I think we sort of react instinctively when we hear that an animal or plant goes on the endangered species list. Even though different species or plant and animal have come and gone over the billions of years of life on earth there is something beautiful and magisterial about the diversity. Somehow we know that it is bad to lose these beings...especially due to our selfish stupidity. Polar Bear? Tiger? Sea Turtle?
For the eco-savvy amongst us monocropping is another dreadful incarnation that thins the diversity of the natural world. We poison the earth so that nothing except crop X will grow in location Y with fertilizer Z. In so doing we weaken soil and the interconnected life that relies upon it.
So this is all bad of course...but reading over the weekend I learned why these could be worse than I had already thought. Join me on the other side, wont you?
Over the weekend I was reading some MM Kamshilov and he had some interesting things to say.
Kamshilov(a Soviet biologist) was interested in how biological communities dealt with toxins introduced into them.
He chose phenolic acid (actually good for you in small doses but was the injectable poison of choice of the Nazis) as the material he introduced into biological communities.
What he found was that the most complex biological assemblages broke down the poison most quickly and most completely.
Clever old MM added phenolic acid to four different enclosed ecosystems
- bacteria.
- bacteria and aquatic plants.
- bacteria, aquatic plants and mollusks.
- bacteria, aquatic plants, mollusks and fish.
So allegedly only the bacteria can officially break down the phenolic acid but the last two communities broke down the poison with the quickness.
MM thought that the waste products from the plants, mollusks and fish fed the bacteria which sped up their work. He also thought that the the other microorganism that come with plants et al also prey on the bacteria which speeds the cycling of mineral elements.
In the end he concluded that "the greater the diversity of species the more vigorous is the destruction of toxic material."
While I am a science buff I dont know where Kamshilov stands in the pantheon of scientists but the implications of this study are pretty huge. Extinctions and monocropping weakens the capacity of ecosystems to process the pollution that is introduced into it.
Isn't this more reason to protect biological diversity in all its forms,politically and otherwise?