THE BALATON BULLETIN Contents

THE BALATON BULLETIN Newsletter of The Balaton Group April 1991 Contents Diversity and Sustainability -- the Next Annual Meeting .............................................1 Species Diversity and its Rate of Loss .......................................................................2 How Much is a Wild Tomato Worth?........................................................................4 Free Trade, Diversity, and Community the Watsonville Case......................................6 Connections Between Biological Diversity and Economic Diversity.............................8 Dumb Things We Could Stop Doing .......................................................................10 Notes on Unsustainable Agriculture in the United States...........................................12 Announcements ......................................................................................................13 News from the Members ........................................................................................13 Stories, Quotes, Jokes............................................................................................18 Diversity and Sustainability -- the Next Annual Meeting The meeting will take place in Csopak on Lake Balaton in Hungary, September 3-8, 1991. We will assemble in Budapest for the bus ride to Csopak after lunch on September 3. We will depart by bus for Budapest after lunch on September 8. The plenary sessions are currently scheduled as follows. All speakers have been invited, but they have not yet been confirmed. September 4 -- The Systems Theory of Diversity 1 Balaton Bulletin #27 Why does nature make so much diversity? What is the value of diversity in ecological systems? What is the latest ecological theory of the relationship between diversity, stability, evolution, and sustainability? How much can diversity be decreased before ecological systems fall apart? Dana Meadows, Dartmouth College Peter Allen, Solvay International Institute, Free University of Belgium Robert Costanza, Center for Environmental and Estuarine Studies, University of Maryland Richard Norgaard, Energy and Resources Group, University of California, Berkeley September 5 -- The Destruction and Restoration of Biodiversity Why is biological diversity disappearing? How fast? Where? What can be done about it? Is it possible to restore biodiversity, once it has been lost? Are there illustrative case studies, good and bad, to teach us about the management of biodiversity? Gerardo Budowski, U.N. University for Peace, San Jose, Costa Rica Lucia Severinghaus, Academica Sinica, Taipei, Taiwan Otto Soemarwoto, Institute of Ecology, Padjadjaran University, Bandung, Indonesia John and Nancy Todd, Ocean Arks International, Woods Hole, Mass. September 6 -- Economic, Cultural, and Technical Diversity To what extent do the system functions of biodiversity in ecosystems also apply to economic, technical, and cultural diversity in human systems? What can we learn from ecosystem management that might be useful in managing social systems? Should we worry about the decreasing cultural and economic diversity in the world? Are there ways to increase social diversity? Aromar Revi, The Action Research Unit, New Delhi, India Calestous Juma, African Centre for Technology Studies, Nairobi, Kenya Michael Thompson, Musgrave Institute, London, England Herman Daly, World Bank September 7 -- Diversity and Sustainability in East and West Europe Is Europe coming together, or is it falling apart, or is it doing one thing in the East and another in the West? Are the trends toward common markets and separate nationalities ominous, or favorable? Where are the dangers and where are the opportunities? Does any of the theory of diversity in ecosystems, economic systems, cultural systems, give us insight as to how to keep working toward sustainability and justice during the rapid changes in Europe (and other places as well)? Niels Meyer, Technical University of Denmark Bert De Vries, RIVM, the Netherlands Joan Davis, EAWAG, Zurich, Switzerland Victor Gelovani, Systems Modeling Group, VNIISI, Moscow Stanislav Shatalin, VNIISI, Moscow Ferenc Rabar, Budapest University of Economics Of course the meeting will offer opportunities for many other activities and discussions than those listed above. We have planned an excursion to the center that is working to restore Lake Balaton. There will 2 April 1991 be numerous afternoon discussion and work groups on topics selected after we assemble at the conference site. Plus there will be suitable commemoration of our tenth anniversary!! Species Diversity and its Rate of Loss (The following is an excerpt from Dana Meadows' textbook-in-preparation. The quotes from Norman Myers are taken from his article, "A Look at the Present Extinction Spasm and What It Means for the Evolution of Species," in R.J. Hoage, Animal Extinctions: What Everyone Should Know, Smithsonian Institution Press, Washington D.C., 1985.) Scientists have described and named about 1.4 million living species. Estimates of the number of species yet to be discovered range from 5 million to