Sunday, May 15, 2011

“What Is Biodiversity and Why Is It So Important?” --- Vandana Shiva


Biodiversity is what makes every plant and animal different. It is used to describe all of the organisms in a specific area. In this case the entire world was taken into context. The world’s organisms have recently in the past one hundred years have become more genetically uniform and have caused a diverse amount problems for their local environments. Organisms have become more prone to disease and pests due to their recent domestication and have not been able to build up a resistance to outside forces.  They never had the chance to grow immune to the outside forces because of the farming techniques that are now used such as pesticides and manufactured fertilizers.
                Biodiversity has also become an economic issue for the poor and less fortunate. Resources that were once accessible to them are slowly yet drastically disappearing. It is a mean of livelihood in which the poor no longer have access to any means of production to live off of any more.  
                The amount of nutrients that used to be fixed and recycled are not as great as they used to and now the number one emitted gas is CO2 in which is changing our global climate and become a danger for all living organisms.
                The variety of different species is diminishing according to the reading in 1897 the US Department of Agriculture recorded 275 variety of apples and now there are less than a dozen sold. This is also so with the variety of commercialized agriculturally farmed crops. The crops that are grown are based on the use of the consumers and therefore not a whole variety of different crops are produced.
                Biodiversity is a very important factor to life on Earth because each individual plant and each individual animal produces something that helps another to survive and flourish such as the salmon, bear, and tree food-web example given in the reading. This world is one big food web and when too many links start to go missing disaster and unknown occurrences begin to happen.   

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