The Permian Extinction has been called “The Great Dying.” It has also been called “When Life Nearly Died.” Permian Extinction was the extinction that wiped out vast quantities of life. The highest numbers given are often in the 90th percentile, but almost never lower than the 70th. There were vast amounts of critters and green stuff that just ceased to continue through the long, dark voyage over the chronological seas of deep time to the present day. The consequences of the Permian Mass Extinction were very profound. Trilobites became extinct, coral, Bryozoans, and brachiopods species dwindled and fungi

264 War on Biodiversity and Extinctions dominated some ecosystems. It was Earth’s worst mass extinction. A comet or asteroid strike may have been the culprit, causing massive outpourings of lava, enough to cover the entire planet to the depth of 10 feet, but evidence for a cosmic hit has not been found. Some think the lava floods came from ruptures in the crust of what today is Siberia. We can’t definitely say for sure that this was the cause and there are other causes, too. But many scientists attribute the catastrophe to major environmental changes, perhaps involving reorganization of ocean circulation or massive volcanism. Death toll: 90 percent of all sea life, along with 70 percent of land animals and most terrestrial plants perished.

Triassic Extinction, 206 million years ago – Another Mass Extinction occurred in the late Triassic Period, only 37 millions after the “Big One.” This one wiped out half the recovered and new species. Welcome to Triassic Period and you look around and see some palm trees and some pine trees. You see some dinosaurs, but not that many. The dinosaurs are mostly two legged meat eaters and plant eaters. These early dinosaurs are not large at all. They are lightly built omnivores or carnivores, and they are very quick and agile. Most of these smaller dinosaurs will be extinct by the end of the Triassic Period. During the Jurassic and Cretaceous Periods, the dinosaurs will be much more adaptive, and many of them will grow to gigantic sizes. It’s very hot and dry. There are some other animals like crocodiles, small mammals, frogs, turtles, fish, and gliding lizards. The continents are still connected. During the span of nearly 200 million years, CO2 levels were 5-10 times higher than they are now with temperatures as much as 10 degrees Celsius higher than today. Earth’s flora and fauna succumbed to the Triassic Mass Extinction at 200 million years ago. It is estimated that biodiversity did not fully recover from this extinction for 25 million years. Some plants such as cycads, which had become the most important of the gymnosperm plants1. They were either stumpy, with round or barrel-like stems, or had tall, slender trunks. All of them were topped by a tuft of palm-like leaves. Conifers were also becoming widely distributed. The most likely cause was massive floods of lava pouring out of what is now the Atlantic Ocean basin. Rocks from the eruptions have been found in the eastern United States, eastern Brazil, North Africa, and Spain. Deadly global warming may have followed and contributed to the extinctions. Death toll: more than 50 percent of all species were wiped

1Gymnosperms are a group of seed-bearing plants which bear seeds on cone-like structures rather than inside fruit. The term gymnosperm comes from the Greek word “gumnospermos,” translated literally “naked seed.”

265 Earth - Designed for Biodiversity. Life will find a Way! out in less than 10,000 years, a mere tick on the geological clock.

Cretaceous-Tertiary Extinction: 65 million years ago – The famous extinction that is now thought to have contributed to the death of the dinosaurs. Strong evidence points to a major impact by a comet or asteroid. The impact created a gigantic crater, the Chicxulub Crater1, in the floor of the Gulf of Mexico near Yucatan Peninsula. Extensive lava flooding from Deccan Traps, what is now in India is also suspected to have contributed to the mass extinctions. Death toll: up to 63 percent of marine organisms and about 20 percent of vertebrate animals living on land. Scientists now think there may have been a total of one or two dozen mass extinctions over the last billion years, some caused or helped along by comet or asteroid strikes. These catastrophic strikes may also have set the stage for a burst of new plant and animal types following the impacts. The reason is that new and unoccupied ecological nooks and crannies were opened and competition among surviving species reduced in some cases. The image of the last majestic dinosaurs passing away and leaving a world of shrew-like mammals and cold-blooded reptiles is false. Instead, many of the major modern land animals were already living in the Cretaceous. Dinosaurs shared their last million years with modern creatures. The extinction event that killed the dinosaurs was worldwide. It affected many plant and animal groups, both on land and in water. Dinosaurs were only a small part-the disappearance of other living things was so great that scientists knew about the extinction 30 years before the first dinosaur was described. The victims of the Cretaceous Mass Extinction included dinosaurs, ammonites or mollusks related to the octopus and the chambered nautilus, pterosaurs, and certain plant groups. But many other animal groups, even some large-bodied reptile groups like champsosaurus1, were not affected. Since more than just dinosaurs became extinct, reasons that only explain why dinosaurs died can be ruled out. For instance, there is one theory that disease caused the extinction of dinosaurs. But a disease could not have caused the extinction of plants and animals over the whole world.

1The Chicxulub Crater is an ancient impact crater buried underneath the Yucatan Peninsula in Mexico. Its center is located near the town of Chicxulub, after which the crater is named.

2Champsosaurus is an extinct genus of diapsid reptile belonging to the order Choristodera. It grew to about 5 feet long. It resembled a gharial or marine iguana and like gharials, hunted in rivers and swamps.

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Quaternary-Holocene Mass Extinction – Right Now

All the above five mass extinctions happened before the arrival of Homo. Natural causes leading to the climate change was the culprit in every one of the mass extinctions. But the sixth mass extinction on the other hand is induced by human activity and the culprit is “the culture.” Harvard University biologist Edward O. Wilson says we need to know three things to tell if there is a mass extinction crisis: first, the natural extinction rate; second, the current rate of extinction; and third, how fast the present rate seems to be speeding up and has reached a crisis, others aren’t so sure. They say we really can’t tell if there is an extinction crisis without knowing how many species there actually are.

Perhaps the question is too big to answer with confidence. We know relatively little about some plants and animals, though quite a lot about others. For example, we know birds pretty well. We now recognize nearly 8,700 bird species the world over. Each year, according to ecologist Stuart Pimm, two or three bird species become extinct while 11 to 14 percent are at risk. That rate of loss is about two hundred to three hundred times higher than past rates revealed by a study of the fossil record. Nevertheless, birds as a group worldwide seem to be among the least threatened. So, too, mammals, of which there are only about 4,810 species. We seem not to have lost a single mammal species in recent history, although some 25 percent are listed by the World Conservation. And, just as a new bird species pops up every now and then, so too does a new mammal species pops out. Seven new monkey species have been reported in Brazil just since 1990. The WCU’s Red List of Threatened Wildlife lists a total of 5,205 species at risk, including 34 percent of fish, 25 percent of amphibians, and 20 percent of reptiles. Although these numbers might seem high, they do not prove that a mass extinction is now under way. Furthermore, the species counters point out that any single species’ well-being or threatened status cannot be used as a measure of the health of all other species. Butterflies and pine trees respond to environmental change quite differently than a tropical forest monkey might. And so the argument continues between those who believe that mass extinctions are occurring and those who do not.

If it is now clear that we are in the midst of the greatest mass extinction since the dinosaurs died out, then that explains why are so many biologists in a state of gloom? According to Robert M. May, an Oxford University zoologist and former scientific adviser to the British government, the rate

267 Earth - Designed for Biodiversity. Life will find a Way! of species extinctions speeded up during the last one hundred years to about 1,000 times the rate before human beings evolved; and the rate probably will speed up 10 times faster over the next hundred years are so. According to Norman Myers, author of the 1979 book “The Sinking Ark”, 40,000 species die out each year. According to Edward O. Wilson, a leading authority on biodiversity, 1 to 10 percent of all species may die out every ten years, which amounts to at least 27,000 species a year. According to the American Museum of Natural History’s Michael J. Novacek, we may have lost as much as 60 percent of all species by the year 2050. These numbers can become confusing considering that different experts come up with numbers that often do not agree, from rate of species extinctions, to the number of extinctions being caused by human activity. We may be driving living organisms to extinction at a rate of about a hundred species a day. If we assume a low total number of species of 10 million, then that means, we are eliminating 0.2 to 0.6 percent of the planet’s species every year.

As evidence of a serious decline in species, the voices of gloom point not only to the percentage of species considered threatened, but to species known to have become extinct. For instance, these scientists point out that the island of Madagascar has lost 17 of about 50 lemur species in the past 3,000 years, some as large as gorillas. In the past hundred years alone, 40 of about 950 fish species in North America have become extinct. Southern Africa has about 8,500 plant species found only in that region. Thirty-six have recently become extinct, and another 618 appear threatened. Worried scientists point out that such a rate of species loss is more rapid than replacement of new species by evolution, and hence means a rapid loss of Biodiversity. According to The Nature Conservancy’s 1996 annual report, two-thirds of freshwater mussels have become extinct or are at risk. Freshwater fish, amphibians, and crayfish are close behind. Coral reefs in many parts of the world also seem to be in great danger. Extinction – A Destructive Creator

Has extinction been a good thing or merely a destructive nuisance barely overridden by the constructive forces of evolution? This is an interesting and tough question without a firm answer. One common opinion is “Of course extinction is a good thing, because it serves to weed out the less fit species.” This deeply embedded notion can be found throughout Darwin’s “Origin of Species,” even though his main emphasis was always on fitness within species. To some people, the idea that extinction is ultimately good is so self-evident that it does not need testing:

268 War on Biodiversity and Extinctions more fit species can be distinguished from the less fit by the mere fact of their survival.

The disturbing reality is that for none of the thousands of well- documented extinctions in the geologic past do we have a solid explanation of why the extinction occurred. We have many proposals in specific cases, of course: trilobites died out because of competition from newly evolved fish; dinosaurs were too big or too stupid. The antlers of Irish elk became too cumbersome. These are all plausible scenarios, but no matter how plausible, they cannot be shown to be true beyond reasonable doubt. Equally plausible alternative scenarios can be invented with ease, and none has predictive power in the sense that it can show a priori that a given species or anatomical type was destined to go extinct.

Sadly, the only evidence we have for the inferiority of victims of extinction is the fact of their extinction—a circular argument. The weakness of the argument does not, of course, invalidate the notion that extinction is based on fitness: it may only reflect our ignorance. For example, mammals of the late Cretaceous may have actually been better adapted than dinosaurs, but our knowledge of these animals may not be good enough for us to recognize that superiority. Consider, as a thought experiment, what evolution would be like if there were never any extinction of species. Evolution without extinction suggests several problems. Most important, Biodiversity would increase exponentially. The more species lineages that came into being, the more lineages there would be to produce more species. Rather soon, the system would saturate: speciation would have to stop because there would be no room for new species.

Adaptation by natural selection would continue to hone and refine the existing species, and the ultimate quality of adaptation might even be greater than what we see today because the species would have more time. The first-formed organisms might have evolved far better structures than the ones visible today. Thus, one can imagine an evolutionary system organized without extinction—and this may exist on planets elsewhere in space. But, would an extinction-free world, have produced as much biological variety as has evolved on Earth—organisms as different as trilobites, fish, flying reptiles, whales, and humans? Probably not, but we don’t know for sure. Extinction eliminates promising lineages—often early in the adaptive process—but this creates space for evolutionary innovations. Therefore, in our world at least, extinction continually provided

269 Earth - Designed for Biodiversity. Life will find a Way! new opportunities for different organisms that can explore new habitats and modes of life. This process “keeps the pot boiling” and may be necessary to achieve the variety of life forms, past and present. The foregoing suggests that extinction may be a necessary ingredient in evolution, but the case is by no means solid. A Voice of Doubt on Alliance of Hope

Mention the name Bjorn Lomborg and most ecologists wince. Lomborg is a professor of mathematics at the University of Aarhus, Denmark. In his book “The Skeptical Environmentalist”, he says that the world is not nearly in as much danger as many environmentalists claim, and that their voices of gloom about mass extinction have vastly overstated biodiversity losses. Lomborg argues that Myers’s 1979 claim that 40,000 species become extinct each year, or one hundred species a day, is nonsense. It is, he says, 10,000 times greater than the latest observed rate of extinctions. Nevertheless, he adds, that the figure of 40,000 has been unquestionably accepted by “millions of people the world over.” He also states that reasons for preserving the world’s rain forests have been twisted. He cites biologist Thomas Lovejoy, who says that a large number of all species live in tropical rain forests. Leave the rain forests alone, and nothing will happen to any of the species. Cut down the rain forests, and most species will disappear. Lomborg then quotes Lovejoy as claiming that if half the tropical forests are cut down, one-third of all their species will disappear.

If that notion is true, Lomborg then asks, “Just what do we lose?” many people immediately think of elephants, leopards, apes, and mahogany trees. He then points out that 95 percent of tropical forest species are beetles, ants, flies, microscopic worms, fungi, and bacteria. Furthermore, he says that if one parcel of rain forest is cleared, many animals and plants simply carry on in neighboring forest areas. For instance, 99 percent of Puerto Rico’s primary forests were cut over a period of 400 years. During that time 7 out of 60 bird species became extinct, but today the island has 97 bird species. “Our mistake is to believe that all cleared rainforest is simply razed and left barren”, Lomborg says. He then adds that about half of all tropical forest that is cleared turns into secondary forest.

Lomborg comes down hard on biologist Edward O. Wilson’s rule of thumb that if a forest area is reduced by 90 percent, the number of species will be halved. Originally, Wilson meant the rule to apply to island communities where there are no other locations to be occupied by a threatened species, but the rule cannot be applied to large continental regions, says Lomborg.

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He then cites the destruction of 88 percent of Brazil’s Atlantic rain forest, with only fragmented areas left. According to Wilson’s rule, half of all the forests’ species should have become extinct. However, the Brazilian Society of Zoology could not find “a single known animal or plant species that had become extinct.” In fact, “an appreciable number” of species considered extinct twenty years ago, according to the society’s report, have cropped up, including several bird species and six butterfly species. Lomborg points out that “we demand that developing countries stop chopping down their forests even though we have eradicated about 99 percent of our own primary forest.”

He concludes by insisting that the widely quoted species loss rate of 40,000 a year is a figure that cannot be shown to be in agreement with observed species loss rates. Lomborg claims that the planet’s forest cover has expanded since 1950. The United Nations Forest Resources Assessment says that the world actually lost 4.2 percent of its natural forests during the 1990s alone. Lomborg claims that “marine productivity has almost doubled since 1970.” He says that biodiversity loss will be “0.7 percent over the next 50 years.” E.O. Wilson claims the figure will be at least ten times higher. Lomborg’s controversial book has drawn severe criticism from many environmental scientists. Some have called the book a fraud and a distorted attack written by a non-scientist who used out-of-date information and twisted real facts beyond recognition. The result has been confusion among the public and the politicians whose job it is to write environmental regulations. Wilson concludes: “My greatest regret about the Lomborg scam is the extraordinary amount of scientific talent that has to be expended to combat it in the media.” Even though it is often hard to get various groups of scientists to agree on the numbers of species that appear to be gong extinct, or on the overall rate of species loss, all, including Lomborg, agree on at least four things that point to a crisis in biodiversity loss on a global basis:

1. Habitat loss or degradation endangers species by reducing their populations.

2. Logging, agricultural expansion, ranching, housing, and industrial development continue to erode and fragment land habitats.

3. A combination of over-fishing, the pollution of marine habitats, and rising ocean temperatures due to global warming are dangerously reducing the populations of many aquatic species.

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4. The adverse effects of human activity, on an ever-increasing scale, due to our out-of-control population growth, is the cause of habitat loss and destruction the world over. Biodiversity Loss - Quick Facts 1. Biodiversity refers to the variety of life from the molecular to the ecosystem level. It has to do with the number and variety of species, ecological systems, and the genetic variability they contain. It includes genetic differences within each species - for example, among varieties of crops and breeds of livestock. Genetic materials determine the uniqueness of each individual and each species. At the broadest level of biodiversity the major varieties of ecosystems are known as biomes, and include tundra, deserts, forests, woodlands, oceans, and grasslands. In each ecosystem, living creatures, including humans, form what is called a community, interacting with one another and with the air, water, and soil around them. It is the unique combination of biodiversity interacting with the rest of the environment that has made our planet capable of supporting human life.

2. Biodiversity plays at least two roles in maintaining natural systems:

z It provides the natural units through which materials and energy flow, giving ecosystems and biomes their functional properties. These types of biodiversity confer stability on ecosystems, and contribute to their effective functioning in mildly fluctuating and predictable conditions. For example, salmon returning to their spawning grounds to die there also serves to return important nutrients to the lands of the headwaters.

z Very different kinds of biodiversity are needed to provide resilience when unusual surprises occur; volcanic eruptions, meteor impacts, major fires, disease outbreaks, etc. For example, in extreme droughts, some grassland species thrive, which otherwise remain dormant in wetter conditions. This diversity maintains the grassland ecosystem under a wide range of climate conditions. These types of biodiversity are less involved with efficient flows of materials and energy, and contribute to ecosystems’ survival and the establishment of a new equilibrium in response to these unpredictable surprises. Upsetting the balance between these different, but still poorly understood types of biodiversity, represents one of the major threats of biodiversity loss.

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3. Life is an improbable occurrence: The conditions for life are a rare, if not unique, event in the universe. Both the evolution and maintenance of life depends on an unusual blend of the rare and the common, which allow an organism to survive. One of the most important and indispensable of these conditions is climate— predictable ranges of temperature and humidity; another is the availability and flow of certain organic and non-organic nutrients. Without a trace of the rare element phosphorus, for example, protein (based on abundant nitrogen) and carbohydrate polymers would not be possible. Without these proteins complex life forms as we know them would not exist. Biodiversity is an expression of how living systems make effective use of these varied elements across the full spectrum of complexity, from genes to biomes. It is biodiversity that allows one life form or another to thrive across most surfaces of the planet, and even survive the most extreme conditions on land, sea and in the atmosphere. Biodiversity is thus an expression of nature’s problem solving capacities, demonstrating how to survive under varied conditions. A remarkable array of mechanisms has evolved allowing various life forms to flourish. Just a few examples include:

z Insects combine small size to populate specialized niche subdivisions, metamorphism to allow different life stages to occupy different niches at different times, herbivore to take advantage of abundant food supplies, and the capacity for relatively rapid mobility, to facilitate dispersal and colonization of empty niches. These characteristics have allowed insects to become one of the most prolific species on the planet, linking plants and the rest of the food chain, and recycling both organic and inorganic materials. “If one could conclude as to the nature of the Creator from a study of his creation it would appear that God has a special fondness for stars and beetles” J.B.S.Haldane.

z Mutualisms, whereby two or more organisms co-evolve and develop a mutual dependency that benefits all parties involved, are likely one of the most common links in the biosphere. Pollination mutualism among insects, birds and bats and flowering plants is one of the best known examples of rewarding symbioses. Bees, for example, are responsible for pollinating more than 70% of the world’s top 100 crops. Bacteria in the human gut make digestion possible.

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z Examples of maintaining various types of stability are abundant. Both sharks and bacteria demonstrate constancy, staying essentially unchanged; grasslands through cycles of flood and drought demonstrate resilience, bouncing back to a reference state; ferns indicate persistence through time; various fire resistance gum trees show resistance, remaining the same in spite of disturbances.

A number of regularities regarding species size, metabolic rates and energy flows can be identified across species. But there is still debate about the role of biodiversity in terms of biomass productivity, a major indicator of species success. In some biomes biodiversity is associated with greater productivity (e.g. tropical rain forests), and in other biomes with less; for example, some extensive and ancient boreal forests, bogs and wetlands are not species rich but highly productive. In still others there seems to be little if any relation. Functional characteristics of the dominant species is sometimes more important than diversity, as with certain grasslands. In short, there is much we still do not know about the role of biodiversity in providing ecosystem services.

4. Biodiversity provides a large number of goods and services that sustain our lives. The benefits of biodiversity include:

z Direct economic benefits; for example, by providing selected crops or animals; or by providing new pharmaceutical compounds. z Indirect economic benefits; for example, a wide variety of ecosystem services such as pollination, decomposition of organic material, and nutrient transfers in soil. z Scientific value, helping us understand how nature works, and by providing models for many devices used by humans, from Velcro to jet engines z Psychological and aesthetic values by providing items and areas that stimulate all our senses, appeal to our ideals of beauty, and contribute to our sense of well being z Cultural value by providing items and places which become interwoven with a group’s social and spiritual beliefs and practices z Options or insurance value, by providing opportunities for

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survival in changing environments. Biodiversity makes adaptation possible. The options value is of special significance as human activities alter many aspects of the natural world, including climate. Greater adaptability is going to be required because of these global changes, at a time when adaptability is declining due to biodiversity loss.

5. There are believed to be between 3 and 100 million species of plants and animals on Earth. Estimates vary not only because experts use different methods of classification, but also because of considerable ignorance about just how many types of living things are in the world, and how they are connected. Scientists continue to discover new plants and animal species.

6. The current mass extinction, the only one induced by human activities, is believed to be approaching the largest in the history of our planet. It is also occurring faster than any previous mass extinction, measurable in decades rather than in millions of years. We are currently loosing between 100 and 1000 times more species per year than the background extinction rate1. On average, one extinction happens somewhere on Earth every 20 minutes. If present trends continue, one half of all species on the planet will be extinct in 100 years.

7. The major causes of species loss are urbanization, agriculture, invasive species, pollution, outdoor recreation/tourism, hunting, livestock and ranching activities, mining, industrial/military activity, water diversions, logging, harvesting/collecting, roads, genetic problems, wetland drainage/filling and aquifer depletion, and disease. Many of these causes are interconnected, and almost all can be traced to human economic activity. The same causes threaten biodiversity from the molecular to the ecosystem level.

8. Some of the newest threats to biodiversity are coming from human- induced global change processes such as climate change and atmospheric ozone depletion. Recent studies suggest that by the middle of the century as many as one quarter of the species on the

1Most extinctions occur as background extinctions, occurring throughout time. These extinctions are not caused by major catastrophes or horrendous climatic changes, but by small changes in climate or habitat, depleted resources, competition, and other changes that require adaptation and flexibility.

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planet today, representing at least one million species, will be jeopardized by changes in climate stability already underway, unless climate change is reversed.

9. In addition to losses through extinctions, major reductions in population size are also a serious threat to biodiversity. Significant reductions in population size reduce the opportunity to reproduce, genetic variability, and ecosystem function. Fewer numbers and reduced genetic variability in turn affect the species’ ability to survive changing environmental conditions. Species reduced to near their minimum viable populations may not ever recover. The Indian Fisheries Society has recently released the first-ever list of marine fish stocks and species at risk of extinction. It identifies 82 species or populations vulnerable, threatened, or endangered in Indian waters, including King Fish and Shark. Twenty-two species are at risk globally.

10. Existing species can go extinct rapidly, but new species evolve at a very slow rate. Scientists have calculated from the fossil record that during periods of normal, or background, extinction, species loss occurs at an average of one every four years. It can take millions of years for new vertebrate species to emerge. By what we do or don’t do in the next few decades, we will determine the future of evolution in terms of biodiversity composition for at least the next five million years, and in some respects, the next 10-15 million years.

11. Many species have thrived and survived for millions of years due to their abilities to out perform competitors in certain niches, such as some crocodile and shark species. Due to the tremendous breadth of the human niche, which expands with technological progress, the scale of the human economy is now expanding to the competitive exclusion of increasing numbers of other species. The current high rate of biodiversity loss is evidence of this human induced competitive exclusion1.

12. Some examples of actual species loss include: z At least 816 species are known to have gone extinct in the wild over the past 500 years due to human activities, although the true number is thought to be far higher.

1Competitive exclusion principle means: no two species can occupy the same niche, at the same time.

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z Of the 128 recorded species of extinct birds, 103 are known to have become extinct since 1800. Sixteen species of albatross are threatened now compared to just three in 1996 as a direct result of long-line fishing. z Some 2,000 species of Pacific Island birds and about 15 percent of the world total have gone extinct since human colonization. z Roughly 20 of the 297 known mussel and clam species have perished in North America in the past century. z Many varieties of basic food sources such as wheat, corn, potatoes and apples have gone extinct due to modern farming practices. Rice varieties such as “IR8, Adu Durai, Kichidi Samba” have gone extinct in India1. z In Indonesia, 1500 local rice varieties have become extinct in the last 15 years.

