For some time and from several ‘microphones’, the biodiversity of our Planet has been declared at risk. And those who talk about it do so mainly by criticising, often instrumentally, man’s actions in agriculture and animal husbandry. Not that ‘sapiens’ are always so capable of honouring what this term evokes, but we must learn to separate the delinquents from those who work hard to nourish the planet with commitment and responsibility.
To speak, for example, of ‘biodiversity at risk’ in relation to poultry farming (More About Chicken’s field of interest) is nonsense. Biodiversity is in fact an aptitude of any ‘natural system’ (i.e. not managed by mankind) that runs on its own, with its own legs, whether we want it to or not.
Flora and fauna left without any human intervention have been spreading and reproducing ‘according to nature’ since the dawn of time anyway. Which means that natural, free interactions are generated regardless of us. And all the unintentional changes and crossbreeding that occur in this free activity produce precisely this biodiversity.
What we humans do instead is to choose which flora and fauna are most congenial to our dietary needs and, once we have identified them and given that there are a few billion of us on this small ‘fluttering’ sphere in the universe, we take care to facilitate their reproduction on a large scale and possibly even facilitate the development of some characteristics rather than others.
Those we choose to reproduce and ‘incentivise’ are those most capable of producing the quantity and quality of nutrients useful for our survival and of doing so in the timeframe most congenial to us. All that we do not manage for our own use (flora or fauna) continues undaunted to produce cross-breeding, mutations… and to generate biodiversity.
Nature’ manages biodiversity on its own and also takes care of eliminating certain sections, or even whole species, when environmental conditions change. This, however, has nothing to do with human urbanisation, which certainly does damage and occupies spaces that used to belong to other species, but something very similar happens or would happen – for example – if a forest were left free to spread out or if an animal without antagonists were to take over others of which it is antagonistic.
We just have to learn to be more balanced, remaining aware that willy-nilly we do not control biodiversity, if anything we can influence it a little. Voluntarily we only do the conscious selection and reproduction of what we think we need to survive. We also make a lot of mistakes. But it only happens by deciding to do something to solve the Planet’s food supply problems.
Basically, it is important to consider that emotions always play tricks on us (especially if our information is superficial) and that if we look at single frames of the nature around us, complaining that we no longer see a type of animal or a particular flora, we must also think that our ‘eyesight’ sees the present for what little we are given. But that before and after what we can see today, there has been and always will be something less or more, different or changed… it is biodiversity beauty!
The Editor