more than 30 million. As the evolutionary biologist Edward O. Wilson has written, "we do not know the true number of species on Earth, even to the nearest order of magnitude." By far the greatest number of known kinds of living creatures are invertebrates, especially insects; together, they make up 71 percent of known species. The known plants account for nearly 18 percent. The vertebrates account for just 3 percent of the total, and mammals make up just one-tenth of the vertebrates. In terms of geographic distribution the number of species is highest near the equator and decreases along a gradient toward the poles -- and at any given latitude diversity is highest at low elevations and decreases with altitude. The two most diverse ecosystems on earth are in the warm- temperature, water-rich tropics -- rainforests on land and coral reefs in the oceans. Roughly 500,000 of the known species of plants and animals live in the tropics, but the actual number is certainly much higher. How much higher? Many scientists are confident that rainforests, covering just 6 percent of earth's land surface, contain at least 40 percent of all species; some think the percentage is much higher. The canopy of rainforest trees is proving to be an unexpected "mother lode" of species. To do a thorough study of insects in the tropical forest Smithsonian Institution biologist Terry Erwin sends a canister of insecticide up into the canopy and detonates it by radio command. Dead insects fall onto sheets spread on the ground, where they are collected and classified (birds, reptiles, and mammals are not harmed). In Peru Erwin found 41,000 distinct insect species in the treetops above just one hectare (2.47 acres), many of them previously undescribed. Similar surveys in the forests of Panama led Erwin to estimate that tropical forests worldwide may harbor as many as 30 million insect species alone. No one expects to find new plant or vertebrate species in comparable magnitudes, although new discoveries in those classes of organisms are also likely. Other habitats where the number of species has hardly begun to be explored are the coral reef, the soils of tropical forests and savannas, and the deep seas. New explorations of the sea bottom are turning up an astonishing variety of previously undescribed species, far more than biologists expected. 3 Balaton Bulletin #27 If we don't know within a factor of 10 how many species there are, how can we know how many we are losing? We can't. But how can we get a quantitative-minded policy world to take interest in a problem, if we can't even describe in numbers how bad it is? We have to make the best guess we can. That was the reasoning of biologist Norman Myers in the mid-1970s. The only number he could find to quantify the rate of species extinction was the commonly quoted "one species a year." He knew that number referred only to mammals and birds, and only to species that were actually observed to disappear (if you think about it, you'll realize that the disappearance of a species is not an easy thing to observe!). The real number had to be much higher. Here is Myers' description of how he came up with a number that turned out to fuel a raging debate. "The scientific community believes that at least two-thirds of all existing species live in the tropics. And of those two-thirds, at least one-half live in the tropical moist forests. We can thus reckon that these tropical moist forests contain nearly two million species.... I think it is fair to say that by the end of the century ... somewhere between one-third and one-half of all our remaining tropical moist forests will be so grossly disturbed or depleted as to have lost much of their capacity to support their current huge array of species.... "Now if we assume that between one-third and one-half of those forests are going to be degraded ... , we can estimate that two-thirds to three-quarters of a million species are highly threatened in these tropical moist forests alone. When we include other parts of the world ... and consider how much of these areas we are also likely to lose by the end of the century, it seems reasonable to surmise that by the year 2000 we could lose one million species out of the postulated minimum of five million.... "That averages out to more than one hundred and thirty species a day. But the big waves of extinctions are not expected to occur in the next two or three years but in the late 1990s, as human populations inexorably build up and generate their enormous impact. If we were to assume that the earth is [in the 1970s] losing just one species per day, then it is realistic, I suggest, to suppose that by the end of the 1980s it will be losing one species each hour; and that by the end of the 1990s, it could be losing dozens of plant and animal species with every single hour that goes by." Here is a summary of the assumptions Myers made to come up with his estimate: - There are 5-6 million species in total. - 2/3 of those are in the tropics (3.5 to 4 million). - 1/2 of those are in tropical rainforests (1.75 to 2 million).

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