13. In addition to species that have already gone extinct, both the numbers of species at risk, and their level of risk, are increasing. Some examples include: z The total number of animal species officially listed as endangered has grown from 7,205 species in 2006 to 9,435 species over a six year period. The total number of officially listed endangered animals and plants stands at 11,046. z Several mammalian species, including most of our closest relatives from the primate family are endangered. z About 12 percent of the world’s 9,900 bird species are at risk of extinction, and species across the globe are showing increasing signs of distress. z One plant species in eight worldwide is threatened with extinction. z An estimated 30% of freshwater fish species worldwide may be extinct by the year 2020. z More than 8,000 tree species, 10 percent of the world’s total, are threatened with extinction, and the situation has grown worse over the past five years. 1These are the particular names of rice in Indian Tamil language. These varieties of rice were very common in the 1950s and 1960s, when organic farming was practiced, throughout India and especially in the southern Tamil Nadu.

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z Alien invasive species, species that invade or are introduced to an area or habitat where they do not naturally occur, are a significant threat, affecting 350 (30 percent) of all threatened birds, and 361 threatened plant species (15 percent).

z Over half of the some 1,200 variety of bamboo are threatened.

14. Some of the ecosystem services lost due to species extinctions include: z Some 3,000 whole bush land ecosystems in Australia which are disappearing, taking more than 1,500 species with them. z Over-hunting of mountain lions and wolves led to a dramatic increase in the deer population of the Kaibab Plateau in northern Arizona. The deer’s over browsing of shrubs and grasses increased the erosion of soil on the plateau. z The cutting down of tropical rain forests in India, Indonesia, Brazil, and Philippines, has resulted in loss of carbon sequestration services, contributing to climatic changes on a regional and global basis. z Scientists and conservationists worldwide have been raising the alarm in recent years about the impacts of high sea trawlers on the deep ocean habitats, in which millions of species are estimated to live. A recent report stresses that some of these species, such as corals and sponges are slow-growing and long- lived, which make them particularly sensitive to disturbance. It points out that deep sea fish such as Orange Roughy and Patagonian toothfish, which can live for up to 150 years and sometimes reach reproductive maturity only after 30 years of age, are particularly vulnerable to over fishing. Various scientific groups have called on the Conference of Parties on the Convention on Biological Diversity to protect the ocean floor from high seas bottom trawling until effective international management is possible. z The tundra’s sequestration of methane, a potent greenhouse gas, is diminishing due to increased temperatures in the higher latitudes z Loss of riparian habitat and wetlands due to a wide range of human activities in many parts of the world has led to a loss of flood control

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15. Various governments and international bodies have attempted to address biodiversity loss: z The Convention on “Biological Diversity” was agreed to in 1992 by the majority of the world’s nations. One of its goals is the preservation of biological diversity. z CITES (Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora) has also been endorsed by most countries, seeks to protect some 30,000 species involved in international trade from going extinct. CITES came into force in 1975, and to date not a single species protected by CITES has gone extinct as a result of trade. Various national governments have enacted legislation to protect species within their borders. z The United Nations treaty known as the Cartagena Protocol on Biosafety, or the Biosafety Protocol, is the first treaty that formally protects biological diversity from the potential risks posed by genetically modified organisms. Adopted by various governments in 2000, the Biosafety Protocol seeks to protect biological diversity from potential risks that may be posed by living modified organisms (LMOs), also known as genetically modified organisms (GMOs), resulting from modern biotechnology. Numerous international agreements cover a range of specific species or ecosystems such as whales, migratory birds, and wetlands.

16. The many national and international agreements have been of questionable usefulness in protection overall biodiversity to date: z Despite numerous international agreements and national programs biodiversity loss continues at an increasing rate z Like most international treaties, the Convention on Biological Diversity is a voluntary agreement and contains no international enforcement agency z The international notification system under the Biosafety Protocol does not replace national biosafety legislation. Various environmental groups have warned that enacting stricter national legislation on biosafety is still needed. z India and China have not supported the Biosafety Protocol, and has major differences in its approach to genetically modified life forms than countries that have endorsed the Protocol.

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z Recent reports from the International Union for Conservation and Natural Resources indicates that global extinction is worse than previously believed, with dramatic declines in populations of many species, including especially reptiles and primates. z Since the last assessment in 1996, Critically Endangered primates increased from 13 to 19, and the number of threatened albatross species has increased from 3 to 16 due to birds drowning after accidentally being caught on hooks set by long- line fisheries. Freshwater turtles, heavily exploited for food and medicinal use in Asia, went from 10 to 24 Critically Endangered species in just four years. A species is classed as threatened if it falls in the Critically Endangered, Endangered, or Vulnerable categories. z The number of Critically Endangered mammals has increased from 169 to 180; Critically Endangered birds increased from 168 to 182. z Twenty four percent (one in four) of mammal species are threatened. z Although the overall percentage of threatened mammals and birds has not greatly changed in four years, the magnitude of risk, shown by movements to the higher risk categories, has increased.

17. Recognizing the importance of biodiversity: The difficulties inherent in preserving biodiversity, some groups have asked the question “which species are most important to save?” Various approaches have emphasized protection for keystone species, endangered species, or what are known as biodiversity hotspots—specific areas with exceptionally high densities of biodiversity. The dangers of attempting to set priorities for preservation efforts is that we are largely ignorant of the values any particular species provides to the web of life or the options value it might provide in a rapidly changing global environment.

18. Continued biodiversity loss threatens the web of life upon which humans depend: Global life support systems and biodiversity coevolved. The very atmosphere which makes the Earth capable of supporting complex life forms was itself generated by plants and microbial organisms. Biodiversity depends on a complex interplay not only between living

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things and the natural world, but also amongst living creatures of varying forms and types, in ways we understand only vaguely. Ecosystem services provided by these complex global systems are essential for our quality of life as well as our survival. Biodiversity is essential for ecosystems to thrive and adapt to changing pressures from human activities. The less biodiversity there is and the more its natural composition is disrupted, the more the human enterprise is at risk. Marine Over-harvesting – The Massacre of the Innocents

The use of over-efficient fishing technology, the lack of sufficient scientific data regarding the oceans, the ignorance and apathy of humanity towards this oceanic crisis, and insufficient implementation of existing maritime agreements are resulting in a decrease in the biodiversity of the ocean, changes to ocean chemistry, changed in the genetic composition of marine species, disturbances to the food web and ecosystem, collapse of fish stocks, and irreparable damage to marine ecosystems and to the fishing industry, including all people dependent on fish for sustenance, income, and cultural value. The problem has not arisen overnight. Historically, fishermen believed that the ocean could support unlimited fishing. As stocks began to collapse, however, international limits and regulations on fishing were implemented. Many nations, however, have cultural and economic ties to the fishing industry that impede the implementation of fishing regulations. Currently, the United Nations is working to control over-fishing, enforce fishing regulations, and resolve international fishing disputes. Examples of the outcomes from over-fishing exist in areas such as the North Sea of Europe, the Grand Banks of North America, East China Sea of Asia, and the Bay of Bengal of India. In these locations, over-fishing has not only proved disastrous to fish stocks but also to the fishing communities relying on the harvest. Like other extractive industries such as forestry and hunting, fishery is susceptible to economic interaction between ownership or stewardship and sustainability, otherwise known as the tragedy of the commons. The FAO scientists publish a two yearly report (SOFIA) on the state of the world’s fisheries and aquaculture. The report is generally rather conservative regarding the acknowledging of problems but does show the main issues:

1. 52% of fish stocks are fully exploited 2. 20% are moderately exploited

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3. 17% are overexploited 4. 7% are depleted 5. 1% is recovering from depletion

The above chart details that over 25% of all the world’s fish stocks, are either overexploited or depleted. Another 52% is fully exploited these are in imminent danger of overexploitation and collapse. Thus a total of almost 80% of the world’s fisheries are fully to over-exploited, depleted, or in a state of collapse. Worldwide about 90% of the stocks of large predatory fish stocks are already gone. In the real world all this comes down to two serious problems—we are losing species as well as entire ecosystems. As a result the overall ecological unity of our oceans are under stress and at risk of collapse; we are in risk of losing a valuable food source many depend upon for social, economical or dietary reasons. Mysterious Disappearance of Amphibians

Biologists are hard put to explain why recent years have seen a decline in frogs, toads, salamanders, and other amphibians in several parts of the world. Some point to pollution and others to habitat fragmentation. But even in many areas where habitats have remained healthy, amphibians have not. Over the past 150 years Sri Lanka has lost 96 percent of its rain forest cover, and more than half its amphibians listed by naturalists before 1900 are no longer around. Some ecologists suspect that, in addition to habitat loss, habitat change may be the cause. Such change occurs when a forest of mixed vegetation is cut down and replaced by a plantation forest of only one species of trees. In Florida, flatwoods salamander populations declined over the years as about 80 percent of the state’s pine forests were cut and most replaced by a drier forest of commercial pine species. The salamanders do not do well in a dry forest habitat. In California some 75 percent of the tiger salamander’s native grasslands habitat has been replaced by farmland and housing developments, with the result that the salamander is now on the endangered species list. In the Cascades Range of Oregon, even though the habitat of the Cascades frog and western toad have not been changed or polluted, the animals are disappearing. No one can say for sure why this is happening. In Costa Rica, 20 amphibian species have declined or disappeared just since the late 1980s. Among them is the famous golden toad.

Amphibians are a hardy lot and were the first land animals to evolve. They have been around for 350 million years and are found on every

282 War on Biodiversity and Extinctions continent except Antarctica. Four northern species of frogs can freeze solid and survive. So far, biologists have identified some 5,000 species of amphibians. Yet some frogs are extremely sensitive and need just the right habitat conditions to maintain their populations. Some need a gently flowing stream at a certain water temperature and with a sandy bottom where they can lay their eggs. The southeastern India is the world’s richest region in salamanders. Most species of salamanders do not have lungs and breathe through their skin, which must be kept moist at all times. When a forest is logged or wiped out, its salamander populations must move elsewhere or perish. Sunlight flooding the forest floor creates dry conditions that can spell death to salamanders. The favorite habitats of these skin-breathers are mature hardwood forests. At the present rate of cutting, the forests will be all but gone by 2015, and many salamander populations will also be gone. The great mystery is why amphibians in a variety of habitats, healthy, protected or those degraded by human activity, are dying out. Some biologists think that pollution, acid rain, pesticides, herbicides, fertilizer runoff from farms, is eroding amphibian populations in many areas. The animals are especially sensitive to poisons that can easily penetrate their thin moist skin and their eggs, which lack protective shells.

Could a worldwide epidemic that seriously injures or kills off entire amphibian populations be involved? Some biologists think so, and they have identified the killer as chytrid fungus1. Bacteria and viruses also seem to be agents of amphibian death in certain areas. Some biologists wonder if some disease agent that has spread worldwide is weakening amphibians’ ability to fight off disease. In shallow lakes and ponds in India, climate change has reduced water level in many areas with it, high amphibian populations. The result has been increased exposure of embryos to ultraviolet B radiation, making them more sensitive to infection by disease agents. The eggs begin to develop normally for a few days but then turn white and die by the hundreds of thousands.

So where do all these local reports of frogs, salamanders, birds, fish, coral reefs, and other animals and their habitats leave us on a global basis? Are these simply local events that don’t add up to a mass extinction? Some scientists say it may be too early to tell because the extinction of a species doesn’t take place overnight. In some cases it may take ten years, in other

1Chytrid, while likely not a novel pathogen, has only now entered the global stage. The most compelling theory for this is the theory that rising temperatures increase the virility of chytrid.

283 Earth - Designed for Biodiversity. Life will find a Way! cases a hundred or more. It’s hard question to answer. Our lack of detailed knowledge about how many species there are on the planet and how they are distributed makes some scientists cautious about estimating the number of species now headed for extinction and about how fast others are headed there. Nevertheless, there is agreement among scientists that species appear to be fading out at an unnaturally high rate. In 1995 one thousand scientists from more than fifty countries agreed. In a report called “Global Biodiversity Assessment”, the scientists asserted that species are becoming extinct at fifty to one hundred times the natural (background) expected rate. In the Pacific region, bird species are dwindling at one thousand times the natural rate. Frog – New Canary in the Coalmine

Our passion for the environment drives everything we do. It is about having a conscience when it comes to protecting our planet. When it comes to protection, frogs need the most of it right now. Brilliant orange, bright blue, dazzling red, frogs come in an astonishing array of colors. This vivid assortment of hues hints at the remarkable diversity that exists among the frog species inhabiting the globe. From lush rainforests to parched deserts, frogs are found nearly in every environment on Earth, and their survival strategies range from surprising to bizarre. Some 365 million years ago, finned, aquatic animals evolved into tetrapods, the first four-legged vertebrates. Over time this new animal group moved onto land and gave rise to amphibians, reptiles, birds, and mammals. Today frogs and other amphibians live in all but the harshest land environments, but many remain tied to water for development of their eggs and tadpoles. There is evidence that frogs have roamed the Earth for more than 200 million years, at least as long as the dinosaurs. While the life spans of frogs in the wild are unknown, frogs in captivity have been known to live more than 20 years. There are 4,900 species of frogs worldwide. Scientists continue to search for new ones and estimate that more than 1,000 frog species have yet to be described. Toads are frogs the word “toad” is usually used for frogs that have wart and dry skin, and shorter hind legs.

Frogs live near lakes, ponds, and streams. This habitat helps their skin moist, which is necessary to their survival. Otherwise, oxygen can’t pass easily through it and the frog suffocates. Frog skin secrets a mucus that helps keep it moist. Toads’ skin doesn’t lose moisture as quickly, so they can live farther from water than most frogs. About once a week, frogs shed their skin. The process begins with the frog doing a lot of twisting, bending, and stretching to loosen the old skin. Then the frog pulls the skin over its

284 War on Biodiversity and Extinctions head like a sweater and usually eats it. Frogs are carnivores. They eat other animals, typically bugs and worms which are harmful to humans. In this process frogs keep diseases down. Except for an occasional blink, the hunting frog sits almost motionless. It waits for a meal to fly by then snares it with a long, sticky tongue. They come out on rainy days or nights to forage. During extensive periods of heat or drought, frogs can enter a period of dormancy similar to hibernation called estivation1. Frogs like sun. This behavior is called basking. When temperatures are cool, frogs need to bask in sunshine to warm up enough to be able to move. That’s because they are cold-blooded, and their body temperature changes with the external temperature. Frogs eat insects, and other small and terrestrial animals. In turn they provide food for fish, some large insects, snakes, lizards, larger frogs, birds, and small carnivorous and omnivorous mammals.

Over the past 20 years scientists have recorded major declines in frog populations around the world. A few species have vanished completely. Many frog die-offs are the result of local human activity, but the epidemic has also reached remote areas. Is there a global cause? Scientists continue to search for answers. Frogs with extra or missing legs, eyes, and toes have been found in many places since 1996. Possible causes include parasites, pollution, and ultraviolet light grew into malformed adults, while eggs with no exposure developed into normal adults. Major causes of frog declines are: 1. Habitat Destruction 2. Introduced Species 3. Chemical Pollution 4. Climate Changes 5. Over-collection 6. Epidemic diseases

Everybody interacts with these fascinating animals. You may love them or be creeped out by them, and if you have a lone toad croaking forlornly from the pond outside your bedroom, you might even be coming pretty close to hating them. Even though frogs are some of the most accessible wildlife out there, surprisingly little was known about their status from a

1Frogs and snails are usually active in summer, but if it goes too warm or too dry for them, they enter a period of inactivity known as estivation.

285 Earth - Designed for Biodiversity. Life will find a Way! conservation perspective before 2004, when the first-ever global study was conducted to look at the state of amphibians. The research uncovered a silent, previously unknown crisis. One in three amphibians (32%) is now threatened with extinction, a rate that is higher than any other known vertebrate group. For the sake of comparison, 12% of birds and 23% of mammals are threatened globally. For the last four years, scientists and conservationists have been in a huddle trying to figure out how to save this incredibly vulnerable and bio-diverse vertebrate group. The result is a comprehensive action plan that will cost nearly $100 million a year to implement. What frogs need is some attention, funding and political champions. By eating harmful bugs and larvae which are otherwise hazardous to all life, frogs help keep healthy ecosystems. Frogs do matter and every frog is a true hero in the Biosphere. Habitat Loss and Extinction

No one will ever know the exact number of bird species wiped out by the Polynesians who colonized most of the 800 or so islands in the Pacific Ocean over the last 12,000 years. The Hawaiian Islands have lost some 60 ground-bird species since the Polynesians arrived between 900 and 500 years ago. Altogether, the Polynesians caused the extinction of around 2,000 bird species there. About 25 more species died out after 1778 when Europeans moved to the islands. Both groups destroyed bird habitats with the introduction of agriculture, pigs, rats, and dogs. Such extinctions are not isolated and rare events and they are not new in Earth’s history. What is new is the rate at which numerous plant and animal species are becoming extinct. That rate is called the “background extinction rate.” The actual extinction rate is most likely hundreds or even thousands of times greater. From 1 to 10 species became extinct every year, on average, during the past 65 million years. In 1996 alone an estimated 1,000 to 10,000 species became extinct. Most of the extinctions today are due to loss of habitats, due to human activity as the world population continues to soar. For example, there are about 100 million migrant people in the world today. That was the total world population at the time of classical Greek civilization. As forest biomes the world over are being carved up into ever smaller habitats, biodiversity suffers. Other extinctions are due to climate change, such as the warming oceans’ destruction of coral reefs around the world.

One way habitats become lost is through a process called

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“fragmentation.” This occurs when forests are cut down for logging, road building, farms, or housing developments. Blocks of forest are made smaller and smaller, with many more barriers to species movement and dispersal. It has been described as an “ecological cancer” that eats away a forest section by section. Around the edge of each parcel, conditions are drier, hotter, and windier than in the forest interior. The altered habitat conditions threaten both the plants and animals accustomed to moister, cooler, and dimmer conditions. It also kills off or forces species that need large territories for breeding and feeding to move. The resulting edge communities of plant and animals usually are much less diverse than the deep forest communities and can extend up to three-quarters of a mile (1.2 km) into the forest interior. So a moist tropical forest need not be hacked to pieces to lose a significant amount of its biodiversity. Fragmentation can do the job nearly as effectively.

Logging of tropical forests in Brazil has eased since the 1960s. During the first half of the 1990s, some 356,000 acres around Rio de Janeiro were logged, but in the second half of the decade only 8,650 acres were lost. Just over one-third of eastern Brazil’s remaining Atlantic rain forest today is officially protected, but only in a patchwork of 170 parks and other fragments. And because little is done to protect the parks, illegal logging goes on. In 1999, for instance, the mayor of a small Bahian city1 illegally logged 125 acres. Earlier, thousands of acres of prime forest, also in Bahia, were clear-cut to make room for eucalyptus plantations. There is a general rule to estimate species extinctions due to habitat destruction. If 90 percent of a habitat is logged, we can expect a loss of 50 percent of all its’ species, from large animals to microscopic organisms to become extinct. But critics of the rule say that there are too many uncertainties for it to be reliable as a species census taker. Some species will survive by migrating out of the area. And there is no way of knowing how long the extinction might take: ten years, fifty years, and one hundred years?

Corals - Coral reefs are under multiple assaults and pervasive threats. These include rising surface temperatures, which lead corals to expel the symbiotic algae that live within them; physical destruction of reefs from tourism, fishing, boating, and other hazards; acidification of the oceans,

1Bahia is one of the largest states of Brazil, it’s slightly smaller than France. The population of over 15 million concentrates mostly along the coast, Salvador, the capital, is the most important city. Most recently, the northern part of the Bahia coast has seen investments on the tourist trade. Therefore, forests are cleared for the construction of buildings and roads.

287 Earth - Designed for Biodiversity. Life will find a Way! with consequent destruction of carbonate structures; ocean pollution; and widespread harvesting of corals of ornamental purposes.

Great Apes - There is a pervasive and acute threat to the great ape populations, including gorillas, bonobos, and chimpanzees. Many of the dangers revolve around the growing encroachments of human populations on the forest habitats of the great apes. Causes of the sharp decline of great ape populations and the extreme danger of their extinction include the small initial population of the great ape populations; the destruction and fragmentation of their forest habitats, especially caused by logging and violent conflict; the hunting of the apes for bush meat; and the mass epidemics of Ebola virus among the apes for reasons that are uncertain and that may include environmental, climate, or habitat change.

These high-profile threats are considered by ecologists to be the visible part of a mass human-led extinction era now under way. Human activity has long contributed to the extinction of megafauna, the large mammals that are easily hunted, such as American horse, camels, mammoths, saber- toothed cats, and other species driven to extinction by hunters in North America roughly ten thousand years ago. In the past half millennium, more than 750 species extinctions have been recorded by the International Union for Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources (IUCN), the keeper of the extinction accounts, including of the dodo, the Chinese river dolphin (declared extinct in 2006), and many other birds and marine life. A vast number of additional species have also been driven to extinction, perhaps by the millions, but these are typically smaller organisms that were not even documented before their disappearance. In its most recent survey of globally threatened species, in 2006, the IUCN evaluated 24,284 vertebrate species and determined that 5,624 of them were threatened; 3,978 invertebrates, of which 2,101 were threatened; and 11,901 plants, of which 8,390 were deemed to be threatened. The category “threatened” includes species that are critically endangered, endangered, or vulnerable.

The estimates of the mass extinctions rely not only on direct observation but on the crucial tool of the species-area relationship, which estimates how many species are likely to exist within a given area. As habitat is destroyed, it is possible to use the known species-area relationship to estimate the number of species that are lost along with the habitat. Edward O. Wilson in “The Future of Life (2006)” has estimated that up to half of all species, an almost unimaginable proportion, faces a

288 War on Biodiversity and Extinctions threat of extinction during the twenty-first century as a result of human induced climate change. Gaia – Mother Earth: The Long Road Ahead

Gaia was the Greek goddess of Earth. The British chemist James Lovelock in 1974 adopted Gaia’s name for his theory about a relationship between Earth and its myriad diverse life forms. He believes that the two share a close biological union. Each affects the other’s well-being in a living association called “symbiosis.” As Lovelock was developing his ideas, he was joined by the American biologist Lynn Margulis. Gaia theory is that Earth’s realm of biodiversity largely keeps the planet more or less the way it is, capable of supporting life. Despite ice ages that have piled up 2 mile thick layers of ice over large parts of the planet, and despite numerous peltings by comets and asteroids that have wiped out millions of species, the planet has remained habitable for nearly four billion years. Although untold millions of species have come and gone, the great chain of life has not once been broken. Gaia is the union of three things: all the organisms and ecosystems that have ever existed; Earth itself with its oceans, atmosphere, and rocks; and the sun as a source of energy.

According to Lovelock, life controls and maintains conditions on the planet. It does so by responding to changes in climate and all other workings of the environment. It then regulates certain parts of the environment to best suit its needs. Recall that Earth’s early atmosphere was very different from the air we breathe today. The oxygen revolution did not just happen. It was brought on by living matter that learned how to carry out photosynthesis. While some of the planet’s primitive organisms were poisoned by the massive buildup of atmospheric oxygen, others found it a better way to carry out life’s many chemical reactions. Once the oxygen level reached about 21 percent of the total atmosphere, it stopped accumulating and has remained just about the same ever since. Why? According to Gaia thinking, living organisms are maintaining that level. If the level increased only a few percent, the forests would burst into flame by spontaneous combustion. If it decreased only a few percent, there would be widespread death of many oxygen users. Some scientists feel uncomfortable with the Gaia theory. They say it’s too fuzzy, that it can’t be measured or tested, and that it is too “unscientific.” Others feel that it’s at least an interesting way to view Earth.

