Speciose Weekly - Inaugural Special Edition
In Brief: It's a New Year! These are the stakes for biodiversity in 2021.
A warm welcome to this special, inaugural edition of Speciose Weekly. It’s a New Year again. Let’s make this a good one.
We have a lot of work do to on our planet, which we share with between 5.3 million and 1 trillion other species.
2020 was the year when human-manufactured materials weighed more than all the living things on earth for the first time. In August, human consumption outstripped what the biosphere can regenerate. 2020 brought record-setting wildfires, which burned across the western United States, in the Amazon and the Pantanal, in Australia, and even in the high-Arctic, transforming carbon in the bodies of living things into lifeless, heat-trapping CO2. Meanwhile, 68 regulations meant to restrain human excess and preserve irreplaceable ecosystems were rolled back in the United States. Water, one of the non-negotiable requirements for all living things, was traded for the first time as a commodity—not a universal need—on Wall Street.
Oh, and how could I forget, a virus, previously native to wildlife in undisturbed habitats, was given the opportunity (by people) to enter the human population. This was the first of many assists we gave the virus: by encroaching into wild habitats, we made it possible for SARS-CoV-2 to enter a human host—and then spread to more than 70 million more, collapsing economies, rupturing existing inequities, and taking almost 2 million human lives in the process.
But take heart, dear reader. The winds of change are blowing.
Many corporations, banks, states, and municipalities are facing the challenge of climate change. Investment in clean energy technology has been increasing globally. And now, solar technologies have become history’s cheapest energy source. In the wake of George Floyd’s cruel death, there has also been widespread recognition that people of color tend to live in areas suffering the worst environmental degradation, the lowest biodiversity, and the most intense climate change impacts.
More and more people are seeing, with clear eyes, that this is not the world we want to live in—and not the world we want to leave our children.
While politicians are as distracted as ever by monied interests, the economy is moving gradually toward lower emissions, and public opinion is moving toward more effective justice for all people. Even in the realm of politics, this past week, the one U.S. political party with a chance at taking action on the climate and biodiversity crises secured control of the executive and legislative branches—a milestone for subverting the status quo.
Still, there’s one element of the conversation that’s missing: we humans are here with other species, too. It’s not just us. These other species’ activities and interdependencies make our planet stable, prosperous, and healthy to live on. As much as I love hearing E. O. Wilson or David Attenborough wax poetic about the charms of biodiversity, biodiversity is really more like infrastructure. And right now, our infrastructure is crumbling.
Think of this infrastructure like ecologists do: in terms of ecosystem functions. These can include pulling CO2 out of the atmosphere through photosynthesis, something all plants do to grow their bodies. Other species contribute functions like storing nutrients in the soil, regulating temperature around a more tolerable average, retaining water in an ecosystem and in the atmosphere, preventing organisms from overexploiting resources, containing disease, pollinating certain plants, dispersing their seeds, and establishing safeguards against disturbances in the future. All extremely important work.
When we think of these functions as stemming from “nature”, they seem abstract. But these functions are much more concrete—and actionable—when we get to know who’s doing them: individual living beings, each making their living, each representing millions of beautiful, exquisitely adapted, one-of-a-kind species. (In an upcoming post on the Speciose Blog, we’ll dig specifically into how species keep their ecosystems functioning—and how evolution can keep these species in balance in a changing world.)
The world’s well-functioning ecosystems are ancient, each of its species having evolved intricately to participate in specific ways. We have little idea how much damage natural infrastructure can sustain before, to use another analogy, the pipe bursts and floods the house. We don’t even know what a flooded house would look like—we just know our food security, water, and climate would be in jeopardy.
And that’s the problem. Ecological breakdown is arguably as catastrophic as climate change, but it is still hardly mentioned in public discourse. The biodiversity crisis remains far off, abstract, unhitched from the practical demands of day-to-day life.
That’s where this newsletter—and the Speciose blog—come in. It’s time for nature to go mainstream. The focus of this newsletter is to lift up biodiversity—the community of other species around us—and clearly demonstrate its relevance to our world. Biodiversity matters to the economy. It matters for our policy making. It even matters for our finances, our psychology, and our education. If only we knew the species around us a little better, surely we’d want to be better citizens of this speciose world.
This is a crucial decade for action on the climate crisis, with repercussions that will ring for millennia. The same is true for biodiversity loss, ecological breakdown, the extinction crisis—whatever you call it, the degradation of earth’s biological infrastructure must be controlled in the coming decade.
So, let’s start the conversation.
The first regular edition of Speciose Weekly will be published this coming Friday. It’s been a big week, and there’s plenty to talk about. There’s also more in store here and on the Speciose Medium publication, so stay tuned.
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With gratitude,
—Nick