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Throughout all of Earth’s geologic history, the ceaseless twisting, churning, flooding, and drying of the land, the spewing of ash, dust, and gases into the atmosphere by volcanoes, and the repeated grinding of massive glaciers have shaped and reshaped the land and seas and altered global climate again and again. Those geologic forces also directed the countless avenues of success and dead-end alleys that the world’s stunning variety of plants, and animals have taken. To this day evolution continues, and it will continue until the sun dies a few billion years from now. No one can say what species may still be around then or what new ones will have come and gone before the sun burns itself out, as it must when it uses up its hydrogen fuel. But that time is further into the future then the origins of life on Earth are back in the past. In the meantime, who can tell what strange and marvelous life forms will appear on our planet and for a few billion years enjoy their place in the sun as we are now enjoying ours? However, life will continue to proliferate on Earth, if man exercises his stewardship with responsibility and proper ethics, after all our consciousness points out to conservation of the natural world. Religion and ethics seem to be the promising enterprises, who can possibly build the required missing relationship in nature. Can Evolution Account for Ethics?

Perhaps no other area of human concern was shaken as drastically by the Darwinian revolution of 1859 as the theory of human morality. Before Darwin, the traditional answer to the question “What is the source of human morality?” was that it was God-given. To be sure, leading philosophers from Aristotle to Spinoza and Kant had thought about the correlated questions, “What is the nature of morality?” and “What morality is best suited for mankind?” Darwin did not challenge their conclusions about these deeper questions. What he did was to render invalid the claim of morality’s God-given origin.

For this he used two arguments. First, his theory of common descent deprived man of the special place in nature that had been attributed to humans not only by the monotheistic religions but also by philosophers. Nevertheless, Darwin agreed that, with respect to morality, there is a fundamental difference between humans and animals. “I fully subscribe to the judgment of those writers who maintain that of all the differences between man and the lower animals the moral sense or conscience is by far the most important.” wrote Darwin in 1859. Yet, since humans and animals would have meant a saltation, and Darwin was unalterably

290 War on Biodiversity and Extinctions opposed to such a process. He, the champion of gradualism, insisted that everything, even human morality, must have evolved gradually. Evidently, Darwin appreciated that a long time has elapsed, now estimated to be at least 5 million years, since the branching point of the human from the ape lineage, and this time interval provided sufficient time for humans to pass gradually through all the intermediate stages of ethical development.

Second, his theory of natural selection eliminated all supernatural forces from the workings of nature and implicitly refuted the assumption of natural theology that everything in the universe, including human morality, is designed by God and governed by his laws. After Darwin, philosophers had the formidable task of replacing a supernatural explanation of human morality with a naturalistic one. Much of the literature on the relation between ethics and evolution of the last 130 years has been devoted to a search for a “naturalistic ethics1”, and several volumes on the subject appear annually, 130 years after Darwin first posed the problem in 1871.

Some of these authors have gone so far as to express the hope that a study of evolution would give us not just insight into the origins of human morality but a fixed set of ethical norms. Leading evolutionists have adopted the more modest proposition that natural selection, directed at the appropriate target, would eventually lead to a human ethics in which altruism and regard for the common good would play a prominent role. Ethicists insist, and they are quite right to do so, that science in general, and evolutionary biology in particular, are not constructed to provide a reliable set of specific ethical norms. But it is important to add that a genuinely biological ethics which takes human cultural evolution as well as the human genetic program truly into consideration would be far more consistent internally than ethical systems which ignore these factors. Such a biologically informed system is not derived from evolution but is consistent with it.

1Naturalistic ethics is a specific area of the more general topic of secular ethics. For centuries philosophers have proposed a number of secular ethical theories. Some of these include Aristotelian Naturalism, Moral Intuitionism, Kantian Moral Categories, and British Utilitarianism. These are primarily attempts to show how moral values and moral judgments can be justified either in terms of human nature, reason, experience, or consequences of actions. Each theory can be read as an alternative to theistic authoritarian theories, mostly associated with religions, which argue that moral values and moral claims must be based on the authority of a deity.

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Traditionally, ethics has been an area of conflict between science and philosophy. Ethics involves values, and scientists, so say most philosophers, should stick to facts and leave the establishment and analysis of values to philosophy. But scientists point out that new scientific knowledge about the ultimate consequences of human actions leads inevitably to ethical considerations. The current problem of the population explosion, the increase of atmospheric carbon dioxide, and the destruction of tropical forests are just a few examples. Scientists feel that it is their duty to call attention to such situations and to make proposals for how to correct them. This inevitably involves value of judgments. Very often our understanding of the process of evolution, as well as other scientific data, enables us to make the ethically most appropriate choice when several options are available for action.

Is Extinction Important? - Yes, I think it is very important. All of us grow up with an acquired set of ideas and thoughts about the natural world around us, its history and its future. We get these ideas from a thousand sources—from comic books and classrooms and television sitcoms—and these ideas represent the collective attitudes of our culture. One idea I think most of us share is that Earth is a pretty safe and benevolent place to live—not counting what humans can do to Earth and to each other. Earthquakes, hurricanes, and disease epidemics may strike, but on the whole our planet is stable. It is neither too warm nor too cold, the seasons are predictable, and the sun rises and sets on schedule. Much of our good feeling about planet Earth stems from a certainty that life has existed without interruption for three and half a billion years.

We have been taught, as well, that most changes in the natural world are slow and gradual. Species evolve in tiny steps over eons; erosion and weathering changes our landscape but at an almost immeasurably slow pace. Continents move, as in the present drift of North America away from Europe, but this movement is measured in centimeters per year and will have no practical effect on our lives or those of our children. Is all this true or merely a fairly tale to comfort us? Is there more to it? I think there is. Almost all species in the past failed. If they died out gradually and quietly and if they deserved to die because of some inferiority, then our good feelings about Earth can remain intact. But they died violently and without having done anything wrong, then our planet may not be such a safe place.

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World’s Most Important Unknown Target

The human assault on Biodiversity has been recognized, though not its scale, extent, and imminent threat. In 1922 the world coalesced around a framework for action to protect Biodiversity in the United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD). The objectives of the treaty are described as “the conservation of biological diversity, the sustainable use of its components and the fair and equitable sharing of the benefits arising out of the utilization of genetic resources.” The treaty, at its core, calls on countries to take appropriate actions to conserve biological diversity. The rich countries promised additional financial resources to this effort. The following wide range of conservation action was envisaged.

1. Reduce the rate of Biodiversity loss, including, biomes, habitats and ecosystems, species and populations; and genetic diversity.

2. Promote sustainable use of Biodiversity.

3. Address the major threats to Biodiversity, including those arising from invasive alien species, climate change, pollution, and habitat change.

4. Maintain ecosystem integrity, and the provision of goods and services provided by Biodiversity in ecosystems, in support of human well being.

5. Protect traditional knowledge, innovations, and practices.

6. Mobilize, financial and technical resources for implementing the convention and the strategic plan, especially for developing countries, in particular the least developed countries and small island developing states among them, and countries with economies in transition.

The most specific of the treaty’s goals was actually adopted by the treaty’s signatories a decade later, in 2002, when the parties committed themselves to “achieve by 2010 a significant reduction of the current rate of Biodiversity loss at the global, regional, and national level as a contribution to poverty alleviation and to the benefit of all life on Earth.” This target was also adopted at the 2002 World Summit on Sustainable Development and was incorporated by the UN General Assembly as a target under the Millennium Development Goals. Alas, the commitment to slow the loss of Biodiversity by 2010 must be regarded as the best-kept secret on the

293 Earth - Designed for Biodiversity. Life will find a Way! planet. The goal was set to at least modest fanfare but has now disappeared from the world’s radar screen entirely. There are many reasons, all relating to a lack of political leadership in all parts of the world. The goal has been eclipsed by war, short-term crises, and pervasive neglect, and also by a blindingly misguided debate over the CBD itself. The world’s nations ended up focusing much of their debate, and ire, on the question of how to share genetic riches for commercial use and on who would own those resources. They also spent an inordinate amount of time on the debate over genetic modification. But most important by far, the United States signed but never ratified the treaty—ratification was defeated in the Senate in 1994 by a coalition of farm and ranch groups who defended their grazing rights over the conservation of the planet’s Biodiversity. The Clinton administration was unable to prevail over the farm lobby, despite the obvious fact that sound rangeland and farmland management is in the long-term interest of these lobbying groups as well. Climate Change and Water Stress The stresses on the world’s water resources are already enormous, and man-made climate change will exacerbate these difficulties profoundly. While there are huge unknown in the precise consequences of man-made climate change on the hydrological cycle, a few things are clear. First, warmer temperatures will intensify the cycles of evaporation and precipitation. There will be more rainfall on average, but in shorter and more intense episodes. There will be more evapotranspiration at higher temperatures, and storms will increase in intensity. Here are some more detailed conclusions:

1. The dry-lands will tend to become even drier. For example, Vellore, Dharmapuri, Chinglepet districts and surrounding districts in India can become deserts.

2. The wet equatorial areas will become even wetter and more subject to floods and other extreme events. For example, areas near Ganges, Krishna, Godavari rivers in India can expect frequent floods.

3. The populous regions with water supplies dependent on annual snowmelt and long-term glacier melt will lose water security with the disappearance of the glaciers and the elimination of the buffering effect of mountain snow. For example, Brahmaputra, Ganges, Yamuna, Sutlej rivers in India can become dry.

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4. The frequency of droughts will rise significantly. For example, African people will have to face more droughts, and famines.

5. Drier and more variable conditions combined with higher temperatures will lead to lower and more variable crop yields. For example, agriculture will suffer in many places due to new pests and weeds.

Recent studies have confirmed the human influence on precipitation patterns in the twentieth century; a wetter equatorial band and high- latitude zone, and a drier subtropical zone. Another recent study has found that the proportion of land area suffering from very dry conditions rose from 15 percent in 1970 to around 30 percent at the start of the twenty first century. One robust conclusion is that climate change will adversely affect the world’s regions dependent on snowmelt and glacier melt. The lives of hundreds of millions of people, especially in South Asia and East Asia, depend on regular snowmelt from major mountain ranges in the dry spring and summer months. Much of the Indian subcontinent, 250 million people in China, and inhabitants of cities near the Andes all depend on such water flows. Higher temperatures will lead to more rapidly melting snow, and thus to more frequent floods and faster-flowing rivers. The water flow will come earlier in the spring and there will be water shortage during the summer months. Ironically, many regions will experience massive flooding in the coming decades due to glacier melt, which will then be followed by extreme water scarcity once the glaciers have disappeared several decades from now. Water Danger Zones

It is useful to focus on several regions primed for water trouble in the coming years, so that we can take preventive and remedial action. These are the areas in particular that are mining the groundwater, living on temporary glacier melt, and experiencing declining precipitation as a result of long-term climate change. In many cases, declining water availability is exacerbated by rising populations, extreme poverty, ethnic divisions, and other political cleavages that make problem solving especially complicated. Here are some of the most challenging regions.

The Sahel - Rainfall has been declining sharply in much of the Sahel: down by one quarter to one half during the past thirty years compared with the first part of the twentieth century. The drying seems to be related to long term, human-induced warming of the surface waters of the Indian

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Ocean as well to global air pollution that is, apparently, affecting the location of the tropical rains. The Sahel’s troubles are a combination of water stress, rapid population growth, and extreme poverty.

The Horn of Africa - This region, including Ethiopia, Sudan, Eritrea, Somalia, and parts of Kenya, is a hotbed of instability, with decreasing, precipitation intersecting the multifaceted demographic, environmental, economic, and agricultural crises of pastoralism. Grasslands are overgrazed and destroyed by drought. Tribal, ethnic, and religious strife intensifies as communities struggle for the dwindling supplies of drinking water, arable land, and grassland for livestock.

Israel-Palestine - The ongoing battle between Israel and Arab Palestine is aggravated by a deepening water crisis. The waters of the Jordan River, long disproportionately appropriated by Israel, are being used unsustainably to the point that the Dead Sea, at the terminus of the Jordan River, is disappearing because the diminishing inflow of river water does not replace evaporation from the Dead Sea. Groundwater aquifers are being depleted. The Gaza Strip is among the most water-stressed, high- density settlements on the planet. Because of overuse of the groundwater, Gaza’s aquifers are becoming dangerously salty. And through all of this, the Palestinian population is continuing to soar, so pressures on the environment are bound to increase.

The Middle East, Pakistan, and Central Asia - The entire band of drylands stretching from the Arabian Peninsula through Iraq and Iran to Pakistan and the steppes of Central Asia is burdened by rising populations and long-term declines in precipitation. The oil-rich principalities are relying increasingly on desalination, the conversion of seawater into freshwater. This solution is far too expensive for poor states, such as Yemen, and landlocked states, such as Afghanistan.

The Indo-Gangetic Plains - India’s Green Revolution was based on a powerful combination of high-yield, dwarf-variety wheat; irrigation; and fertilizer. Small holder farms (that is, farmers with small farms) irrigated their fields by sinking boreholes to tap the groundwater. Green Revolution technology enabled India to escape from seemingly endless cycles of famine and to break out of the poverty trap. Yet now a water crisis is intersecting with India’s rising population. The twenty million or so boreholes that pump irrigation water to India’s farmlands (up from ten thousand in 1960) are depleting the groundwater aquifers, with declines of the water table from 100 to 150 meters in some places, but in the South

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India it is between 150 to 450 meters. A similar crisis is affecting the Indus valley in Pakistan. Water that now flows from glaciers in the Himalayas will cease in a few decades, when those glaciers have completely melted and disappeared. And there is massive water pollution to boot, with only about 10 percent of wastewater from industrial and municipal uses treated before it is discharged into lakes, rivers, and the sea. There is no immediate solution in sight.

The U.S. Southwest - The semiarid U.S. Southwest is becoming more arid and has the potential to become a dust bowl within years or decades. The paleoclimate record as well as large-scale climate models point robustly to further human-induced drying ahead. Till now, much of the region’s rising population has been supported by abstracting river flow, for example, from the Colorado River. Yet the region has reached limits in the amount of water abstraction from the rivers and will have to promote far more “crop per drop” solutions, and perhaps a significant substitution away from agriculture in the coming years. The same problems, with even less ability to respond, occur across the border in northern Mexico.

Murray-Darling Basin - This watershed is Australia’s largest and the home of the country’s agricultural potential. The basin has suffered a once- in-one-thousand-year drought from 2003 to 2007, meaning a drought so severe that before man-made climate change intervened, such a drought was likely to occur no more than once in a thousand years! The ongoing drought is causing a sharp loss of crops and urgent and expensive measures of water conservation. The IPCC, highlights the likelihood that global warming will lead to further drying in the basin and in other parts of Australia. Bees and Cellphones – The Compass Awry

Many fruits, vegetables, and flowering trees depend on pollinators, such as honeybees, for their reproduction. Indeed, the fruit industry spends vast sums of money on bee pollinators, including the roughly one million beehives brought into California each spring to pollinate the almond orchards. There is now a mass decline in the wild populations of many pollinators, including honeybees, and also a replacement of native pollinators by unsuitable invasive species. The results will be declining crop productivity and rising food costs. There is, as with the other areas of catastrophic Biodiversity decline, a multitude of interacting factors, probably all of which are contributing to the decline. These include loss of habitat of the pollinators (for example, forests), invasive species of

297 Earth - Designed for Biodiversity. Life will find a Way! parasites (for example, mites and fire ants that attack honeybee populations), viral infections transmitted from abroad, and large-scale use of pesticides, which kill the pollinators.

A new study at Punjab University, Chandigarh, has established that electromagnetic radiation from cellphones is wreaking havoc on the homing insect of bees. Promoting the use of cellphones is not such a good idea—especially for the well-being of bees. Unable to reach home, the bees remain alone in the open and perish since they are able to sustain themselves only in the social hierarchy of their hive. The findings—by Neelima Kumar, of zoology department, and Ved Prakash Sharma, of the department of Environment and vocational studies—were published in “Current Science” magazine in June 2010. Bees orient themselves through the interaction between tiny paramagnetic particles in their bodies and the magnetic field of the Earth. But any other magnetic radiation causes interference with this mechanism. Exposing a colony of bees to radiation from two mobile phones for just 30 minutes twice a week for three months had disastrous consequences. The number of homing fell from 36 before radiation to 28 after. Their pollen foraging efficiency, too, fell—from an average of 6.3 to 4.6 worker bees returning with pollen loads per minute. And their honey stores—measured in sq cms of hive space—fell from 3,200 to 400.

While the study did not investigate how radiation affected the physiology of bees, it did find that exposure to radiation impaired the egg-laying capacity of the queen bee. A queen bee that was studied produced 144 eggs per day under exposure to the radiation, quite a fall from the average of 545 per day. Any drastic fall in the number of bees is sure to have dire consequences on agriculture, given the vital role they play in pollinating crops. Around 80 percent of our crops are pollinated by bees. So, there is that risk, even if in the long term. What we tried to show is that the benefits of cellphones come with certain risks—just like with DDT. So their use has to be regulated. Other sources of radiation— such as cellphone communication towers, high tension electricity cables— have the same impact on bees, and possibly other life forms too. Exposure to radiation from cellphones and communication towers could have also killed off sparrows, hardly seen in some cities these days. In fact, another study on the impact of cellphone radiation on animals and plants, found that exposing hens’eggs to four hours of cellphone radiation increased the mortality of chicks by over 40 percent. This was severly impaired in the embryonic stage. In some studies conducted by Neelima Kumar and

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Ved Prakash Sharma, they found even seeds exposed to radiation have reported stunted growth.

All this throws up the next big question—what impact is radiation from wireless communication towers and cellphones having on humans? The Cellular Operators Association of India maintains there is none, but doubts are being allowed more space now. On May 31, 2010, the Delhi High Court asked the Center to set up expert committee to examine potential health hazards from communication towers. Last August, 2010, the Union Ministry of Environment and Forests cited the lack of any published long-term research studies that conclusively show the adverse impacts of cellphone towers on birds, including sparrows, as an impediment to any meaningful intervention. But now that the evidence is beginning to be available, will something be done before it gets too late?

It’s a question that has baffled the worlds of agriculture and science. What is it that has caused the mysterious deaths of honey bees all over the world in the last five years? Bees have been on this Earth for about 25 million years and are ideally adapted to their natural environment. Without bees the environment would be dramatically diminished. Honeybees are a part of our folklore and are one of only two insect species that are managed to provide us with essential services. Honeybees are the pollinating agents and U.N is gearing up to protect the bees as their project for the international year of biodiversity 2010. Indeed, bees are threatened in many ways, from pesticides to habitat loss and degradation. Nearly $27 million will be allocated to prevent the collapse of these species, which are most important to our very survival. Nothing evokes the sense of an organic garden like the hum of bees buzzing amongst summer flowers. Honey bees are important for pollination of all our fruits and berries and many of our vegetable crops. They don’t need us but we certainly need them. By maintaining a bee-friendly garden, you can play a small, but important role in helping to restore the hard-hit wild honeybee populations, and help bee-pollinated crops. Bees pollinate numerous crops and scientists have expressed alarm over their mysterious and rapid decline. Experts have warned that a drop in the bee population could harm agriculture. If we continue to neglect the global bee population, then this will have a dramatic effect on our already strained world food supplies. In India, agriculture is marked by three stages: planting, weeding, and reaping, all done by laborers. With the disappearance of bees, one more work load is added, that is pollinating by humans between weeding and reaping.

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Why are honeybee colonies collapsing? Colony collapse disorder is characterized by a sudden decline in a bee colony’s population and the inexplicable absence of dead bees. One hypothesis is that bees are bringing into their hives traces of pesticides called neonicotinoids, whose use has expanded greatly in the past few years. Some scientists believe that these damage the development of the bee larvae, and inhibit the queen’s production of eggs. As a result, these pesticides have already been withdrawn from sale in many countries. Other theories point out the parasitic diseases caused by the “varroa mite” and the link between these diseases and the quality of pollen and nectar that the bees are feeding on. The collapse of honeybee colonies is a phenomenon that, while it was not unknown in the past, has recently been occurring all over the world at an alarmingly increased rate, for reasons that are not entirely understood. Colony collapse occurs when a critical proportion of bees in a hive die early, making the colony unable to sustain itself. Millions of colonies have collapsed in India in the past year, and billions of bees have died. Until a cause is found, the beekeeping industry and scientists in general face a serious threat to their well-being. The buzz about the alarming disappearance of bees has been all about the food production. If the tireless apian workers didn’t fly from one flower to the next, depositing pollen grains so that fruit trees can bloom world could well be asking where its next meal would come from. Last year, world’s beekeepers watched in horror as more than a quarter of their 2.4 million colonies collapsed, killing billions of nature’s little fertilizers. Climate change is the culprit. All the explanation that bees become disoriented by cell-phone radiation, or this, that and the other thing, there is zero evidence for any of it. All we know is we lost the worker population and they died away from the hive. What’s unusual is they died over a short time period. In the summer, bees go through a six-week life cycle: three inside the hive, three outside it as foragers. Then they die of old age. When bees are coming to the end of their life for whatever reason, they just fly off and don’t come back. Bee can be called a hero. 35 Hotspots – Nature’s Gift to Future Generations

The distribution of species on Earth is quite uneven. Some places, such as the Arctic tundra, are native territory to very few species. Tropical rain forests—in Indonesia, the Amazon, or Hawaii—are home to the highest density of species. Most land-dwelling species have small ranges. A great part of those land-dwelling species—around half of land plants and two

300 War on Biodiversity and Extinctions fifths of land-dwelling vertebrates—are concentrated in small areas that together make up only a tiny portion of Earth’s surface. These regions, called “biodiversity hotspots,” are dotted around the world from Indonesia to Ecuador. The term “biodiversity hotspot” was introduced by Norman Myers in 1988. He designated ten tropical forests as hotspots of biodiversity. However, in the use of the term hotspot Myers meant more than just that they were sites of high species that were found nowhere else (endemic) but he also defined them in terms of how threatened they were. So instead of a “hotspot” being a term for high species richness, merely describing a natural pattern, from its inception it was wedded to conservation and identifying conservation priorities.

Most references to hotspots in the scientific literature follow Myer’s usage. In fact, there is now a formal definition of hotspot in that it must be an area which contains at least 1500 species of plant and must have lost at least 70 percent of its original habitat. Hotspots tend also to be defined using larger organisms such as mammals, birds and plants. Hot spots use to constitute nearly 12 percent of Earth’s land, but they have been logged and built on and degraded by human populations until they now constitute only 2.3 percent of Earth’s land surface, an area about the size of India. Our responsibility compels us to save these pristine places, the last strongholds of the wild; it is our moral duty and our obligation we owe to our future generations. Recent inventories of hotspots identified 25 to 35 different regions worldwide. While these hotspots once covered about an eight of our planet’s surface, an area roughly the size of Russia and Australia combined. The following are more or less 35 hot spots around the world:

1. New Zealand; 2. New Caledonia; 3. Polynesia-Micronesia; 4. East Melanesian; 5. Southwest Australia; 6. Wallacea; 7. Philippines; 8. Japan; 9. Sundaland; 10. Indo-Burma; 11. Indian Western Ghats; 12. Himalaya; 13. Tropical Andes; 14. Sundaland; 15. Mountains of South-Central China; 16. Mountains of Central Asia; 17. Madagascar and Indian Ocean Islands; 18. Horn of Africa; 19. Irano-Anatolian; 20. Maputaland-Pondoland-Albany; 21. Cape Floristic Region; 22. Succulent Karoo; 23. Coastal Forests of Eastern Africa; 24. Eastern Afromontane; 25. Caucasus; 26. Mediterranean Basir; 27. Atlantic Forest; 28. Sri Lanka; 29. Chilean Winter Rainfall Valdivian Forest; 30. Cerrado; 31. Caribbean Islands; 32. Tumbes-Choco-Magdelena; 33. Mesoamerica; 34. Madrean Pine-Oak Woodlands; 35. California Floristic Provionce.

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The Good Samaritan

The Good Samaritan is a famous New Testament parable that appears only in the Gospel of Luke (10:25-37). The parable is told by Jesus to illustrate the precepts that a person’s fitness for eternal life is defined by his or her actions, that compassion should be for all creation, especially animals and plants and as well as people and that fulfilling the spirit of the Law is more important than fulfilling the letter of the Law. Under Herod the Great, Samaria’s fortunes improved. But hatred still continued between the Samaritans and Jews in Judea and Galilee. A group of Samaritans believed that the Jerusalem temple was a false cultic center. Because they were excluded from the inner courts by the Jerusalem authorities, they profaned the Jerusalem temple in approximately AD 6 by spreading human bones within the temple porches and sanctuary during Passover. Hostility toward Galilean Jews traveling through Samaria on the way to Jerusalem for various feasts was also not uncommon (Luke 9:51-53). In Luke, a scholar of the Law tests Jesus by asking him what is necessary to inherit eternal life. To begin his answer, Jesus asks the lawyer what the Mosaic Law says about it. When the lawyer quotes the basic law of loving God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your strength and with all your mind and the parallel law of loving one’s neighbor as well. Jesus says that he has answered correctly—”Do this and you will live,” he tells him. When the lawyer then asks Jesus to tell him who his neighbor is, Jesus responds with a parable about a traveler who was attacked, robbed, stripped, and left for dead by the side of a road. Later, a priest saw the stricken figure and avoided him, presumably in order to maintain ritual purity. Similarly, a Levite saw the man and ignored him as well. Then a Samaritan passed by, and, despite the mutual antipathy between his and the Jewish populations, immediately rendered assistance by giving him first aid and taking him to an inn to recover while promising to cover the expenses. At the conclusion of the story, Jesus asks the lawyer, of the three passers-by, who was the stricken man’s neighbor? When the lawyer responds that it was the man who helped him, Jesus directs him to do likewise.

This parable is one of the most famous in the Bible and its influence is such that to be called a Samaritan in Western culture today is to be described as a generous person who is ready to provide aid to people in distress without hesitation. In many English-speaking countries, a Good Samaritan law exists to protect from liability those who choose to aid people who are seriously ill or injured. It is important to note that

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Samaritans were despised as apostates by the story’s target audience. Thus the parable, as told originally, had a significant theme of non- discrimination and interracial harmony. But as the Samaritan population dwindled to near-extinction, this aspect of the parable became less and less discernible: fewer and fewer people ever met or interacted with Samaritans, or even heard of them in any context other than this one. To address this problem with the unfamiliar analogy, the story is often recast in a more recognizable modern setting where the people are ones in equivalent social groups known to not interact comfortably. For instance, in a telling to a conservative middle class audience, the assaulted man could be a middle class businessman, the unhelpful passers-by could be so-called respectable people like a pastor and the substitute for the Samaritan could be some disliked minority such as an atheist, drunk, and gang member. Thus cast appropriately, the parable regains its socially explosive message to modern listeners: namely, that a social group they disapprove of can have superior moral behavior to their own group.

The whole point of the Parable of the Good Samaritan was to point out that our neighbor includes those who are completely outside the community of faith, as the Samaritans were, not excluding the animals and plants from the anthropocentric realm. Neighbor should not be understood narrowly as anthropocentric, but it should be seen in broader perspective comprising the whole creation, so, a new meaning is that those who in need of attention, care and help, and therefore it includes all the biotic and abiotic world, which cries out loud for help. And, that those neighbors are to be helped. In the light of this discussion, I would like to point out that we all still behave exactly like the Levite and the priest, ignoring to acknowledge the problem of global warming, climate change and loss of biodiversity. We need Good Samaritans to save the wounded creation. Human beings consciously ignore the alarming conditions in nature, going on with their routine lifestyles. Creation is waiting to see the advent of the Good Samaritan. In the Good Samaritan story, one can observe the following things: a man went on a journey from Jerusalem to Jericho; he was robbed and left for dead; a priest saw him by the side of the road, but did not stop to help; a Levite came along the road, but he passed the man by; a Samaritan saw the man, and he stopped to help; he put him on his donkey and took him to an inn; the Samaritan paid the in-keeper and asked him to care for the man. The same things could be observed in today’s context regarding nature and human activity. The ecosystems symbolize the wounded and bleeding man in the parable. Most of us by ignoring

303 Earth - Designed for Biodiversity. Life will find a Way! the dangerous situation that we are in, symbolize the priest and Levite who ignored the wounded man. There are people among us who acknowledge the presence of problems in nature, unfortunately only few do something about it. Time is running out and planet Earth is wounded, bleeding and it is in advanced stage of exhaustion. War has been declared on creation. We need to stop the war and we need to heal the world and start conserving Biodiversity. We need Good Samaritans! Sacrifice – The Key to Conservation

There have been great advances in our thinking about what to conserve how to conserve, even on a global scale. Our observation in nature suggests that every species survives on the sacrifice of another species. Species can proliferate abundantly if we choose to do sacrifice in our lives; limiting our consumption of natural resources; providing more habitat for wild life conservation; and limiting our human population levels. There are number of examples in nature continue to inspire humanity to follow the ever sustaining nature of sacrificing lifestyles. In evolutionary terms, it might seem as though creatures that sacrifice their own reproductive lives for the sake of others would quickly disappear from the gene pool. Yet many animals do in fact display self-sacrificing behavior. In colonies of army ants, thousands of individuals toil their whole lives for the sake of the queen, with little chance of themselves reproducing. Generally, only the queen’s genetic material is passed on to the next generation. Honeybees separately evolved a similar, self-sacrificing social structure in which most individuals never reproduce themselves, toiling instead on behalf of a related queen.

The depth of sacrifice is well explained in the life cycle of a salmon. Salmon (fish), common name applied to fish characterized by an elongate body covered with small, rounded scales and a fleshy fin between the dorsal fin and tail. Many species of salmon are anadromous—they spawn, or lay their eggs, in fresh water; the young migrate to salt water and grow up there; and the fish return to fresh water to breed after they reach maturity. Other populations or species of salmon are landlocked, spending their entire life cycle in fresh water. The migratory instinct of members of the salmon family is remarkably specific, each generation returning to spawn in exactly the same breeding places as the generation before it. Some salmon migrate hundreds or even thousands of miles to reach their spawning grounds. Even those species that do not migrate from fresh water to salt water spawn in the same freshwater streams as did their

304 War on Biodiversity and Extinctions ancestors. Although usually drab in color before the breeding season, which varies with the species, members of the salmon family develop bright hues at spawning time. During this season the male usually develops a hooked snout and a humped back. Salmon typically spawn in rapidly flowing, clear streams with gravel and rocks in the bottom. Before mating, one parent excavates a nest, for the eggs. The female deposits eggs in the nest and the male releases sperm, or milt, over the eggs to fertilize them. The female then stirs up the stream bottom so that Earth and stones cover the eggs and protect them. During the migrations and nest-building activity that precede mating, neither the females nor the males consume food. And they die next to the eggs and they become food for the young when the eggs hatch.

The ultimate story of self-sacrifice is the rather gruesome tale of the redback is a small spider, with a painful bite, that likes to live in urban or suburban areas. When mating, the male sometimes twists his abdomen onto the female’s fangs. In more than 60 percent of spider matings, the male is cannibalized. The self-sacrificial behavior may have developed because there is so little chance of the male spider’s finding a mate more than once, or because they are not physically able to father more than one brood. In Christianity the death of Christ on the cross is considered an exemplary and perfected sacrifice offered to expiate the sins of humanity. Throughout the writings of St. Paul, Christ is identified as a sacrificial victim (see 1 Corinthians 5:7; Ephesians 5:2; Hebrews 10:12-13). The Eucharist has been associated from the beginning of the Christian church with the sacrifice of Christ, and in some Christian churches, notably the Roman Catholic church, the Eucharist is interpreted as a form of participation in Christ’s sacrifice. Sacrifice could be a powerful tool in the line of conservation. You sacrifice can save the rainforests, oceans, wetlands, and all the natural resources found under the Earth, ultimately you save life on Earth. Conservation – A Good Investment

Biodiversity is one of nature’s support services. Through Biodiversity, natural systems grow stable, yet are resilient enough to withstand most disturbances that nature can throw at them, from disease to ice to fire. The genetic and ecological diversity existing in Earth’s environments today took billions of years of evolution to develop. Like other ecosystem services, Biodiversity provides these enormous benefits free of charge. It is up to humans to learn to perceive Biodiversity not as just a fascinating

305 Earth - Designed for Biodiversity. Life will find a Way! display of nature’s weird and wonderful imagination, but as the safety net that will keep our species alive and well through eons to come. Studies show that investing in the environment is a good way to fight poverty around the world. Environmental sustainability is an essential part of ending global poverty, according to the United Nations, which has made sustainability one of the top priorities for reducing global poverty. Education, health, clean water, and drip irrigation—investments in all these areas can help fight poverty in a way that reinforces the importance of healthy ecosystems. Investment in antipoverty development should involve local people who will be affected. Environmental restoration and preservation should be part of any economic development plan. Agricultural investment should support Biodiversity and improved soil, not only new crop varieties. Investment in infrastructure, such as wells, communications, and roads, should support change that is ecologically sustainable. Investment in new energy sources is essential for economic growth in developing countries, but carbon levels in the atmosphere must be controlled. A village that can cook with solar ovens will have no reason to cut down its surrounding forests for firewood.

Preserving Biodiversity hotspots is crucial to avoiding major species loss in coming decades. Poor people who live in or near endangered places must have a way to earn a living that does not involve degrading or destroying the land. Conservation money, rather than trying to keep people away from sensitive lands, can be spent on creating jobs and teaching methods of land management that help people to value their local ecology. Meanwhile people in the richest countries must change behaviors and policies that are causing long-term damage to Earth’s climate and ecosystems. Sustaining the planet’s life-giving ecosystems— which are threatened by construction, agriculture, deforestation, mining, and other activities of modern man—is as important as preserving species. Lowering carbon emissions by burning fewer and cleaner fossil fuels is just one place to start. As we have seen earlier, it is inner spirituality, connectedness to all creatures, call for preservation and conservation. Without animals and plants, our place would resemble hellish. The same breath of God would give rise to humans, is present in all animals and plant kingdoms. Religion gives value and credibility to philosophies and assumptions. Religion is a powerful tool in conservation. Our “spirit-spirit” relationships are not only extrinsically meaningful they are intrinsically valuable for they connect us to other persons and to the Transcendent. As Buber nicely put it: “As soon as we touch a You we are touched by a

306 War on Biodiversity and Extinctions breath of eternal life … the lines of relationships intersect in the Eternal You.” But I want to go beyond this conclusion about meaning and value to make a point about metaphysics: the interconnected web of personal relations is part of the fundamental structure of the universe. As Nammalvar, the ninth-century CE Indian poet-singer, writing about Krishna, says:

“My little girl says: ‘I’ve no relatives here and everyone here is my relative. I’m the one who makes relatives relate,’ she says. Can it be the Lord of illusions beyond all relations has come and taken her over?”

One ought to take the religious point of view, if he wants to be effective; it is the path of wisdom, because taking the religious point of view will give ultimate value for life, for to do so one has to integrate the self through integration with the structure of reality: this is the root notion of following the dharma in all religions. This argument leads to the metaphor of Cosmic Christ, which also concerns with the responsibility of preservation, conservation and restoration. The world in our thinking is the sacrament of God, the visible, physical, bodily presence of God. The Cosmic Christ metaphor suggests that Jesus’ paradigmatic ministry is not limited to the years 1-30 CE nor to the Church, as in the model of the Church as the mystical body of Christ, but is available to us throughout nature. It is available everywhere, it is unlimited—with one qualification—it is mediated through bodies. The entire cosmos is the habitat of God, but we know this only through the mediation of the physical world. The world as sacrament is an old and deep one in the Christian tradition, both Eastern and Western. The sacramental tradition assumes that God is present not only in the hearing of the word, in the preaching and reading of scripture, and not only in the two (or seven) sacraments of the Church, but also in each and every being in creation. The Christian tradition is rich and powerful, epitomized in a sensibility that sees God in everything and everything full of the glory of God: the things of this Earth are valuable principally as vehicles for communication with the divine. A different sensibility is evident in this Navajo chant:1

1 Navajo (people), Native Americans of the Athapaskan language family and of the Southwest culture area. The Navajo are one of the largest tribes in the United States. Their homelands are in what is now northeastern Arizona, northwestern New Mexico, southeastern Utah, and southwestern Colorado. In the Navajo language their name is Diné or Dineh, meaning “The People.”

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May it be delightful my house; From my head may it be delightful; To my feet may it be delightful; Where I lie may it be delightful; All above me may it be delightful; All around me may it be delightful.

It is uplifting when you read Fr. Francis Vineeth Vadakethala, CMI, a prominent Indian philosopher writes on the relationship of nature and man with the Ineffable: “Created in God’s own image and placed on this Earth, human beings are called to combine the divine and the earthly, the visible and the invisible, the tangible and the Ineffable. The Ineffable shines forth in and through everything and everyone in creation. When human beings, through their untiring search, learn to integrate the outer layers in their own innermost depth, where the Ineffable abides, the entire universe becomes splendid with the light and delight of the Ineffable, they all become one, as Jesus, the visible face of the Ineffable prayed: “May they be one, just as you are in me and I am in you.”

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Life Yet to Come Jesus said to his disciples: “I have much more to tell you, but you cannot bear it now. But when he comes, the Spirit of truth, he will guide you to all truth. He will not speak on his own, but he will speak what he hears, and will declare to you the things that are coming. He will glorify me, because he will take from what is mine and declare it to you” (John 16:12-15).

Thousands or millions of years into the future, what will our species be like? Will it change radically? Or will we become builders of the next dominant intelligence on Earth, the machines? So how on Earth can we expect to do any better with the future of life, with its millions of species, its myriad ecosystems, projecting what’s going to happen, not this week or next month, but hundreds, thousands, millions of years down the road? So the question becomes: What is our fate? Others who have taken a shot at what life’s future evolution will look like have assumed that the current vector of extinction, meaning ourselves, will disappear completely, leaving all other forms of surviving life to reclaim the planet. Extinction – The Creator of Future Life

“Everything in Nature called destruction must be Creation, a change from beauty to beauty” (John Muir, 1869).

The typical sequence of events in a mass extinction begins with the extinction phase, when Biodiversity falls rapidly. During this time, the extinction rate far exceeds the “origination rate” which is the number of new taxa evolving through speciation. After some period of time, the extinction phase ends and is succeeded by a second phase, often called the “survival phase.” This is the time of minimal diversity, but no or few further extinctions. During this interval the number of species on Earth levels out: neither increasing nor decreasing. The third phase, called the “rebound phase,” is when taxonomic diversity slowly begins to increase. The final phase is the “expansion phase,” and it is characterized by a rapid increase in diversity due to the evolution of new species. The latter three phases are grouped together into what is known as a “recovery interval,” which is followed by a long period of environmental stability until the next mass extinction. The rate of the recovery is usually proportional to the intensity of the extinction that triggered it: the more intense the mass extinction, the more rapid the rate of new species formation. Three types of taxa are generally found immediately after the mass extinction: survivors,

309 Earth - Designed for Biodiversity. Life will find a Way! or holdover taxa; progenitor taxa, the evolutionary seeds of the ensuing recovery; and disaster taxa, species that proliferate immediately after the end of the mass extinction. All three types of taxa are generally forms that can not only tolerate, but thrive in, the harsh ecological conditions following the mass extinction event. They are generally small, simple forms capable of living and surviving in a wide variety of environments. We have another term for such organisms: “weeds.”

The recovery interval is marked by a rise in diversity. This sudden surge in evolution is generally due to the many vacant niches found within the various ecosystems following the mass extinction. Because so many species are lost in a mass extinction, it creates new opportunities for speciation. Darwin once likened the speciation process to a wedge: the modern world has so many species in it that for a new species to survive and compete, it must act like a wedge, pushing out some other already entrenched species. But after a mass extinction no wedging is necessary. Early on, virtually any new design will do. Many new species appear with morphologies or designs seemingly rather poorly adapted to their environment and inferior to those of species existing prior to the extinctions. Rather quickly, however, a winnowing process takes place through natural selection, and new, increasing efficient suites of species rapidly evolve. The great mass extinction ending the Permian created a long-term deficit in diversity, but eventually, in the Mesozoic Era, that deficit was made up. In fact, after every Mass Extinction that has occurred on Earth, over the past 500 million years, Biodiversity has not only returned to its former value, but exceeded it. Sometime during the last 100,000 years, Biodiversity appears to have been higher than it has been at any time in the past 500 million years. If there had been twice the number of mass extinctions, would there be an even higher level of diversity than there is on Earth now?

Interesting as this question is, it has not yet been tested in any way. The fossil record, however, does yield some evidence that mass extinctions belong on the deleterious rather than the positive side of the Biodiversity ledger. Perhaps the best such clue comes from the comparative history of reef ecosystems. Reefs are the most diverse of all marine habitats; they are the rainforests of the ocean. Because they contain so many organisms with hard skeletons, we have an excellent record of reefs through time. Reef environments have been severely and adversely affected by all past mass extinctions. They suffered a higher proportion of extinctions than

310 Life Yet to Come any other marine ecosystem during each of the six major extinction episodes of the last 500 million years. After each Mass Extinction reefs disappear from the planet, and usually take tens of millions of years to become reestablished. When they do come back, they do so only very gradually. The implication is that mass extinctions, at least for reefs, are highly deleterious and create net deficits of Biodiversity. And whether we are talking about reefs, rainforests, or any other ecosystem, the reality is that for millions of years following a mass extinction the Biodiversity of the planet is impoverished. So, while there are many who would argue that since mass extinctions are source of innovation, a modern one would not be such a bad thing, as it would be the source, ultimately, of a new age and even greater Biodiversity. Are we still Evolving?

Now that we are able to control our own health and fertility, has the struggle between humans and nature been all but won? When we can conceive children with partners that we have never even met or, as seems possible in the near future, we can clone our cells to repair our bodies, are we so in control of our own destiny that there is no room left for natural selection? Can we still be evolving, or is our genome now suspended, as though weightless, in a selection-free environment cushioned by medicines and public health measures that have cut infant mortality rates and lengthened adult life expectancy? Perhaps our capacity to read the human genome sequence means that we can now freeze the text by editing our harmful mutations or render those mutations harmless with personalized medication. Has cultural evolution now replaced biological evolution? When social developments, such as worldwide networking over the internet, can change our habits and opportunities in a few years, can biological evolution operating at the measured pace of generations possibly be significant any longer?

Modern biology and medicine are genuine triumphs of science that have the capacity to help and starvation and to eradicate mass killers like malaria, AIDS and tuberculosis. Smallpox has already been globally eradicated. Is it more than a matter of time before other scourges are also removed, even from the poorest people on Earth? The science fiction writer William Gibson is often quoted as saying: “The future is already here, it is just unevenly distributed.” What he meant by this is that, for example, the standards of health that are currently enjoyed by people in Japan, say, where life expectancy is higher than anywhere else, will one day be

311 Earth - Designed for Biodiversity. Life will find a Way! universal. On the other hand, perhaps we should learn from Francis Fukuyama not to be misled in a moment of triumphalism1. Starvation and disease have been major agents of natural selection in the recent past and have not been defeated, even in rich nations. Emerging infectious diseases introduce new source of natural selection, like light passing through a prism, but evolution will continue alone one path or another. In fact, natural selection may even be accelerating.

Sheer weight of numbers dictates that favorable mutations, from which natural selection can mould new adaptations, are more likely to appear in a large population than a small one. For this reason, human evolution was accelerated over the last 10,000 years by the combination of a rapid increase in the human population and the many different environments in which we lived, offering new opportunities for natural selection to produce locally favorable adaptation. For example, the advent of cereal farming in the Neolithic increased the supply of energy-rich carbohydrates available to people who had previously been hunter-gatherers. A consequence was that natural selection increased the number of copies of genes coding for starch-digesting enzymes in the farming population. Many polymorphisms present in our species, like alleles affecting skin color, are recently evolved. Since the human population continues to increase and may reach 9 or even 10 billion before it eventually stabilizes, there is no reason to think that humanity has taken its foot off the accelerator pedal of evolution. Increasing population density itself produces new challenges to health and wellbeing, both directly and indirectly through the effect of an increasing population upon our environment. The Future of Evolution What is the future of evolution? So ambiguous, a question invites varied responses. What will animals, plants, and other organisms be like at some time in the future, perhaps a thousand years from now, perhaps a thousand million years from now? The only certainty is that they will be different. Even in the near future, the mix of species and their distributions, relative numbers, and relationships with one another will have changed, and by the far future the accumulated changes may be breathtaking or

1Triumphalism is a neutral word that classifies something as simply commemorating a victory, usually a military one: The band will play a triumphal march. Triumphant describes the feelings following a success, or something outstandingly successful: The winning team returned home triumphant. She told us of her win with a triumphant look on her face. He made a triumphant comeback.

312 Life Yet to Come trivial. There can be no doubt that the evolutionary forces that have created the astonishing diversity of species on Earth in the past and into the present will continue creating new species and varieties, resulting in a global biotic inventory of species different from that of today. How different, and in what ways, is open to informed speculation, and is one of the subjects of this article. This particular question was addressed some years ago by author Dougal Dixon in his delightful 1970 book “After Man.” Ahead of his time, Dixon forecasted an imminent mass extinction, prophesying that humanity would eliminate enough of the current biota on Earth to open the faucets of evolutionary change. Dixon posited his new fauna evolving in a world where humanity itself has gone extinct. Dixon predicted that most of Earth’s post-extinction bestiary would evolve from the surviving meek, such as a small birds, amphibians, rodents, and rabbits. Dixon’s central assumption is that humanity will biotically impoverish the planet and then have the good grace to go extinct, opening the way for the evolution of many new species. He imagined new biota depends on this central fact, that humans have gone extinct, yet left the Earth in sufficiently good repair to allow wholesale evolution of new forms. The creatures figured show evolutionary convergence: they resemble the animals that might soon be extinct on the present-day Earth. Dixon has thus figured animals resembling the many endangered large herbivores, carnivores, and scavengers in the varied biomes represented on the planet today. While it feels like a great fun, this new fauna is completely un- testable vision, residing in the realm of fantasy. The pathway of Dougal Dixon of imagining a subsequent fauna and flora is one way of answering the query about the future of evolution on Earth. Yet there is another way that the question might be interpreted. Perhaps it relates not to outcome, but to the evolutionary process itself. It might mean, “What is in store for the varied mechanisms that have resulted in the various species of the past and present?” Might the “rules” governing those processes be changed in the near future, or might they have been changed already in the not so distant past? The second interpretation of this question seems, at first, patently ridiculous. The processes that introduce novelty and evolutionary change, natural selection, mutation, sexual selection, will continue to modify the gene pools of species, occasionally resulting in the formation of new species, just as they have since life first appeared on the planet at least 3.8 billion years ago. But it may be that while process has not changed, but pattern has changed. Another English thinker Dr. Norman Myers believes that humanity has changed the rules of speciation itself.

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Whether or not we have somehow changed fundamental aspects of how or where new species arise, it is an unambiguous fact that very early on, our species learned to manipulate the forces of evolution to suit its own purposes, creating varieties of animals and plants that would never have appeared on Earth in the absence of our will. Large-scale bioengineering was under way well before the invention of written language. We call this process domestication, but it was nothing less than efficient and ruthless bioengineering of food stocks, and the elimination of species posing a threat to those food stocks. Once the new breeds of domestic animals and plants became necessary for our species’ survival, wholesale efforts toward the eradication of the predators of these new and stupid animals were undertaken. A carnivore eating humans was tolerable, because the losses were negligible, but a carnivore eating the new human food sources was not, because the losses spread to the entire group.

Our modern efforts at biological engineering are but an extension of our earlier efforts at “domestication.” Until the end of the twentieth century the natural world had never evolved a square tomato, or any of the numerous other genetically altered plants and even animals now quite common in agricultural fields and scientific laboratories. Just as physicists are bringing unnatural elements into existence in the natural world through technological processes, so has our species invented new ways of bringing forth varieties of plants and animals that would never have graced the planet but for the hand of man. And like plutonium, the new genes created and spliced into existing organisms to create new varieties of life will have a very long half-life; some may exist until life is ultimately snuffed out by an expanding sun some billions of years in the future. So what is the future of evolution? Some of it is being decided in biotechnology labs at this moment.

Humans have profoundly altered the biotic makeup of the Earth. We have done it in ways both subtle and blunt. We have set fire to entire continents, resulting in the presence of fire-resistant plants in landscapes where such species existed only in small numbers prior to the arrival or evolution of brand-bearing humans. We have wiped out entire species and decimated countless more, either to suit our needs for food or security or simply as an accidental by-product of our changing the landscape to favor our new agricultural endeavors. We have changed the role of natural selection by favoring some species that could never otherwise survive in a cruel Darwinian world over others of estimably greater fitness. We have

314 Life Yet to Come created new types of organisms, first with animal and plant husbandry and later with sophisticated manipulation and splicing of the genetic codes of various organisms of interest to us. The presence of humanity began radical revision of the diversity of life on Earth. Eight Pillars to be Defended 1. Past mass extinctions have been instigators of biological innovation and the eventual augmentations of diversity. They have opened up ecological niches and fostered the creation of evolutionary novelty. 2. Most or all, past mass extinctions have been multi-causal, and have lasted tens of thousands of years at a minimum. 3. The Earth has entered in a new mass extinction event during the waning of the last Ice Age, a mass extinction that continues into the present. It is likely to continue well into the future. But its most consequential phase, the destruction of large mammals and birds, is already finished, and it happened a very long time ago. It resulted in the extinction of the land surface until the last phases of the Ice Age and into the present. This new mass extinction now preys upon the small, the endemic, and the wild species such as salmon and cod that are harvested as human food. What we witness now is a highly significant yet almost invisible diminution of the smaller species on Earth, for the larger animals are already gone. 4. The modern mass extinction is different from any other in the Earth’s long history. To date, it has affected mainly large land animals, island birds, and rare tropical species although data emerging in recent decades suggest that its highest extinction rates may be shifting to tropical plant communities and perhaps tropical marine coral reefs. It is certainly causing the depletion of wild food stocks of land and marine animals. The reduction of fishery stocks is causing a wholesale elimination of major populations that may not kill off entire species (due to fish farming), but will leave the planet biotically impoverished nevertheless. Global terrestrial diversity will fall to end-Paleozoic levels because of continued extinction and the functional removal of traditional barriers to migration.

5. All mass extinctions have been followed by a recovery interval, characterized by a new fauna composed of animals that have either survived the extinction or evolved from such survivors.

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In this case, that recovery fauna is already largely in place, and consists mainly of domesticated animals and plants, as well as “weedy” species capable of living amid high populations of humans.

6. There will be new species yet to evolve. Many of these new species will be the result of jumping genes, as DNA from organisms created under laboratory conditions by biotechnology firms escapes into the wild. Others will be mainly small species adapted to living in the new world of spreading cities and farms. The new animals and plants species thus evolve in the niches and corners of a world dominated by Homo sapiens. The rules of speciation have changed; few large animals will evolve as long as humanity exists in large numbers, and as long as our planet remains divided into innumerable small islands.

7. Our species, Homo sapiens, can look forward to both evolution and long-term survival. Of all the animal species on Earth, we may be the least susceptible to extinction: humanity is functionally extinction proof. Yet we are also malleable by the evolutionary forces of natural selection, and we may be seeing rapid evolution within our species at the present time, as evidenced by an increase in the incidence of potentially heritable behavioral disorders. There will also be what might be called “unnatural selection” as some segments of humanity acquire the use of neural connections to sophisticated memory storage devices, the future evolution of humanity will entail integration with machines, or perhaps we are but the midwives of the next global intelligence: machine intelligence.

8. There will never be a new dominant fauna on Earth other than humanity and its domesticated vassals until we go extinct, and if we succeed in reaching the stars that may never happen. Prophecy is perilous business. But there are some clues, mainly from the fossil record, about how the future of evolution may proceed. These clues and their implications are the subject of this article.

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When in Edwardian times Sir Arthur Conan Doyle1 wrote his scientific adventure story “The Lost World,” he created an environment known at that time only to academics: the world of the Mesozoic Era, known to us as the Age of Dinosaurs. He created a place lost in the world because of geographic isolation, but he was really painting a picture of scientific isolation, for even in the early twentieth century the great Age of Dinosaurs was still a lost world, so little did science know about it. The Age of Dinosaurs is clearly no longer so lost. Every schoolchild knows the dinosaurs’ tongue-twisting names, their food preferences, and even their color schemes. Nothing so well known to Hollywood and popular culture can be considered lost. Instead, the true lost world is that of the mammal- like reptiles, a time and place that disappeared from the Earth a quarter billion years ago. Old Age – When Natural Selection Retires

Although major structural changes in H. sapiens may now be over, many smaller evolutionary changes will undoubtedly take place. Prominent among these might be a homogenization of the current human races. The same forces resulting in the homogenization of the Earth’s biota are at work on us: our former geographic isolation has been broached by the ease of transportation and the dismantling of social barriers that once kept the very minor genetic differences of the various human racial groups intact. The most obvious change that may come about would occur in skin color. Because rapid transportation and global communication have destroyed most barriers to human movement and even isolationist human culture, we move about more. As we do so, we tend to interbreed, and thus the barriers that once selected for various types of skin pigment are no longer present. Skin pigment is one of the most heritable of human genetic features, and it may be that humanity is heading for a universal brown-skinned future, as the darkest of the back-skinned races get lighter and the melanin-free skins become darker. The humanity of ten thousand years from now might be but a single shade of color, a pleasing chocolate brown. But, in stature, each race of our species seems to be getting larger, yet this is surely not a genetic feature; with improved nutrition we are simply maximizing the height potentials carried by our genes.

But in many ways, natural selection as we know it may not operate on

1 Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (1859-1930), British physician, novelist, and detective- story writer, best known as the creator of the character of master sleuth Sherlock Holmes.

317 Earth - Designed for Biodiversity. Life will find a Way! our species at all. It is being thwarted on many fronts by our technology, our medicines, and our rapidly changing behavior and moral values. Babies no longer die in large numbers in most parts of the globe, and babies with the gravest types of genetic damage, which were once certainly fatal in pre-reproductive stages, are now kept alive. Predators, too, no longer affect the rules of survival. Tools, clothes, technology, and medicine: all have increased out fitness for survival, but at the same time have thwarted the very mechanisms that brought about our creation through natural selection. By 500 million years from now the Earth, as a planet of life, will have aged considerably. Today, in this dawn of the Age of Humanity, we are already on a planet whose “habitability” has gone from middle to old age, a planet nearer the end of its life than the beginning. In those far future days, the engine of evolution will begin backing toward the final accounting that old age, even the Earth’s brings. By a billion years from now the Earth will no longer be habitable. Somewhere, then, between those two times will be a time when life on this Earth will have to adapt to ever-increasing heat and decreasing carbon dioxide. It is then, in that far future, that the types of animals and plants might finally prove to be exotic compared with our present-day biota. The big problem, of course, will be the sun. Like all stars, it contains a finite amount of fuel, and as the tank empties, the temperature will increase. The amount of hydrogen being converted to helium will decrease, and heavier material will begin to accumulate. The sun will expand in size, and the Earth, the once equable Earth, will face the prospect of becoming the next Venus in our solar system: a desert without water, a place a searing heat, a burned cinder. That will be our fate. What will precede it?

Between 500 and 1,000 million years from now there will still be clinging survivors of the Cambrian Explosion of 500 million years ago, the last twigs of the once vigorous tree of life. Let us imagine a stroll along the seashore in such a world. The sun is gigantic, the heat searing. The equatorial regions are already too hot for all but microbial life, and it is only in the cooler polar latitudes that we can see the ends of animal life on Earth. Plant life is still present, but the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has shrunk to but a trace of its level during the first evolution of humanity. Only those plants evolved for life in this low-carbon-dioxide environment can be seen: low shrubbery with thick, waxy cuticles to withstand the searing heat and desiccation. There are no trees. Gone are the forests, grasslands, mangrove swamps, and meadows. The oceans are in the process of evaporating away, and huge salt flats now stretch for untold

318 Life Yet to Come miles along their shores. There is no longer animal life in the sea, save for crustaceans adapted to the very high salt content. The fish are gone, as are most mollusks and other animals without efficient kidney systems, such as echinoderms, brachiopods, enidarians, tunicates, all the groups that were never good at dealing with changes in the saltiness of the sea, or at moving into fresh water. There is still land life, for animals can be seen along the shores, but they are low, squat, heavily armored creatures, and their armor is not for protection from predation, but for protection from the ever present heat, salt, and drying.

Inland from the sea there is a different vision. There are lichens, a few squat low plants, other desultory animals, some of them arthropods, a few of them vertebrates. All the rest of the world is a desert, a place of heat and dying. The birds are gone. So too are the amphibians. Whole classes, even phyla, are now disappearing from the Earth like players from a stage when the play is ending. There are still lizards, and snakes, and scorpions and cockroaches, and very few humans. All of humanity or what is left of it, now lives underground in the cooler recesses of the Earth. It is as if at least part of H.G. Wells’s vision has come true. In a sense, humans have become his morlocks, a troglodyte species. There is too much radiation from the growing sun for humans to last long on the surface of the planet. Humanity, by necessity, has had to go underground, becoming the new ants of the planet. But physically, humans have not changed much. They know the end is near. There is no way off, and no path to other, younger worlds. Space turned out to be too vast, the other planets in the solar system too inimical, the stars too far. The Planet Earth is old and dying. They do not mourn the many animals the Earth once had. It is hard to remember things that happened 500 million years ago. Once there was a future to evolution.

Natural selection gradually weeds out from a population congenital defects that lower reproductive success, but there are situations when this appears not to happen. More common congenital conditions like sickle cell anaemia1 are often side effects of beneficial mutations that have been

1 Sickle-Cell Anemia, genetic disorder of the blood leading to frequent and severe infections, damage to major organs, and episodes of unpredictable pain in the back, chest, abdomen, and extremities. Early symptoms appear at about six months of age and may include serious infections, pain and swelling in the hands and feet, and enlargement of the abdomen and heart.

319 Earth - Designed for Biodiversity. Life will find a Way! favored by natural selection in the past. Sickle cell anaemia, thalassemia1 and some other conditions are the side effects of alleles that have been favored by natural selection because they protect against malaria. This explains why sickle cell anaemia and thalassemia are most common in people to the malarial pathogens. Certain other genetic diseases, like cystic fibrosis and haemophilia2 result from recurring mutations that natural selection is slow to purge because the genes can be transmitted by symptomless carriers. Everyone is prey to another group of inherited conditions that natural selection is unable to purge: the degenerative disease, dementia and decrepitude that may come with old age. Like the dusty corner of a room that no broom ever reaches, old age is a repository for deleterious conditions that natural selection cannot touch. Natural selection is ineffective against diseases that express themselves only later in life because these conditions do not impair reproductive success.

Older individuals have already produced all or most of their offspring and have therefore transmitted their genes, including any genes may lead to malfunction in old age. Therefore, mutations that express themselves only late in life tend to accumulate over evolutionary time, leading to the evolution of ageing. For the same reason, mutations that increase reproduce success early in life, but also have deleterious consequences for the carrier of those genes in later life, are favored. For example, the inflammatory response with which our immune system protects us from infection and which is vital to survival in early life may also play a part in causing the degenerative diseases of old age such as arthrosclerosis, osteoarthritis, osteoporosis3 and Type II diabetes. Degeneration in old age may be the price to be paid for youthful evolutionary success. Interestingly

1Thalassemia, inherited blood disease resulting from defective production of hemoglobin, the protein that transports oxygen in the blood. People with thalassemia typically develop anemia, a condition that results in inadequate delivery of oxygen to the body’s tissues, which can produce symptoms ranging from fatigue to organ damage.

2Blood-clotting disorder, a disorder linked to a recessive gene on the X- chromosome and occurring almost exclusively in men and boys, in which the blood clots much more slowly than normally, resulting in extensive bleeding from even minor injuries.

3Osteoporosis, bone condition characterized by a decrease in density, resulting in bones that are more porous and more easily fractured than normal bones. Fractures of the wrist, spine, and hip are most common; however, all bones can be affected.

320 Life Yet to Come enough, there is evidence that the price borne in old age is less onerous in modern societies with a high standard of living than it was pre-modern times, suggesting that natural selection has indeed weakened as technology has made our environment more benign. Many studies have found that in pre-modern societies, women who had their first children early, and had many of them, died earlier than women who delayed childbearing and had fewer. This pattern disappears as health and standards of living increase. Future World is Opaque

What is the future? Surely it is not summed up in the smog of Beijing or New Delhi, or the world’s other exploding cities. Forests are disappearing, but after all, they still occupy 30 percent of the land surface. Some coral reefs, such as those in northwestern Hawaii, are almost untouched, and others might be rejuvenated. Clean water still runs in some mountain streams with their unique assemblages of tiny fish and insect larvae. Will not the future of the planet be more like a mosaic? Won’t it strike a balance between conversion to total human domination in some places and other areas left inviolable, free zones where the life wrought over eons still breathes unadulterated? Or will nature be reduced to tiny sanctuaries isolated in the midst of vast acreage controlled by humanity? Unfortunately, much of the world already looks like that. What of the rest? What is likely to happen, and what does it bode for the planet and for us?

Prognostication is a dangerous business in science. Yet science is by definition a predictive enterprise, so why not foretell the future? After all, what good is all this documentation of extinction in the topsy-turvy world of the past unless it gives us some useful indication of what’s in store for us? The easiest prediction to make is that the natural world will continue to change dramatically. Three premises underscore our certainty about this. The first is that the changes we are witnessing today are in many ways unparalleled not only in the entire length of human history but in the many millions of years preceding that history. The second is that facets of the current events were nonetheless foreshadowed by certain events in the past, from which we can learn something. The third premise is that our environmental and evolutionary future will be altered and redefined by any major change occurring in the vital services already provided—nutrient recycling, productivity, CO2 sequestering—by the present ecosystems and their diverse species. What has occurred, is occurring, and will occur over the next few decades has the power to transform a 100-million-year old ecosystem.

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The transformation has two key ingredients. Take 6.5 billion human consumers, predicted to increase to 8.9 billion by 2050, and blend them with what remains of Earth’s natural habitats, and you get a rather volatile mix made all the more unstable because humanity has not made a commitment to designing a different, sustainable way of using natural resources. Serving this exploding population, and making only slow and erratic progress in converting the performance of these services into more efficient and environmentally less damaging behavior, has put us on this collision course with nature. Scientists call the warming years after the last ice age some 12,000 years ago, which saw the beginning of agriculture and the emergence of civilization, the Holocene, or “wholly new,” epoch. The Nobel laureate Paul J. Crutzen, developing a thought first offered by scientists like Antonio Stoppani, V.I. Vernadsky, and Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, has coined a new term, “Anthropocene,” for the epoch that began in the late eighteenth century, the signal event being James Watt’s invention of the steam engine in 1784, which marked a change in the planet as profound as that caused by the great paroxysm at the end of the Cretaceous and the beginning of the Tertiary 65 million years ago.

The Anthropocene is easy to characterize, as we have seen, by human activity that has nearly halved Earth’s forestland, consumed its limited fresh water reserves at a rate that outstrips human population growth, wiped out many of its terrestrial and marine organisms, and infused its atmosphere with enough pollutants to change its climate. Every year thousands, perhaps tens of thousands of species are going extinct. Perhaps a third or a half will be extinct by the mid-twenty-first century. Fifteen years back, we’ve begun of the sixth great mass extinction event. Some people think all this talk about the sixth extinction event is simple hyperbole, fueled by hysteria rather than by real science. They usually issue the following challenge: it may have been nice to have all these species, but the world is changing in response to human need. We have to give some things up. It might as well be a stone fly, a spider, a pond shrimp, a South Indian King Cobra, even a rare antelope in a forest in Vietnam, and a gazelle on the plains of the Gobi Desert. This disappearance of these creatures, great and small, is regrettable, but we cannot compromise an ever- expanding population and global economy, whose collapse would leave billions to starve. Moreover, tree farms and other restored green spaces perform many environmental services, including the sustainable provision of a few products, the regulation of water flow, and carbon sequestration.

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They sometimes link this argument with an often ignored fact about the modern ecosystem: humans have been exterminating its components for forty thousand years. Much of what we find beneficial and appealing— ”natural”—has suffered at least some measure of historical degradation. What we have come to call natural habitats in our time were already grossly modified by humans centuries ago. In New Zealand, for example, flightless birds were reduced in a few centuries from thirty-eight to nine species. David Steadman, who has chronicled the extinction and precipitous decline of birds on Pacific Islands, puts it well, “… the Biodiversity crisis is over. People won: native plants and animals lost.” So, the argument goes, this is an inevitable state of affairs, and we would not expend huge resources and energy to protect habitats simply to sustain all their Biodiversity. This two-part dismissal warrants vigorous response. All science consists of connecting theories with evidence, and scientists know they must refute a theory if an observation contradicts it. Scientists are not supposed to claim that they are offering profound truths, yet the following is as close to facts as anything scientists know of, and I label them accordingly. Biodiversity Crisis – Six Undeniable Facts First Important Fact - What we are experiencing is not just the “normal” rate of extinction, the background rate. The current extinction rate is soon to be as much as ten thousand times faster than the background rate. The projected mid-century loss of 30 to 50 percent of species is perhaps not as big a deal as the 90 percent loss at the end of the Permian, 250 million years ago, but it approaches the Cretaceous extinction event 65 million years ago and surpasses in magnitude many extinction events that mark the boundaries of time over the last 500 million years. Also, the current assault on Earth’s biota is not a matter of epochs, millennia, or even centuries, but of decades, a mark too small to jot down on a room-size Earth calendar. Remember that the error range for dating the Cretaceous extinction event at 65 million years is, at its most precise, between 50,000 and 100,000 years, nearly the entire evolutionary history of Homo sapiens.

Second Fact - Although humans have assaulted the ecosystems of the world for more than forty thousand years, there is no scientific indication that their indefinite exploitation or abuse of the environment will ensure livable conditions in the future. With the recent acceleration of abuses, we are approaching, indeed may have already crossed, the threshold to catastrophe for much of life on this planet. Again, what is at stake is not a century, or forty thousand years, but 100 million years of modern living.

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Third Fact - Extinction is irreversible. Species that die out will never come back. While humans might accomplish the Herculean feat of “restoring” destroyed grasslands, forest, or rivers, they will never resurrect any extinct species that once lived in those habitats. Michael Soule has said, “Death is one thing, an end to birth is something else.” And the impact of the extinction events such as those we are now experiencing reverberates through many other species that interact with those that have been lost, perhaps for one that carries on for millions of years.

Fourth Fact - This irreversibility of species extinction and its reverberating effect clearly impede ecosystem recovery. The past provides us with useful evidence. The “very speedy” post-Cretaceous recovery of some species, among them ferns and some marine invertebrates and microorganisms, took hundreds of thousands of years, hundreds of times longer than recorded human history and nearly as long as the brief span of our species’ history. After the Cretaceous event, key species in the ecosystem, including large plant-eating vertebrates, took even longer, in some cases millions of years. In anticipating recovery from the current Biodiversity crisis, we can take little comfort from what the fossil record shows.

Fifth Fact - The loss of species is not an event unto itself; it is one event that inevitably leads to others that can threaten ecosystem collapse. We have learned that the interconnectedness and complexity of ecosystems maximize the impact of species loss. For example, spiders, which are not humans’ most cherished organism but are the most important invertebrate predator on insects in many habitats, are unusually slow and dogged in apprehending prey, and they are particularly susceptible to plant and soil toxins and other products of human intervention. The endangerment and ultimately the extinction of spider species in many areas, a trend now being explicitly documented by many scientists of Museum of Natural History, will allow the increase of swarms of crop- destroying, disease-carrying insects. These multitudes, if unchecked, could wipe out other species and would not be welcomed by humans.

Sixth Fact - The diversity of species is directly related to the sustenance of human life, not to mention our health, our pleasure, and our happiness. An analysis of African and human population distribution shows the greater Biodiversity is directly associated with the areas of greater human population. The two are closely correlated; people need Biodiversity. We use thousands of species of plants and other organisms for food,

324 Life Yet to Come pharmaceuticals, and raw materials. The modern land ecosystem depends on plant pollination by insects. We have seen that bees, including many species of wild bees, pollinate a majority of the world’s crop species and are thus directly or indirectly responsible for much of the food we produce for ourselves.

Gauging the expected level of extinctions by mid-century is a first big step in prognostication. But we can expect other biological effects, first- order effects, as the experts Norman Myers and Andrew H. Knoll call them. These include massive losses of population even in species that do survive, accelerated invasions of alien species, progressive depletion and homogenization of biotic communities, global reduction in biomass, and the severe reduction, if not virtual elimination, of some biomes such as tropical forests and coral reefs. All these first-order effects have obvious evolutionary consequences: collapse of species ranges, disruption of gene flow, depletion of gene reservoirs, and the increase in exchange of species between different areas and ecosystems. A biota that is so severely manipulated, as Myers and Knoll point out, is likely to experience many new evolutionary shocks.

We might expect an outburst of new species as old ones go extinct and their adaptive zones or niches are vacated. This is the pattern we see in the fossil record following major extinction events. We have some clues from what we have learned about the uncontrolled evolutionary success of invasive species like zebra mussels and water hyacinths, species that thrive in degraded, human-dominated ecosystems. Species that reproduce explosively and invest little time and resource in the prolonged development of offspring might be favored. These are quick to spread and less sensitive to vicissitudes in climate and other conditions, indeed resilient to natural catastrophes, such as intensive storms or droughts. They can afford to lose offspring under stress because they produce so many. The laws of chance give them a chance. We might have an Earth dominated by pest and weed ecology. Our principal locus of Biodiversity, the tropics, will no longer be the key place for the replenishment of species. The rapid deforestation in the tropics and the difficulty of restoring those regions to levels that generated real biological wealth ensure that this great source for Earth’s evolutionary prospects will be severely diminished. During hundreds of millions of years the evolution of life on land saw rampant diversification and species flow from the warm, even-tempered climates of the tropical regions. When tropical conditions extended from equator to the poles, the diversity of some groups in North America and Eurasia, such as

325 Earth - Designed for Biodiversity. Life will find a Way! mammals, was at an all-time high. The evolutionary potential of the planet’s biota will be greatly reduced when the wellspring for this diversity is so massively damaged.

Species will decrease not only in numbers but in the range of their structures, functions, and adaptations. This aspect of Biodiversity, which scientists call bio-disparity, explains why there are mammals as big as a 100-ton blue whale or as small as a 0.13-ounce pygmy shrew no bigger than your little finger. Bio-disparity allows new opportunities for yet more species and increases the range of evolutionary potentials not only for species but for the major groups to which they belong. The twenty-first century may mark the evolutionary dead end of large vertebrates. As we have seen, much of the devastation that humans have wrought over the past forty thousand years has been unusually focused on big animals. The survivors of this onslaught now hang on in confined, degraded habitats, with small, isolated populations that maintain only a meager portion of their once enriched gene variation. We may have already deprived them of the genetic potentials for evolutionary change and adjustment they accumulated over millions of years. Despite recent conservation efforts, even some of the largest protected areas might be too small to provide a matrix for such evolutionary change. Particularly vulnerable are bears (Polar bears), elephants, rhinoceroses, apes, and big cats. With strict implementation of international conservation regulations, whales in the open ocean may fare better despite the disruption of food chains in the ocean caused by over-fishing, pollution, and global warming.

As evolution has always demonstrated, novelties will invariably emerge, and not all of them will be welcomed by humans. Small mammals such as rats, insects like cockroaches will likely thrive in human-dominated ecosystems and develop evolutionary resistance to any chemical or other means of disposing or controlling their numbers. One source of novelty has already been demonstrated: disease-carrying insects from the tropics that spread to high-latitude regions, where their status as invaders makes them strong enough to dominate resident species and resist human defenses against them. The bacteria and viruses that travel with insects and other disease vectors are the greatest threat here, since they can reproduce stupendously, evolve explosively, and kill rampantly. The HIV epidemic is an important reason why the revised estimate of global human populations by mid-century is somewhat lower than originally predicted. As human populations grow, new diseases will keep the continuous check on the exploding numbers. Tsunamis, earthquakes, famines, droughts,

326 Life Yet to Come plagues, and hunger will continue to fight against the exploding populations to bring it down to the carrying capacity of the planet. Sometimes I wonder, source of all these catastrophes all along the way, the culprit was none but “natural selection.” We are also watching to see if other novelties, such as the virus responsible for avian flu, will evolve to a form readily transferred from human to human. With all our ecological tapering, one can predict with some confidence that such prospects will be part of our future. With the present volume of availability of natural resources, and present life styles of humans, planet can support 2 to 3 billion people at most.

As the last point shows, evolution and the biota intersect with all the trends in global human society—changes in health, wealth, distribution of resources, trade, government, and societal prerogatives. We have seen how a perfect ecological storm is brewing in West Africa because of the complex interplay between over-fishing by both African and European nations offshore and the periodic devastation of wildlife on land for bush- meat. We have also learned that human population densities in Africa are higher where Biodiversity is higher, suggesting that Biodiversity is itself a better index for resource and comparative power than we realized. Large- scale migration of humans can be understood as one outcome of a situation in which there is a disparity in resources, especially one in which impoverished communities seek safe, sustainable conditions elsewhere. But nations that become target destinations have pushed and will push back. Such pressures lead to conflict. Many important areas rich in Biodiversity lie on international borders, especially tropical rainforests. Some straddle the boundaries of Brazil, Colombia, and Peru, of Vietnam, China, and Laos, and of many countries in western and central Africa, such as Congo, Tanzania, Uganda, Malawi, Rwanda and Zambia. These nations have not always maintained the most peaceful of relations. History shows that people have made war over gold, oil, fish and water; they may do so over Biodiversity.

This is not a very uplifting prospect, but neither I nor other scientists who have studied the modern ecosystem as it has evolved over the past 100 million years can see a way of opting for less alarming scenarios. I can understand that none of us necessarily wants to hear this message. But we must guard against denial and passivity, which will lull us into ignoring the carnage that is engulfing life on this planet. When the signs of the time became clear more than a decade ago, many of us suspected that some of the doom and gloom might be overwrought. We convinced

327 Earth - Designed for Biodiversity. Life will find a Way! ourselves that the negative trends would be mitigated by complex factors we would come to understand or that conservation awareness and action would improve matters. One area of skepticism concerned climate change, for evidence seemed too sketchy to allow a clear look into the future. Unfortunately, in this case science has been prescient. Those early-warning signals have been, if anything reinforced. This is not like the stories we read as children about people of Earth facing an oncoming comet, an alien invasion, or a lethal shift in the composition of the atmosphere, trying to beat back or adapt to the onslaught, even leaving the planet. What we are dealing with is not science fiction. It is reality of here and now. It is science fact. Still, human ingenuity, commitment, and shared responsibility have great potential for ensuring more positive prospects. History has demonstrated our capacity for improving situations; think of those Romans who centuries ago constructed an elaborate, superbly functional sewage system in their polluted city. Three Urgent Options and Three Useful Strategies

Do current positive efforts indicate a clear possibility that we can at least slow biological decline and environmental degradation? I shall say yes, but with a caveat: our recent efforts, however meritorious, must become more intensive and global; they must be implemented from the top down and given higher priority and more investment. We know which recent and current efforts to conserve water, restore forests, ban hunting of threatened wild life, manage fisheries, arrest the invasion of alien species, curb pollution, and control the release of greenhouse gases are successful. They should continue and proliferate. Meanwhile, the creatures that humans do recognize and cherish have yet to run the gauntlet successfully. The precarious situation for the few tigers scattered about Asia will not improve until we enforce, rather than simply proclaim, the interdiction of the trade in traditional medicines derived from their body parts. The reserves established for such large animals are laudable, but most of them are not big enough to support populations sizable enough to secure a healthy evolutionary future for the animals. Creating corridors lacing through human-dominated regions to connect wildlife reserves and nature preserves is a welcome idea, and it has caught on in some parts of the world.

All these are good starts, but we have a long way to go. Jonathan Foley and other scientists have argued that a more global strategy of land use must distinguish among three options. Option 1, to preserve natural

328 Life Yet to Come ecosystems, would maximize all the benefits we expect from ecosystems— water filtration and flow, Biodiversity and habitat health, mediation of infectious diseases, good air quality, forest production, and carbon sequestration—but of course does not provide food crops. Option 2, to develop intensive croplands, is the converse and fails to provide the ecosystem services under Option 1. Option 3, to develop croplands mixing agriculture with natural components, would provide crop foods and restored ecosystem services. Though its productive capacity will not equal that under Option 2, it does provide a good deal of the other aspects of the natural habitat we value. We need to shift away from a strategy that is on the whole still directly converting Option 1 into Option 2 landscapes. It is Option 3 we should aim for. The fate of the remainder of what we call natural ecosystems will depend on our adopting it and, at the same time, securing as much natural habitat as possible from any kind of conversion. Option 3, land conversion should be widely adapted to serve both humans and the nature we are part of.

This brings us to the challenge of improving the prospects for the planet on the largest, most integrative scale. Climate change itself can be good for some organisms. Under normal conditions many species can adapt over time, are able to migrate and expand their ranges. But the extremely rapid climate changes that are predicted, in combination with habitat fragmentation, preclude this kind of flexibility and adaptation. The steps taken to deal with this problem have been limited and insufficient. Emissions of pollution gases such as nitrogen oxides have leveled off in North America and even declined in Europe, but air pollution, including CO2 emissions, remains much too high. To make matters worse, countries in Asia, especially China and India, are making huge contributions to air pollution and climate change with their increasing emissions of pollutants, including carbon dioxide and nitrogen oxides. These were unprecedented just a few years ago. What can be done then? Containing this accelerating planetary transformation will take a truly mammoth effort that goes beyond a drastic reduction in the use of substances producing greenhouse gases.

Two prominent environmental scientists, Thomas Lovejoy and Lee Hannah, have well stated the nature of the problem and the possible solutions. The current global yearly use of fossil fuels is about six gigatons of carbon, which will have to grow by a factor of two or three even if we use fuel more efficiently, make major changes in our lifestyle, and substitute renewable energy source for traditional ones. Remember the

329 Earth - Designed for Biodiversity. Life will find a Way! current concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere is 380 parts per million per volume, a higher concentration than at any time in the last 10 million years. The last time it was this high much of the coastal land surface that now is home to millions of humans was under water. So we must decrease the use of carbon fuels very soon just to say within a ‘stabilized” range of 450 to 750 ppm/v; if we don’t carbon levels could increase by a factor of ten, a disastrous prospect for life on Earth. The future should be carbon- neutral, and that requires the immediate adoption of Four major strategies:

First Strategy - First, we must both, effect greater fuel efficiency and sequester excess carbon—concentrate and store it in safe places—by natural, biological means. If all the cars in the world were converted to hybrid power, that would effect an efficiency savings of 50 percent or more. The reforestation of natural ecosystems, as in the Option 1 approach we’ve noted above, or the development of tree plantations and cropland enriched with Biodiversity, Option 3, can absorb significant amounts of carbon.

Second Strategy - Yet these monumental steps are merely short-term fixes. We must go beyond the natural sequestration of fossil fuel CO2 and must start making a transition to renewable energy sources, both programs requiring a great deal of money and technology. There are proposals to pump CO2 into abandoned oil wells or saline aquifers or to dispose of it in the deep ocean. But ocean disposal would doubtless disrupt marine life, and there would always be the insidious problem of leakage back to the atmosphere. This might take the form of gigantic burst of CO2, like the catastrophic cloud of gas released from Lake Nyos in Cameroon in 1986 that killed more than seventeen hundred humans who lived nearby. Some paleontologists hypothesize that gigantic releases of CO2 in the ocean may have been related to mass extinction events like the one occurring at the end of the Permian Period. Mineral sequestration1 is potentially the best alternative, since CO2 chemically reacts with rocks such as serpentine and peridotite; it is estimated that mineral carbonates could store fifty thousand gigatons of carbon for hundreds of thousands of years, a storage vault bigger than any requirements we might have for a carbon- neutral future. The technology for such sequestration has yet to be developed, much less tested. But sequestration must be pursued as a viable remedy, with a focus on technologies that are safe and efficient.

1Act of going into or putting CO2 in an isolated place, away from people or everyday pressures, or the fact of being in such a place.

330 Life Yet to Come

Third Strategy - A third strategy would require us to switch entirely, to renewable energy sources such as solar and wind power, a comprehensive solution that minimizes or virtually eliminate our dependency on fossil fuels is a must if we are to stabilize the current conditions. Many renewable energy technologies are benign at local levels but have problems when applied at a larger scale. Already there are conflicting political problems in using wind power in the form of expansive “forests” of wind turbines, which require large sectors of land or ocean and may interfere with other environmental prerogatives, such as assuring safe passage for migrating birds.

But these steps, however difficult and complex, must be taken. Climate change, in combination with habitat fragmentation and other human induced factors, leaves the deepest mark on our modern ecosystem. Bleaching coral reefs and withering plants in Asia and Africa are just a taste of what is in store for the biota. Any measure of success depends not only on international cooperation but also on the leadership of those nations and economies most empowered to do something. Unfortunately, such leadership is dismay the world “pristine” mean in a world ecosystem dominated and transformed by humans, who can reach virtually everywhere? We have gone way past any point where we might be able to restore the world to that pure, mysterious, and unblemished condition that curious, exploratory humans, then only a billion strong, encountered just two centuries ago. But perhaps our dazzling evolutionary success points to a bright future. Given our success, why isn’t it reasonable to assume that Homo sapiens has the capacity to clean up the water, air, soil, stop depleting the now dangerously diminished and unevenly distributed products of long-dead biota—oil and coal—and put ecosystems back on the right track? Do we have the will to turn back the Four Horsemen at the gates of the city? Is our instinct to do so a real one or simply another example of our vanity and hubris? Unfortunately, for all our progress in plotting the diversity and distribution of species, our refinements of ecology, and our exhaustive recording of life’s ups and downs in the fossil record, we can’t predict the future of the human condition. I have tried to show, on one hand, the marvelous intricacy and sustainability of life and living processes and, on the other, their susceptibility to unexpected shocks that leave Earth utterly and irrevocably changed. Perhaps this simple lesson from the past is enough to make us skeptical about our ability to reverse the insidious forces in play. Evolutionary success is not an endowment; it is a legacy, and we may or may not continue to fulfill it.

331 Earth - Designed for Biodiversity. Life will find a Way!

As Darwin maintained, there is no optimal goal or guarantee of everlasting success. As evolution goes, much of the future may be out of our hands. Still, we find ourselves in an extraordinary moment, a species with a profound knowledge of its past, with a huge ambition for change, and with a disturbing ability to radically transform the water, land, air, and life of an entire planet. By scientific consensus, we are our own destroyers, our ever- redeeming Vishnus1, ever-saving Jesus and asteroids. But science tells us we also can be our own benefactors, as seen in the work of a few, whose efforts should be an inspiration to all of us. One of these is the discoverer of the saola, the Vietnamese ecologist Do Tuoc, who still hacks his way through the dense forests of the Truong Son Mountains to catch sight of one of his beloved creatures. He works tirelessly to educate villagers who share the saloas’ habitat to protect rather than kill them. Do Tuoc is undaunted by the destructive forces in play; since my visit to Vietnam in 2002 the fate of the rare, elusive saola has become even more uncertain. There are also plans to clone a captive saola and eventually reintroduce individuals bred in captivity to the wild, a project, like many other such cloning attempts, that has such a low chance for success it has been called a genetic Hail Mary. There may indeed be reasons for other optimists. Some nations actually reduced the levels of some of the gases that pollute the atmosphere and raise the global thermostat. And when it comes to saving species, I have related success stories in bringing back the majestic Indian Bengal Tiger, the Indian rhino, the Indian vulture, and others from the point of near extermination. At the same time, these successes should fuel, not allay, our concerns for the future. They demonstrate how much work is required to save a few among many others that need our attention. Had only those efforts been applied to some of the species already wiped out in the brief span of our history! Man in the Future – War with Ants

Our lineage has produced new species in the past. What about the future? Speciation requires an isolating mechanism of some sort. The most common is geographic isolation, whereby a small population gets cut off from the larger gene pool, then transforms its own set of genes sufficiently

1Vishnu or Chu Ta, major god of Hinduism and Indian mythology, popularly regarded as the preserver of the universe. In the ancient body of literature called the Veda, the sacred literature of the Aryan invaders, Vishnu ranks with the numerous lesser gods and is usually associated with the major Vedic god Indra in battles against demonic forces.

332 Life Yet to Come that it can no longer successfully reproduce with the parent population. Most species have done this through geographic isolation, yet the very population size and efficiency of transport of humanity make this possibility remote, at least on Earth. If however, human colonies are set up on distant worlds, and then cut off from common gene flow, new human species could indeed arise. Perhaps humans will lose the technology that allows the global interchange our species from continent to continent. If separation lasts long enough, and if conditions on the separated continents are sufficiently different, it is conceivable that a new human species could arise due to geographical isolation. With hundreds of thousands to million of years to play with, what might our species evolve into? Here are four scenarios:

1. Stasis - In this scenario we largely stay as we are now: isolated individuals. Minor tweaks may occur, mainly through the merging of the various races.

2. Speciation - Through some type of isolating mechanism, a new human species evolves, either on this planet or on another world following space travel and colonization.

3. Symbiosis with Machines - The evolution of a collective global intelligence comes about through the integration of machines and human brains.

4. Eusociality - Our fascination with ants is that we see our cities and ourselves mirrored in them. The animal world is filled with colonial organisms. Hydrozoans and bryozoans have morphologically distinct polyps that serve for food acquisition, defense, reproduction, and colony stabilization. Each polyp is connected to every other polyp. The functional equivalent of this system among insects is the behavior of species like ants, known as eusociality. Ants and other eusocial insects have evolved behaviors and morphology befitting a highly complex system in which the colony itself serves as the functional individual and the various actual ants of the colony serve as the various organs of that “superorganism.” Will the future evolution of our species be toward the ant model? Harvard biologist Edward O. Wilson, the expert on ants, thinks it is true. Future man unfortunately, will be forced to live underground like ants, because of heat, poisonous atmosphere and deadly solar radiation on the surface of the planet. Man has to carry all their nukes and guns

333 Earth - Designed for Biodiversity. Life will find a Way!

underground, because they need them in future: they have to fight with ants. In one of the most original of all science fiction novels, Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle’s “The Mote in God’s Eye,” an intelligent race genetically manipulates itself to evolve different types of “workers,” including morphologically discrete farm workers, engineers, politicians, soldiers, “masters,” and even “food.”

Each species gradually comes to existence, flourishes, struggles, and, then disappears; this is the law of life, humanity’s demise is inevitable. If you want to understand why God will not prevent the horrifying destruction and death that will soon cover this Earth, then you need to stop and ponder why we were placed on this Earth in the first place. The specific answers of “why” this end-time destruction must come to pass will follow immediately, once the plan of God is explained. Do you know why you exist? Rather than seeking the answer from the one who placed us on this Earth, much of mankind chooses to believe that he evolved from slime in the ocean, and that eventually, he began to crawl upon the Earth, over millions of years and he finally evolved into present-day man. Mankind is so intent on keeping God out of the picture that he eagerly awaits, greater evidence that he evolved. Man is determined to distance himself farther and farther from God. Even for those who claim to be religious, the Biblical account of Adam and Eve seems too simplistic. Rather than God creating the first two human beings exactly as he said, some prefer to believe that he used some means of evolution to bring about the human race.

Even though many religious people find the story of Adam and Eve difficult to believe, they do like the idea that there is some kind of afterlife. Man doesn’t like the idea of finality in death. He prefers to believe that there will be a continuation of life beyond death, but not the kind God has told man about. Ideas of an afterlife among this world’s religions are far too numerous to mention. Although mankind does not choose to believe God concerning such matters, he does not like the idea of living beyond this temporary physical existence. During the latter half of the past century, God worked through his Church to tell the world “why” man was placed on Earth and the purpose of his existence. But the reality and the true witness is that people did not choose to believe what they heard. Instead, they choose to hold onto their own religious ideas and beliefs, which are false. Therein is much of the problem and much of the reason why man’s self-rule must come to an end. Apart from spiritual extinction

334 Life Yet to Come there is another ecological plague has befallen on the face of the Earth: human population. Extinction of humanity is not from asteroids, meteorites, tsunamis, global warming or climate change, but, ultimately humanity might be destroyed by over-population of his own species. In animal world “competitive exclusion,” limit the species level in a ecosystem, that is how the population levels are maintained according to the availability of the food resources in nature. But human species does not follow the nature’s rule, allowing his own species to exceed the “carrying capacity” of the planet. Human Population – The Human Juggernaut

Ten thousand years ago, there may have been at most 2 to 3 million humans on Earth. There were no cities, no great population centers; humans were rare beasts, scattered in nomadic clans of groups, or at best in settlements of little lasting construction. There were fewer people on the entire globe than are now found in virtually any large American city. By two thousand years ago that number had swelled almost to 130 million or perhaps as many as 200 million people. One billion-mark was reached in the year 1800, and there were 2 billion people by 1930, 2.5 billion in 1950, 5.7 billion in 1995, and approximately 6.5 billion in 2010. At this rate of growth, the human population is expected to exceed 10 billion sometime between 2050 and 2100, assuming an annual increase of 1.6%. While this rate is somewhat reduced from the 2.1% growth rate characterizing the 1960s, it remains a staggering figure. In 1992 the United Nations published a landmark study calculating potential human population trends, which arrived at several estimates.

By 2150, the human population could reach about 12 billion, if human fertility figures fall from their present-day levels of 3.3 children per woman to 2.5 children. If, however, the faster-growing regions of the world continue to increase in population and maintain their current fertility levels, average fertility worldwide will increase to 5.7 children per woman, and the human population could exceed 100 billion people sometime between 2100 and 2200. The latter figure seems beyond the carrying capacity1 of the planet. We need 10 more planets to maintain the population. We can learn to eat all animals including elephants, snakes, beetles, ants and termites and also eat all land and marine plants without

1Carrying capacity – when a population grows until it gets as large as its habitat can accommodate, that habitat is said to have reached its carrying capacity. Carrying capacity is the number of individuals that the local resources can sustain.

335 Earth - Designed for Biodiversity. Life will find a Way! any exception, including maple leaves, teak leaves, and grass. Officially, the United Nations uses three estimates for the year 2150: a low estimate of 8.3 billion, a medium estimate of 11.5 billion, and a high estimate of 28 billion.

More than 200 years ago, the British scientists Thomas Malthus described the single most intractable problem with human population growth. While our population numbers increase exponentially, human food supply tends to increase on a linear scale as more land is devoted to agriculture. The inescapable conclusion is that the human population will tend to outgrow its food supply. In a related fashion, the human population is likely to outstrip its supply of untainted and unpolluted fresh water. Water may indeed be the most critical factor in determining the maximum human population that the Earth can support. While the Earth’s stock of water is immense, most of it is salt water held by the oceans. The amount of fresh water is far less, only a small percentage of the total. Moreover, about 69% of that fresh water is locked in glaciers, permanent snow cover, or aquifers more than a kilometer deep, all inaccessible to humans. About 30% is present as accessible groundwater, leaving 0.3% in freshwater lakes and rivers. This total about 93,000 cubic kilometers of fresh standing water on the Earth’s surface. This water does not stay in one place however it evaporates into the atmosphere or sinks into groundwater stocks. Thus, a total of between 9,000 and 14,000 cubic kilometers of renewable fresh water is available for human agriculture each year.

Humans use water for more than agriculture. People drink about 2 liters of water per day in temperate climates, and perhaps three times this amount in arid climates. But drinking is the least of human water consumption, and washing amount to about 7 to 15 cubic meters of water per year per person. The average person in a developed country uses twice this amount. Yet these figures pale when the amount of water needed to feed each person on Earth is calculated. It takes approximately 200 tons of water per year per person to raise sufficient wheat or rice to maintain a normal person with medium build. This translates to about 350 to 400 cubic meters of water per person per year, a whopping 300 gallons per day. Eating meat requires even more water. If 20% of the diet comes from animal meat and dairy products, about 550 cubic meters of water per person per year are required, whereas the typical European diet requires 1,000 cubic meters of water each year to produce.

336 Life Yet to Come

Environmental Despair

Until the late twentieth century, every generation throughout history lived with the tacit certainty that there would be generations to follow. Each assumed, without questioning, that its children and children’s children would walk the same Earth, under same key. Hardships, failures, and personal death were encompassed in that vaster assurance of continuity. That certainly is now lost to us, whatever our politics. That loss, unmeasured and immeasurable, is the pivotal psychological reality of our time. The responses that arise from that reality are compounded by many feelings. There is terror at the thought of the suffering in store for our loved ones and others. There is rage that we live our lives under the threat of so avoidable and meaningless an end to the human enterprise. There is guilt; for as members of society we feel implicated in this catastrophe and haunted by the thought that we should be able to avert it. Above all, there is sorrow. Confronting so vast and final a loss as this brings sadness beyond the telling.

Even these terms, however—anger, fear, sorrow—are inadequate to convey the feelings we experience in this context. They connote emotions long familiar to our species as it has faced the inevitability of personal death. But the feelings that assail us now cannot be equated with dread of our own individual demise. Their source lies in concerns for the personal self than in apprehensions of collective suffering—of what happens to others, to human life and fellow species, to the heritage we share, to the unborn generations to come, and to our blue-green planet itself, wheeling in space. What we are really dealing with here is akin to the original meaning of compassion: “suffering with.” It is the distress we feel in connection with the larger whole of which we are a part. It is our pain for the world. No one is exempt from that pain, any more than one could exist alone and self-existent in empty space. It is inseparable from the currents of matter, energy, and information that flow through us and sustain us as interconnected open systems.

We are not closed off from the world, but rather are integral components of it, like cells in a larger body. When part of that body is traumatized—in the sufferings of fellow beings, in the pillage of our planet, and even in the violation of future generations—we sense that trauma too. When the larger system sickens as is happening in our present age of exploitation and nuclear technology, the disturbance we feel at a semiconscious level is acute. Like the impulses of pain in any ailing

337 Earth - Designed for Biodiversity. Life will find a Way! organism, they serve a positive purpose these impulses of pain are warning signals. Yet we tend to repress that pain. We block it out because it huts, because it is frightening, and most of all because we do not understand it and consider it to be a dysfunction, an aberration, a sign of personal weakness. As a society we are caught between a sense of impending apocalypse and the fear of acknowledging it. In this “caught” place, our responses are blocked and confused. The result is three widespread psychological strategies: disbelief, denial, and double life. These three disorders become part and parcel with most of our life styles. Political and religious leaders all know too well what’s going on? Each and every one of them are hypocrites, they can save this planet which is in peril, but consciously they don’t choose to save it. All of them are addicted to consumption, fossil fuels, energy, comfort, luxury, technology and development, authority, power, money, fame and sin and we know it is very hard for them to come out of addictions. Restoring Habitats, Communities, and Relationships

Many parts of the world, plastic bags are banned, especially in Kanyakumari District in southern India. The community uniformly welcomes and enforces the law through their participation and understanding. Children in India make a habit of planting a tree on their birthdays. Inner-city children collect native grass seed in Chicago vacant lots for prairie restoration. Tireless tree planters turn wastelands into woodlands in desertified regions of Tunisia and Kenya. Churches and businesses “adopt” streams and beaches as aspects of their community- participation programs. Ranchers, loggers, and back-to-the land bio- regionalists in Northern California discover that their economic and community well-being depends on how well they can work together to restore the health of a watershed. Children in hundreds of Japanese schools cry “Come back salmon!” as they release salmon to be raised into depleted rivers. Central American farmers rediscover and plant a rich mix of forgotten pre-colonial crops, restoring a measure of species diversity in their localities.

These glimpses reveal aspects of a blossoming, grass-roots movement for environmental restoration. Restoration projects may be urban or rural, professional or volunteer, on wild-lands or agricultural lands, in strip- mined areas or in backyards. By mimicking the life-sustaining patterns inherent in a place, they aim to bring back the vitality and diversity that the community living there needs in order to thrive. Through

338 Life Yet to Come environmental restoration, people are coming back to Earth with their bodies: cleaning up and decontaminating, clearing out and planting, building erosion-control structures and sapling protectors, and weeding, mulching, and monitoring. They are learning, through their hands and their hearts, to identify with the pain and the healing of the ecosystems that sustain them. Environmental restoration work can spontaneously engender deep and lasting changes in people, including a sense of dignity and belonging, a tolerance for diversity, and a sustainable ecological sensibility. This art and science of helping the web of life in a particular place heal and renew itself can serve as a mirror and an impetus for individual and community renewal. Because of this inherent power, environmental restoration has become one of the key activities through which we practice eco-psychology.

The emerging field of ecopsychology explores the basic shifts in our patterns of identity and relationship that occur when we include our connection to the web of life around us as essential to human well-being. If ecosystems are healthy, humanity will be healthy. Our life is nothing without plant and animals. Deep within our soul we unconsciously long for their relationship. When I work in the parishes—whether through outdoor activities such as gathering edible plants or as an institutional recycling consultant—I help people mend their ties to the other species and cultures that share the web with them, particularly in the place they call home. There are millions of species of our friends live around us, working tirelessly to run this web of relationships. The health of the planet and an individual depend on these little friends around us. At the same time, I interweave this practice with the psycho-spiritual work of reclaiming the disowned parts of their inner world. Ultimately, it’s the spiritual connection which is calling us to see the uniqueness and oneness of all life that started from one cell long time ago. Each process requires and enhances the other. Love for Life in Ancient India - Sangam Literature

World classical Tamil Conference or Ninth World Tamil Conference was held in Coimbatore from June 24 to 27, 2010. Chief Minister M. Karunanidhi the man behind all this, has written thousands of poems, fiction and non-fiction stories, perhaps he is the last of the “Prophets of Tamil.” His prophetic vision has created unparallel marvels of art and architecture, such as “Valluvar Kottam,” “Poompuhar,” and other hundreds of great monuments. His love for Tamil language continues to inspire millions of Indians in India,

339 Earth - Designed for Biodiversity. Life will find a Way! and around the world. They realize the importance of Tamil language, the role that it played in shaping up of the Indian subcontinent and feel proud about their cultural heritage. No doubt, Mr. M. Karunanidhi, the most generous person in the world, his charity to the poor is unparallel in human history, rivaling to all the religious efforts. Mr. M. Karunanidhi is a true hero of Tamil country. Tamil is a Dravidian language that has remained relatively intact despite a considerable amount of contact and intermarriage with other peoples of the Indian subcontinent. Tamil language is spoken by Tamilians, inhabitants of Tamil Nadu. Tamil is the mother tongue of more than 60 million people who live in the state of Tamil Nadu, which lies in the southeastern corner of the Indian subcontinent. It is also spoken by another 30 million Tamils who have emigrated to and have settled in countries like Singapore, Sri Lanka, Malaysia, Mauritius, Fuji, South Africa, Australia, UK, Canada, and USA.

Tamil is one of the oldest languages of the world. It belongs to the family of the Dravidian languages and is considered to be the source for other Dravidian languages. In addition to its antiquity, it is also rich in its literature. Some of the oldest Tamil literary works much predate the Christian era by at least three centuries. According to Prof. George Hart, University of California, Berkeley, a well-known Tamil Scholar, “The quality of Tamil literature is such that it is fit to stand beside the great literatures of Sanskrit, Greek, Latin, Persian and Arabic. The subtlety and profundity of its works, varied scope and universality qualify Tamil to stand as one of the great classical tradition of the world.” Tamil language has the special claim of being at once classical and vigorous like the modern Indian languages. Its history can be traced back to the age of Tolkappiyam the earliest extant Tamil grammar generally to 500 B.C. Among the Dravidian language it is least influenced by ‘Sanskrit’ though there is a certain degree of influence. The earliest extant literature of the Tamils is called Sangam literature and it is dated between 300 BC and 200 A.D. Though a considerable part of the early poetry has been lost, some of the bards and patrons decided to preserve apart of it in certain anthologies (about 4th century A.D.).

Tamil Sangam Literature – Sangam Period, historians designate it from 2 BC and 2AD. Mentions the early Sangam literature (c.150 CE), indicate that the earliest kings of the dynasty antedated 100 CE. Parimelalagar, the annotator of the Tamil classic Tirukkural, mentions that this could be the name of an ancient clan. The most commonly held view is that this is, like Cheras and Pandyas, the name of the ruling family or clan of immemorial antiquity. Another famous work known as “Silapadigaram,” comes from

340 Life Yet to Come the Sangam Period. On the history of the early Cholas there is very little authentic written evidence available. Historians during the past 150 years have gleaned a lot of knowledge on the subject from a variety of sources such as ancient Tamil Sangam literature, oral traditions, religious texts, temple and copperplate inscriptions. The main source for the available information of the early Cholas is the early Tamil literature of the Sangam Period. There are also brief notices on the Chola country and its towns, ports and commerce furnished by the Periplus of the Erythraean Sea (Periplus Maris Erythraei). Periplus is a work by an anonymous Alexandrian merchant, written in the time of Domitian (81–96) and contains very little information of the Chola country. Writing half a century later, the geographer Ptolemy gives more detail about the Chola country, its port and its inland cities. Mahavamsa, a Buddhist text, recounts a number of conflicts between the inhabitants of Ceylon and the Tamil immigrants. Cholas are mentioned in the Pillars of Ashoka (inscribed 273 BCE–232 BCE) inscriptions, where they are mentioned among the kingdoms which, though not subject to Ashoka, were on friendly terms with him. The ‘Sangam Age’ is the earliest known period of organized life and history of the Tamils. Though there are some disputes about the exact dates, but roughly it goes back to the period of pre-Aryan and non-Aryan. During this period the first, second and third Sangams flourished... Here are some of Tamil stories from Sangam Period, describing a very tight knitted relationship of people and king with the nature. During that time and after there were three big ruling dynasties in south India: Chera Dynasty, Chola Dynasty and Pandya Dynasty.

King Sibi and the Pigeon - There was an emperor known as Sibi Cholan from Chola dynasty, in the southern India ruling part of Tamil Nadu, known for his kindness to people and animals, believed in a just rule. People loved him and believed in his justice and it happened one day a pigeon came to him in distress and complained to the king that something bad has happened, a hunter killed its mate and pigeon wanted a swift justice from the king. After hearing the unfortunate news, the king was saddened by this inhuman act and called his councilors for advice. His councilors thought it was stupid to listen to a pigeon they wanted to dismiss the case. But the king asked for a weighing scale, they all wondered why he asked for the scale. Then he drew his sword and cut the soft tissue from his thigh, placing the flesh in the scale, weighed against the dove until the balance was even. The whole court was shocked and could not believe what was unfolding in front of their eyes. Eventually they praised the king

341 Earth - Designed for Biodiversity. Life will find a Way! for his truthfulness in his duty toward not only to humans and also to animals.

Cow wants Justice – Only in India you can find these kinds of stories. Thiruvarur, in south India, was the capital during Manuneethi Cholan. Manu Needhi Cholan or Manuneedhi Cholan was a legendary Chola king believed to have killed his own son to provide justice to a Cow, following Manu Needhi or Manu’s law. Legend has it that the king hung a giant bell in front of his courtroom for anyone needing justice to ring. One day, he came out on hearing the ringing of the bell by a Cow. On enquiry he found that the Calf of that Cow was killed under the wheels of his son’s chariot. In order to provide justice to the cow, he tried to kill his own son under the chariot as a punishment to himself, i.e. make himself suffer as much as the cow. Lord Siva appeared in front of him and gave the life back to the calf. This is one of Lord Siva’s Thiruvilayadal (Holy play) to show the world the just nature of the king. A stone sculpture depicting the story of the Manu Needhi Cholan (the chariot, the king, cow, calf etc.) is found in Thiruvarur in Tamil Nadu, India.

King Pari falls in Love with Creeper - Another king known as Pari from Pandinadu from south India was known for his hospitality and generosity. Famous Sanga poetess Howayar has composed 22 poems on a famous south Indian king known as Athiyamaaan. There was another poet Kabilar composed 20 poems on king Pari’s generosity, all these poems are edited in a single work called “Purana-Nooru.” Pari is one of the 7 generous kings (Kadai Elu Vallalgal) ever to rule Tamil country. There was an incident in the life of king Pari, once, as he was traveling in a chariot, he observed, a creeper of a pea-pod-plant swaying in the wind without trellis and any supporting vegetation nearby. Moved with pity, he abandoned his chariot as a trellis, near the creeper for support and growth. He thought, under his rule, in his kingdom, no one should suffer, lack of companionship, whether humans or plants.

Ashoka the Great – In northern India, today, Ashoka captures the imagination of all the historians. Ashoka was the ruler of the Mauryan Empire from 273 B.C. to 232 B.C. His territory included most of India and parts of what is today Afghanistan and Iran. Emperor Ashoka was a fierce warrior-king who killed anyone who stood in his way. However, his greatest feat was conquering himself. Some people think changing one’s mind is a sign of weakness. But, turning over a new leaf like Ashoka did can require great courage—and can make the world a better place. He was a brutal

342 Life Yet to Come and bloodthirsty king, and frequently warred against other countries to expand his empire. People called him Chandashoka, or “the cruel Ashoka”. The battle of Kalinga in 250 B.C. changed everything. Ashoka was standing on the field after the fighting had ended. Surrounded by the dead bodies, he realized that more than 100,000 people had died because of his war. Horrified, he decided to change. He embraced the Buddhist belief of ahimsa, or non-violence. From that day on, he became known as Dharmashoka, or “the pious Ashoka”. He appealed his subjects to save and respect all life. He changed into a kinder ruler, and built many temples and hospitals to help people. Ashoka even built hospitals for animals, which was unheard of back then. No longer interested in war, he started sending missions of goodwill to other countries. He also sent Buddhist missionaries to spread the message of peace. Many Buddhists today believe that it was probably because of Ashoka that their faith spread so widely. Within his empire, Ashoka promoted peaceful debate and discussion as the way to solve problems. He also made sure that all religions were respected. He planted trees and dug water tanks all along the public road ways. More than 2,000 years later, Indians still look up to Ashoka. When the modern Republic of India was formed, it chose as its national symbol the lions on top of a pillar he had built.

Jainism – It is beliefs that impart meaning to social and individual religious actions, whether ethical or ritual in nature, and to personal experiences and narratives identified as religions. The Jain philosophy has influenced ‘non violent sentiments’ in every belief and religion. For the past 2,600 years the Jains shared with Hindus both the Indian subcontinent and many beliefs. However, ancient, peace-loving religion, which has around four million followers, is distinct in several regards: its overarching concern for the universe; its belief in the spiritual equality of humans, animals and plants; and its extreme asceticism. Jains are all vegetarians, but because of their abhorrence of violence towards all living things including plants, they do not consume root vegetables such as potatoes, garlic, onions, carrots and turnips. They will however, eat rootstocks, turmeric, ginger and peanuts, for example. Aubergines (fruity eggplant) are avoided because of the large number of seeds in them; a seed is seen as a carrier of budding life. Strict Jains do not eat food that has been left overnight, such as yogurt, and have their meals before sunset. They shun worldly goods, sex and violence, and follow a path laid out in the sixth century BCE by an Indian prince-hermit named Mahavir. Jaina and yogic observances mandate lifestyle and occupation choices that minimize violence to living beings. Such a stark commitment to a non-violent

343 Earth - Designed for Biodiversity. Life will find a Way! ethic influenced the political thinking and action of Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Jr., and more recently, Nelson Mandela. For the Jainas, the Yogis, and these modern activists, the meaning of life results in altering behavior, through self-effort, working at self-purification. This purification ideally results in a lessening of violence and an openness to the needs and realities of other life forms, a sense of respect for the lives of all beings. Other great religions such as Christianity, Islam, Judaism, and Hinduism continue to talk the intrinsic value of life. Inspired from these great Indian religions, other world religions and great people, we formulate strong themes of ecological responsibility.

While some religions rave about the importance of plants and animals, some few other religions continue to abuse animals, supported by religious practices, for example, “scapegoat.” In the time before Christ, in the days of the Temple in Jerusalem—that is, before AD70—the high priest offered sacrifices for the expiation of sin. During the ritual was then taken into wilderness. This act was symbolic of expiation and God’s the high priest placed his hands upon a goat as he confessed the people’s sins; the goat forgiveness. The concept of the scapegoat, that is, someone who bears the blame for others, originated in this ceremony. The laws relating to “Yom Kippur1”, are found in Leviticus 16, 23:26-32, 25:9 and Numbers 29:7-11. Again, as a Jew Jesus used sheep and goats to picture the division between believers and unbelievers. Jesus, the judge, will separate them. While all nations are before him, he will separate individuals, for each individual is responsible for his or her own salvation. “And he shall set sheep on his right hand destined to heaven—but the goats on the left destined to hell” (Mt 25:33). Poor goats, what a drastic end for them, what did they do wrong? But goats are sustaining poor people around the world with their milk, cheese and goats are delicacy in some countries and perhaps, highly priced (10 dollars/Kilo in Mumbai) than any other meat around the world. Acknowledging the importance and inherent value of an animal can influence our thoughts and actions in the path of preservation and conservation of that species. On the other hand, Jesus

1 Yom Kippur (Hebrew yom hakippurim, “day of atonement”), the most sacred and solemn holy day in Judaism. It falls on the tenth day of the Hebrew month of Tishri, in September or the first half of October in the Western calendar. The day is observed by fasting and prayer and by rededication to a religious life. Like any other day in the Hebrew calendar, it is reckoned from sundown to sundown.

2 Alapakkam a small little village near Kancheepuram, one of the 7 sacred cities of India. People live out there, very poor due to the dry climate throughout the year. Goats have the ability to survive in these conditions.

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Christ’s teaching on “Lost Sheep” is absolutely a brilliant hint for conservation of species. As parish priest I’ve started a program in my parish, Alapakkam2 “save the goat program,” sponsored by American friends, to bring awareness to see the beauty and value in this puny animal. These animals help environment, dispersing seeds all over the nook and crannies in tough terrain, through their droppings, so help tress’ growth, hence they play an important role in ecology. Seven Sacraments of Ecology

1. A God-centered and sacramental view of the universe: In a sacramental view, nature’s beauty and diversity reveal something about God. God is present and active in creation, while also transcendent. “Faced with the glory of the Trinity in creation, we must contemplate, sing, and rediscover awe,” said John Paul II.

2. A consistent respect for human life, which extends to respect for all creation: The Church approaches the care and protection of the environment from the point of view of the human person. Men and women are created in the image and likeness of God. Fostering and protecting human life and dignity, from conception to natural death, lies at the Church’s social teachings. We now realize that respect for human life and respect for nature are inextricably linked. Our lack of respect for life extends also to the rest of creation and is an underlying cause of social injustice and environmental destruction.

3. A world view affirming the ethical significance of global interdependence and the global common good: Recent ecological concerns have heightened our awareness of just how interdependent our world is. According to John Paul II, “Today the ecological crisis has assumed such proportions as to be the responsibility of everyone … Its various aspects demonstrate the need for concerted efforts aimed at establishing duties and obligations that belong to individuals, peoples, states, and the international community.”

4. An ethics of solidarity promoting cooperation and a just structure of sharing in the world community: We are all parts of one human family, whatever our national, racial, religious, economic, or ideological differences. Solidarity is a firm and preserving

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determination to commit oneself to the common good, and a willingness to lose oneself for the sake of others, including future generations. Solidarity must take into consideration not only the needs of all people’s but also the protection of the environment in view of the good of all.

5. An understanding of the universal purpose of created things, which requires equitable use of the Earth’s resources: God has given the fruit of the Earth to sustain the entire human family, including future generations. “The world is given to all, not only to the rich,” said Pope Paul VI. It is manifestly unjust that a privileged few should continue to accumulate excess good, squandering available resources, while masses of people are living in conditions of misery at the very lowest level of subsistence. Today, the dramatic threat of ecological breakdown is teaching us the extent to which greed and selfishness, both individual and collective are contrary to the order of creation, an order that is characterized by mutual interdependence.

6. An option for the poor, which gives passion to the quest for an equitable and sustainable world: The ecological problem is intimately connected to justice for the poor. The option for the poor embedded in the gospel and the Church’s teachings makes us aware that the poor suffer most directly from environmental decline and have the least access to relief from their suffering. It is important to note that populations of poor people are never the primary cause of ecological destruction; rather, they are its victims. Our duty is not only to share our wealth, but also to promote the values and institutions that generate wealth: economic freedom, political liberty, private property, the rule of law, and respect for human life and rights. No amount of aid can ever be enough if the leaders of developing countries do not respect their people, open their markets, invest in better health and education, conserve the natural environment, and abide by a legal system that is fair and consistent. Insisting on reform is a challenge, but it is also a work of compassion.

7. A conception of authentic development, which offers a direction for progress that respects human dignity and the limits of material growth: Much of the destruction of creation is caused by sin, including the sins of arrogance, greed, and disrespect for life.

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Add to that human ignorance and error. These lead to rampant consumerism, haphazard development, social injustice, the indiscriminant application of technology, and ultimately violence. Numerous social conditions, including love, health, freedom, economic and material prosperity, and a healthful and beautiful environment, impact our ability to realize our human dignity and reach our full potential. In addition, humankind carefully and wisely develops creation so that the whole creation reaches its full potential, according to God’s will. Instead of limiting ourselves to “sustainable development,” Catholics strive for more: we strive for “authentic development” for humankind and the whole of creation. “Development cannot be limited to mere economic growth. In order to be “authentic,” it must be complete: integral, that is, it has to promote the good of every person and of the whole person,” wrote Pope Paul VI, in his “Populorum Progresso, on March 26, 1967. Top Ten Reasons to Care for Creation 1. God is the Creator of the universe and maintains its existence through an ongoing creative will. 2. God has blessed and called “very good” all that is created. 3. God’s plan for Creation is one of harmony and order. Creation forms a whole, a Cosmos. 4. God loves the community of life. 5. God’s creatures share a common home. 6. God’s presence is discernable in all Creation. 7. God intends the Earth’s goods to be equitably shared. 8. Within Creation, the human person enjoys a consummate dignity. Inherent to this dignity is that of exercising a wise and just stewardship over the rest of creation. 9. Sin brought division into the entire world, but not only within and between human persons. The consequences of sin also affect the Earth. 10. In a mysterious way, Christ’s redemptive mission extends to all of Creation. The mission continues through the Church’s priests.

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Man – The Avatar for Conservation 1. Many people mistakenly view humans as principally consumers and polluters rather than producers and stewards. Consequently, they ignore our potential, as bearers of God’s image, to add to the Earth’s abundance. The increasing realization of this potential has enabled people in societies blessed with an advanced economy not only to reduce pollution, while producing more of the goods and services responsible for the great improvements in the human condition, but also to alleviate the negative effects of much past pollution. A clean environment is a costly good; consequently, growing affluence, technological innovation, and the application of human and material capital are integral to environmental improvement. The tendency among some to oppose economic progress in the name of environmental stewardship is often sadly self- defeating. 2. Many people believe that “nature knows best,” or that the Earth- untouched by human hands-is the ideal. Such romanticism leads some to defy nature or oppose human dominion over creation. Our position informed by revelation and confirmed by reason and experience, views human stewardship that unlocks the potential in creation for all the Earth’s inhabitants as good. Humanity alone of all the created order is capable of developing other resources and can thus enrich creation, so it can properly be said that the human person is the most valuable resource on Earth. Human life, therefore, must be cherished and allowed to flourish. The alternative-denying the possibility of beneficial human management of the Earth-removes all rationale for environmental stewardship. 3. While some environmental concerns are well founded and serious, others are without foundation or greatly exaggerated. Some well-founded concerns focus on human health problems in the developing world arising from inadequate sanitation, widespread use of primitive biomass fuels like wood and dung, and primitive agricultural industrial and commercial practices; distorted resource consumption patterns driven by perverse economic incentives; and improper disposal of nuclear and other hazardous wastes in nations lacking adequate regulatory

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and legal safeguards. Some unfounded or undue concerns include fears of destructive manmade global warming, overpopulation, and rampant species loss. The real and merely, alleged problems differ in the following ways. Faith as Guiding Light

Our beliefs teach the following theological and anthropological principles are the foundation of environmental stewardship.

1. God, the Creator of all things, rules over all and deserves our worship and adoration.

2. The Earth, and with it all the cosmos, reveals its Creator’s wisdom and is sustained and governed by his power and loving kindness.

3. Men and women were created in the image of God, given a privileged place among creatures, and commanded to exercise stewardship over the Earth. Human persons are moral agents for whom freedom is an essential condition of responsible action. Sound environmental stewardship must attend both to the demands of human well being and to a divine call for human beings to exercise caring dominion over the Earth. It affirms that human well being and the integrity of creation are not only compatible but also dynamically interdependent realities.

4. God’s Law-summarized in the two great commandments (to love God and neighbor), which are written on the human heart, thus revealing his own righteous character to the human person- represents God’s design for shalom, or peace, and is the supreme rule of all conduct, for which personal or social prejudices must not be substituted.

5. By disobeying God’s Law, humankind brought on itself moral and physical corruption as well as divine condemnation in the form of a curse on the Earth. Since the fall into sin people have often ignored their Creator, harmed their neighbors, and defiled the good creation.

6. God in his mercy has not abandoned sinful people or the created order but has acted throughout history to restore men and women to fellowship with him and through their stewardship to enhance the beauty and fertility of the Earth.

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7. Human beings are called to be fruitful, to bring forth good things from the Earth, to join with God in making provision for our temporal well being, and to enhance the beauty and fruitfulness of the rest of the Earth. Our call to fruitfulness, therefore, is not contrary to but mutually complementary with our call to steward God’s gifts. This call implies a serious commitment to fostering the intellectual, moral, and religious habits and practices needed for free economies and genuine care for the environment. Our Aspirations for Future Life In light of these and concerns, we declare the following principled aspirations.

1. We aspire to a world in which beings care wisely and humbly for all creatures, first and foremost for their fellow human beings, recognizing their place in the created order.

2. We aspire to a world in which objective moral principles-not personal prejudices-guide moral action.

3. We aspire to a world in which reason (including sound theology and the careful use of scientific methods) guides the stewardship of human and ecological relationships.

4. We aspire to a world in which liberty as a condition of moral action is preferred over government-initiated management of the environment as a means to common goals.

5. We aspire to a world in which the relationships between stewardship and private property are fully appreciated, allowing people’s natural incentive to care for their own property to reduce the need for collective ownership and control of resources and enterprises, and in which collective action, when deemed necessary, takes place at the most local level possible.

6. We aspire to a world in which widespread economic freedom- which is integral to private, market economies-makes sound ecological stewardship available to ever greater numbers.

7. We aspire to a world in which advancements in agriculture, industry, and commerce not only minimize pollution and transform most waste products into efficiently used resources but also improve the material conditions of life for people

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everywhere (from Cornwall declaration on environmental stewardship). In the Bible Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount clearly points out the necessity of human relationship with nature, enabled by the sustainable living lifestyle.

The Strategy of Sustainable Development - Sustainable development means prosperity that is globally shared and environmentally sustainable. Sustainable development means a chance to raise standards of living in the present, without destroying future generation’s ability to meet their own needs. In practice, sustainable development will require three fundamental changes in our business-as-usual global trajectory. First, we will have to develop and adopt on a global scale, and in a short period of time, the sustainable (high S) technologies that can allow us to combine high levels of prosperity with lower environmental impacts. Second, we will have to stabilize the global population, and especially the population in the poorest countries, in order to combine economic prosperity with environmental sustainability. And third, we will have to help the poorest countries escape from the poverty trap. These three basic goals— environmental sustainability, population stabilization, and ending extreme poverty—are of course the essence of the Millennium Promises. Sermon on the Mount – Magna Carta on Sustainable Development

Sermon on the Mount, also known as “The Beatitudes,” a term that comes from the Latin word “beatitudo,” technically means “blessedness.” To be “blessed” means that one has been given a gift or a kindness by God. The phrase “happy is,” or “blessed is,” appears often in the book of Psalms. These Beatitudes describe the person who is righteous, one who lives sustainable with natural world, his relationship with biotic and abiotic world is just right, meaningful and also someone who has faith and hope in God. Hence he fulfills the two of the greatest commandments, love of God and love of neighbor. They are signs of a life lived in relation with creation, with creatures big and small, with hope, love, and favor. These blessings apply to the whole person, whether in family life, in worship, in public life, or in one’s inner self. The blessed person is in touch with the fruitfulness of the creator himself and in touch also with his biotic and abiotic neighbors. He or she lives a fulfilled life, life as God intended it to be lived.

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The text is found in the Gospel of Mathew in chapter 5:1-16. There are 8 or 9 beatitudes and they are the best ecological and environmental sayings of all time. They talk about spiritually and ethically motivated integral growth of man with God, and especially with nature. Bible reports, as the crowds were gathering to listen to Jesus, Jesus pulled his disciples aside and warned them about the temptations they would face as his associates. “Don’t expect fame and fortune,” Jesus was saying, “but mourning, hunger, and persecution.” If we don’t live by Jesus’ words in this sermon, we will find ourselves using God’s message only to promote our personal interests. I see a progression of awareness and consciousness in human soul as Jesus moves from first beatitude to the ninth. One is built on the other in the ascending order. They are not pronounced at random, on the other hand the nine of them stacked as steps one above the other in succession, gradually becoming more complex, one leading to the other. The man who abides by these beatitudes, I would like to call him a “Son of Beatitudes.” Jesus begins his sermon saying, “Blessed are the poor in Spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of God.” One who is “poor in spirit” able to see the truth objectively what’s going on in nature such as pollution, deforestation, violence against man and other animals and become concerned about the status quo. His DNA tells him that he is connected with them, not for few years, but millions of years of molecular relationship, which prompts him that he is the microcosm of the macrocosm. This understanding initially brings him unimaginable pain in his soul and as a immediate reaction he “mourns.” “Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted.” He mourns for the hacked-down trees, depleted oceans, eroded rivers, poisoned lakes, and polluted atmosphere. His mourning expresses sorrow for the sins committed by human activities, repents for his own actions and he admits that the consequences of his sufferings are self-inflicted. His depressed state shatters him at first, but, eventually he picks up his pieces and rises like a phoenix, soaring confidently with two wings of “meekness and kindness.” The sermon continues, “Blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the Earth.” Meekness is almost feeling shy away from everything. The word “meekness” translated gentle and lowly convey humility and trust in God. Gentle and lowly people do not selfishly concentrate on themselves, but on others. I would like to replace meekness with a similar word from Sanskrit: “ahimsa,” a favorite word of Mahatma Gandhi1 which inspired him, eventually he would design his entire freedom movement on this concept. Meekness could be seen as a non-

1 Mohandas Gandhi (1869-1948), Indian nationalist leader, who established his country’s freedom through a nonviolent revolution.

352 Life Yet to Come violent force that can resist any violent force. A man who is meek, cannot sit and watch the atrocities like hunger, famine, poverty and inequality, happening around him. In other words, he is able to see the reality that the planet Earth is wounded, bleeding and slowly dying. Seen in another aspect, the meek are the egoless. They are those who have awakened to their essential true nature as consciousness and recognize that essence in all “others,” all life-forms. They live in the surrendered state and so feel their oneness with the whole and the source. They embody the awakened consciousness that is changing all aspects of life on our planet, including nature, because of life on Earth is inseparable from the human consciousness that perceives and interacts with it. That is the sense in which the meek will inherit the Earth.

Obviously, the alarming situation we’re in right now, calls for an urgent response. “Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be filled.” The words hungry and thirsty picture intense longings that people desire to satisfy—necessities that they cannot live without. Those who have an intense longing for righteousness (justice) are blessed. Most likely, this refers to personal justice—being so filled with God that the person completely does God’s will. Justice refers to total discipleship and complete obedience. It may also refer to justice for the entire world which is torn ecologically and environmentally—an end to the sin and evil that is perpetrated everyday by human activity. His “hunger and thirst for righteousness” sets him in motion to set things right. The “Son of Beatitude” from this moment on is powered by the Spirit of God. He is not motivated by authority, position, money and power which are proned to corruption and manipulation; on the other hand he is moved by the spirit within, a compelling outcome: “compassion and mercy.” His transformation is the ethical outcome of the evil he has seen around the world such as exploitation of Earth’s systems like lithosphere, atmosphere, hydrosphere and biosphere; exploitation of natural resources; assault on forests; depletion of fish in the oceans; destruction of natural habitats and Biodiversity; abuse of poor, powerless, unfortunate and down-trodden. “Blessed are the merciful, for they will receive mercy,” continues Jesus. Merciful people realize that, because they received mercy from God, they must extend mercy to others. Mercy implies generosity, forgiveness, and compassion, and a desire to remove the damage which human activity has done to the ecosystems and Biodiversity, as well as alleviate their suffering, restoring dignity and prestige to nature.

353 Earth - Designed for Biodiversity. Life will find a Way!

The “Son of Beatitude” is enlightened and he has so much of positive energy to give, people call him saint and some people say “he is pure in heart.” “Blessed are the pure in heart, for they will see God,” the sermon continues. People characterized as pure in heart are morally pure, honest, and sincere, which are strange concepts to our politicians and leaders. Unfortunately, not all politicians are good leaders. The people of pure heart have integrity and single-minded commitment to God. Because of their sincere devotion to God, they will see God here and now through the eyes of faith. He believes in “Panentheism,” which means “All in God” and “God in All.” He sees God, in the solid, liquid, gas and plasma and in the biotic and abiotic worlds. The sermon reminds, “Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called children of God.” God calls his children to be peacemakers. “If You Want to Cultivate Peace, Protect Creation,” wrote Pope Benedict XVI. Preservation and conservation of nature and its life forms are very important, if we want to cultivate peace. Humanity has declared war on creation and we should stop the war right now. This involves action, not just passive compliance. Peacemakers actively work for peace, to cause reconciliation, to end bitterness and strife. This peace is not appeasement but dealing with and solving problems to maintain peace. Arrogant, selfish people do not concern themselves with peacemaking. Peace makers will be called the children of God, because they reflect their Father’s character. His ability to set things straight transports him to places where people are continuously torn between conflicts, to make peace and he is known as “peace-maker.” We could have stopped war in Afghanistan, Iraq, communal conflict in Sri Lanka, Rwanda, if one played the role of “Son of Beatitude.” Unfortunately, we’re yet to credit any big achievements to religions: therefore, individual can draw inspiration in “Son of Beatitude,” which is a better option, could be a powerful tool for new millennium.

Every step is not easy and he’s “persecuted for righteousness sake,” indeed, a journey from “poor in spirit” to “peace-maker” is not that easy. Jesus complements, “Blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness’ sake, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.” Unfortunately, we are persecutors than being persecuted. We kill so many animals, abuse them, mistreat them and ignore them. Let us not forget that in most instances we have intruded in animals’ habitats, they are not the intruders. And many animals suffer each and every day because of the messes we make. No shark ever came out on our street, begging for food. On the other hand we intrude and exploit their habitats. Let us never avert our eyes from the gaze of the animals who need us and whom we need as much or more. Life without

354 Life Yet to Come our animal friends would be lonely and miserable. First thing, stop eating meat, fish, whatever bleeds. Not eating meat or fish may be considered as persecution for some people. Let us defend all forms of life. Persecution should not surprise people those who work for truth and justice, namely, saving nature and Biodiversity. People who put others before themselves will seldom receive applause and honors. Often, they will be persecuted instead. Because they live for God, they stand out from the world and become marks for enemy attacks. The reward for these believers will be the kingdom of heaven. God will make up for the suffering that his children have undergone because of their loyalty to him. Jesus complements him, “blessed are you when people revile you and persecute you and utter all kinds of evil against you falsely on my account. Rejoice and be glad, for your reward is great in heaven, for in the same way they persecuted the prophets who were before you.” The Real Steward of the Earth - Microbes

All the time, everywhere, all the species in the world are turning resources into waste, and that was has to go somewhere. In fact, as we all know, it invariably ends up in the environment: in the soil, in a river or lake, in the sea, or on the atmosphere. The truth is that waste materials, whether they come from an ant colony, a clump of trees, a coral reef, a refrigerator factory, or our kitchen, ends up in the back yard of some other organism. For hundreds of millions of years, natural wastes have been dumped on the land and in the sea and, for the same period, organisms that use those wastes for food have evolved and proliferated. Those organisms known as microbes are immensely successful and come in a bewildering array of shapes, sizes, and abilities. By abilities we mean the different ways of converting wastes into resources that other creatures can use. Consider the wastes of a forest, dead leaves and flowers, logs, branches, twigs, and roots, generated all year long for thousands of centuries. Without the waste-eaters, technically known as decomposers, all that trash would have piled up and suffocated the forest long ago. The waste from modern human societies is a vast addition to the biosphere. Then too, it contains a variety of highly toxic substances and materials strongly resistant to degradation.

Decomposers or microbes in the form of bacteria are attacking the waste, but it is going to take a very long time to get through all these materials, such as electronic waste. Furthermore, as many are the products

355 Earth - Designed for Biodiversity. Life will find a Way! of very recent sophisticated manufacturing process, they are new to the planet and thus create a sudden and daunting challenge to waste-eaters that have never encountered them before. Life on Earth would die out far faster if organisms in the Kingdom of Microbes became extinct than if any of the other kingdoms disappeared. We believe that microbial life on our planet thrived long before the large organisms that evolved by symbioses from communities of bacteria ever appeared. Microbes have an ancient and noble history. They were probably the first living organisms and, with respect to everything but size, have dominated life on Earth throughout the ages. The oldest fossil evidence for microbes dates to about 3400 million years ago, whereas the oldest evidence for organisms belonging to the eukaryotic kingdoms is about 1200 million years. These microbes are more than bacteria! Animals and plants could not survive long without fungi and bacteria. In getting nourishment for themselves, these organisms turn the matter that life is made of back into its basic particles and compounds, so that they can be recycled and used again by new life. Their main food is material that other living things no longer need, also known as detritus. For this reason the recyclers are known as detritivores.

Who is the real steward of the Earth? Again, the possible answer is: man, all religions think that man is the steward. We all know that it is anthropocentric answer! But where was the steward some 5 million years ago before the advent of Australopithecus or the southern ape? Where will be man in another 2 or 3 million years, if we could last that long! Therefore, who was the steward before 5 million years ago and who will be the steward after 3 million years? I think real stewards are—”microbes.” They constantly recycle the dead matter into life-giving organic matter. But for them, this world would rot and stink! If man thinks, he is the steward he can do one thing at least: just protect microbes. They have survived hundreds of obstacles. They started to evolve some 3.5 billion years ago, they have seen plate tectonic upheavals, encountered earthquakes, volcanoes, tsunamis, and outlived all the mass extinctions. Five mass extinctions wiped out almost 99 percent of organisms on Earth, there were only one survivor—microbes. But human-induced Global Warming has already wiped out thousands of species of microbes. These life forms are most ancient, more endearing, and very indispensable. I wish that nothing could destroy these incredible survivors: you can say without any hesitance that they are the symbol of remarkable endurance. The sixth

356 Life Yet to Come mass extinction is happening right now. At the end, thousands of years from now, all the big organisms on Earth will disappear and again the “steward microbe” will inherit the Earth. He will do his work as he did in the past as if nothing happened, of recycling the dead matter into organic life giving matter; the planet will be beaten, scorched and powderized and again microbes claim their dominion over land and it will be ready for the new creation. Finally …

The story of creation nears the end. Our story started from the beginning. In the beginning there was light; then a dark cloud appeared, and made the sun and Earth. The Earth grew warmer; its body exhaled moisture and gases; water collected on the surface, soon the first molecules struggled across the threshold of life. Some survived; others perished; and the law of Darwin began its work. The pressures of the environment acted ceaselessly, and the forms of life improved. The changes were imperceptible from one generation to the next. No creature was aware of its role in the larger drama; all felt only the pleasure and pain of existence; and life and death were devoid of a greater meaning. But to the human observer, looking back on the history of life from the perspective of many eons, a meaning becomes evident. He sees that through the struggle against the forces of adversity, each generation molds the shapes of its descendents. Adversity and struggle lie at the root of evolutionary progress. Without adversity there is no pressure; without pressure there is no change. These circumstances, so painful to the individual, create the great currents that carry life forward from the simple to the complex.

Finally, man stands on the Earth, more perfect than any other. Intelligent, self-aware, he alone among all creatures has the curiosity to ask: How did I come into being? What forces have created me? And, guided by his scientific knowledge, he comes to the realization that he was created by all who came before him, through their struggle against adversity, and we are the last inheritors of Earth. Inheritors have to work hard for inheritance through conservation, preservation and restoration. Let me conclude with the statement from my mentor Edward O. Wilson, “May we take possession of this land that God has provided and let it drip with milk and honey into our mouths, forever.” Planet Earth is the home for all life. It is home to the microbes the smallest of all animal. It is home to the blue whales, the largest of all animals. It is home to the algae the smallest of all organisms.

357 Earth - Designed for Biodiversity. Life will find a Way!

It is the home to the giant sequoia tree, the largest organism on Earth. It is home to the ants. It is home to the king cobra. It is home to elephants. It is home to all the plants and animals including humans and Earth is our only home, where life proliferates so abundantly on our planet.

For your Spiritual Reflection : “Then the Lord saw that the wickedness of man was great in the Earth, and that every intent of the thought of his heart was only evil continually. And the Lord was sorry that he had made man on the Earth, and he was grieved in His heart. So the Lord said, “ I will destroy man whom I have created from the face of the Earth, both man and beast, creeping thing and birds of the air, for I am sorry that I have made them.”

Book of Genesis 6:5

358 Bibliography

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366 INDEX Index

A acid life 126 Adam and Eve 159 addendum 196 ahimsa 190 Albert Einstein 245 Alfred Russell Wallace 123 algae 133 Amazon 183 amphibians 172 angiosperms 19 Anthropocene 322 Archaea 51 Archaeopteryx 27 Aristotle 50 Arthur Conan Doyle 317 Ascomycota 85 Ashoka the Great 342 Augustine 63 B

Background rate 323 Basil 52, 64, 65 Beatitudes 351 Bees 64, 164, 213, 273, 297 298 Bhagavad-Gita 153 Bible 50, 52, 53, 55, 95, 99, 158, 159, 246, 256, 302, 351, 352 big bang 238, 241 biocentric 101, 144 Biodiversity 50 Bioethical Determinants 193 biomes 182, 183, 212, 222, 272, 274, 286, 293 Biophilia 101, 141 143 Biophobia 141 Biosphere 66, 67, 75, 85, 88, 100, 104, 136, 137, 144, 146, 207, 210, 219, 220, 221, 224, 273,286, 353, 355 Biotechnology 189, 191, 193, 196,198, 205, 230 Bjorn Lomborg 270 Brontosaurus 211

367 Earth - Designed for Biodiversity. Life will find a Way!

C Cambrian Explosion 263, 318 Carboniferous 25 carnivore 22, 40, 90, 214, 265, 285, 313, 314 Carolus Linnaeus 51, 70, 123 carrying capacity 197, 327, 335 cell 161, 170, 171, 205, 238 Cellphone 297, 298 Chicxulub 266 chilopods 92 chimpanzee 34, 35, 41, 42, 101, 102, 117 China 230, 258, 279, 281, 327 chlorophyll 2, 12, 76, 83, 86, 91, 170 Chola Dynasty 341 chordate 94 Christianity 51, 52, 63, 106, 305, 344 Chromosome 11, 47, 72, 111, 119 ciliates 81 Climate Change 102, 104, 137, 138, 153, 156, 229, 267, 275, 283, 289, 294, 295, 328, 329 climax community 222 CO2 76, 129, 265, 321, 329, 330 competition 4, 16, 17, 29 Competitive exclusion 216, 276 Conservation 55, 110, 175, 191, 202, 203, 213, 221, 256, 258, 267, 280 286, 288, 290, 293, 294, 301, 306, 326, 344, 354, 348 Coral reefs 230, 236, 268, 283, 286, 287, 315, 321, 325, 331 Cosmic Christ 163, 307 Cosmic Egg 241, 242 Creation 1, 5, 10, 46, 50, 53, 54, 57, 58, 98, 153, 159, 160, 198, 273, 302, 303, 307, 309, 315, 318, 345, 346 Cretaceous 17, 20, 261, 262 Crustaceans 92, 120, 172, 319 D Darwin 19, 27, 37, 38, 39, 103, 109, 118, 119, 120, 123, 127, 206, 215, 268, 290, 310, 332, 357 Darwinian definition 3, 4 Decomposers 80, 84, 85, 87, 224, 355 Deep Ecology 101, 144, 145 Deep time 46, 264 Detritus 224, 356

368 INDEX

Devonian 17, 19, 264 Dharma 153, 307 Dinosaur 21, 22, 23, 24, 28, 172, 211, 261, 262, 265, 266, 317 dipterocarp 183, 184 DNA 4, 5, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 46, 47 domestication 89, 196, 314 Dougal Dixon 313 Dravidian language 340 Dreamtime 46, 48 E Ecological cancer 287 Ecology 96, 101,102, 142, 190, 203, 221, 229, 249, 306, 325, 331, 345 Ecopsychology 96, 137, 138, 139, 141,142 Ediacara 103 Edward O. Wilson 1, 99, 141, 204, 205, 239, 267, 268, 270, 288, 333, 357 Egypt 48, 56, 57 Enuma Elish 57 Eros 10, 40, 91,146 Eubacteria 51, 71, 79 evolution 1, 4, 17, 54, 309, 310, 311, 312, 313 exnihilo 56, 161 extinction rate 204 Extremophiles 112,132 F Fauna and flora 204, 205, 218 Freud 139, 146 Frogs 17, 18, 63, 94, 106, 164, 176 Fungi 19, 51, 52, 68, 69, 72, 73, 74, 75, 83, 84 G Gaia 103, 104, 145, 218 Genesis 46, 58, 64, 159, 162 genetic variation 119, 207, 208, 239, 247, 249 genomes 117, 192, 205, 251 Geologic Time 46, 164, 228, 235 gibbon 34 Glacier 21, 43, 165, 182 Global Warming 153, 154, 173, 201, 228 gorilla 34, 35, 36, 243, 247 Greeks 56, 59, 60, 238

369 Earth - Designed for Biodiversity. Life will find a Way!

Green Cathedrals 182 Greenland 21, 172 Gregor Mandel 118 Gymnosperms 19, 91, 92 H heterotrophs 81, 84, 92 Hinduism 50, 172, 203 Hitler 154 holdfast 19 Holy Spirit 54, 160 HOMO 41 Homo 42, 43, 44, 70, 102, 247 Homo sapiens 102, 165, 247 human population 145, 152, 204, 247, 248 humus 186 hydrothermal vents 130 I ice age 237 Immortality of Life 105 India 207, 213, 221, 230, 243 internal wilderness 97 Invertebrate 90, 92, 93, 230 Isaiah 246, 257 J Jainism 203 jelly 82 jellyfish 92 Jesus Christ 52, 55, 105 Jews 51, 154 John Muir 103 K Kalinga 343 Kanyakumari District 338 Karunanidhi 339 Kattupadi 97, 207, 243 Khnum 57 King Cobra 99, 165, 322, 358 Kingdom of God 50, 53, 352 Kronos 59

370 INDEX

L Lacantius 63 Lichens 87, 178 Liverworts 18, 19, 90 Louis Leakey 42 M Mahavir 96, 343 Mammals 2, 20, 21, 22, 26, 28, 29, 44, 73, 78, 90, 94, 95, 212, 213, 214, 217, 220, 265, 266, 267, 269, 280, 284, 285, 286, 288, 301 Manuneedhi Cholan 342 Marduk 57 marine ecosystems 208, 209, 281 Mass Extinction 259, 261, 267, 262, 270, 309, 310, 311, 313, 315, 330 Mathew 50, 53, 67, 84, 352 Medicinal Plants 185 megafauna 288 Mendelian genetics 71, 118 Metabolism 11, 26, 67, 69, 73, 74, 76, 108, 109, 111, 116, 126, 195 Microbes 8, 10, 74, 113, 126, 128, 129, 133, 135, 224, 234, 355, 356 migration 16, 44, 48, 240, 305, 315, 327 Mineral sequestration 330 Monera 68, 69, 71, 165 Morse code 115 multicellular 67, 84, 89, 103 Mutation 99, 116, 119, 120, 121, 122, 123, 124, 125, 126, 166, 169, 238, 311, 312, 320 mutualism 167 Mycorrhizae 88 N Nammalvar 307 Natural Heritage 213, 255 Natural selection 4, 5, 39, 45, 70, 107, 109, 117, 118, 119, 120, 121, 122, 205, 215, 221, 239, 260, 269, 291, 310, 312, 313, 314 Naturalistic ethics 291 Navajo chant 307 Neuroscience 245 New Atlantis 187 New Testament 163, 302 niche 273, 276 Norman Myers 268, 301, 313 nucleoid 71, 72

371 Earth - Designed for Biodiversity. Life will find a Way!

O Old Testament 58, 59, 159, 163 orangutan 34, 38, 247 Ordovician 262, 263 Origin of Species 27, 37, 60, 119, 120, 123, 226, 268 Osteoporosis 320 P Paleolithic 49 Pandavas 96 Panspermia 134 Pari from Pandinadu 342 Paul 106, 144, 161, 162, 166, 184 penicillin 74, 164 permafrost 136, 173 Phanerozoic 1, 2 Phoenix 107, 352 Photosynthesis 14, 74, 75, 76, 134, 169, 289 Phylum 51, 70, 74, 76, 207, 213, 214 Plato 60, 61 Pope Benedict XVI 354 Precambrian 1, 92, 103 Prometheus 59, 156 Protozoans 81, 87, 102 Psalm 55, 160, 161, 162, 256, 351 pseudoextinction 260 Pyramid of Life 66 R Rainfall 35, 36, 180, 215, 223, 295, 294,301 ratites 28 rebound phase 309 Religious Naturalism 241, 244, 249 Reptiles 2, 18, 21, 22, 23, 212, 213, 214, 317 Resurrection 105, 106, 107 Rig Veda 1 RNA 4, 73, 100 Russian steppe 180

372 INDEX

S Sacrifice 304 sacrifice 145, 146 Sahel 295 salamander 282, 283 salmon 94, 304, 315, 338 Sangam Literature 339, 340, 341 savanna 35, 36, 37, 39, 101, 102 savior 153, 154 Sermon on the Mount 53, 351 Sibi Cholan 341 Sickle cell anaemia 320 Silicon Life 126 silvicultural breeding 229 Sociobiology 239, 240 speciation 123, 213, 238, 269, 309, 310, 313, 316 Stanley Miller 6 Stegosaurus 23, 24 Steward 160, 162, 227, 252, 281, 348, 350, 355 Stromatolites 2, 72 Stuart Pimm 267 Subphylum 70 survival phase 309 Sustainable Development 293, 347, 351 Symphony of Species 163, 172 systematics 69, 71, 165 T Tamil 339, 342 tetrapods 14, 284 The Lost World 317 thermophiles 132, 133 Thomas Malthus 122, 336 Transgenics 191 Triassic 17, 18, 264, 265 Trilobites 14, 15 triumphalism 312 Tundra 88, 172, 272 Tyrannosaurus 22, 23, 29

373 Earth - Designed for Biodiversity. Life will find a Way!

U Urodoles 18 V Vascular plants 90, 91, 178, 237 Vellore 97, 207, 294 Vertebrates 2, 17, 90, 92,94, 213, 214, 240, 319, 324 W Warm Pond 127 , 128 Waterworld 131 Western Ghats 165, 301 Wilderness Experience 95, 96, 98 Y Yahweh 58 Z Zen master 105 Zeus 59, 156 Zygomycota 85, 88

374