This Saturday is International Day for Biological Diversity. If you’ve been following this celebration from its beginnings in 1993 (as I have not), you might recall that we (not me) used to celebrate it on December 29. But, what with so many countries having holidays around the end of December, they decided to move it in 2000 to May 22, where it has been ever since. The theme this year is Bioversity, Development, and Poverty Alleviation.
As with most UN-sponsored events, the theme is deadly boring, full of moral overtones, and yet critically important. Probably the greatest threat to the future of our planet is human poverty, because human misery provokes attempts to alleviate it. As it should. We must help relieve the suffering of our fellows; it’s inhuman, and inhumane, not to do so. The problem arises when our urgent desire to help motivates us to take shortcuts in doing so.
Think about Haiti, for example, which shares the island of Hispaniola with the Dominican Republic. The Haitian side of the island is completely deforested because the people need the wood from the trees to make charcoal to stay alive. Satellite images show the stark divide between the Haitian side of the border and the Dominican side; they also show the increased amount of illicit tree-cutting in the DR, motivated by survival necessity.
A better response would be to provide development opportunities that bring economic relief to the people, so they can buy food and fuel for themselves, and leave the forests alone. (Of course, it’s too late for Haiti’s forests now.) But when we rush in to develop a place, all full of high-minded idealism, we can set off a whole series of unintended consequences: wholesale clearing of land that might be the last refuge of endangered plant and wildlife species; conversion of natural soil-retaining mechanisms like grasses, forbs, shrubs, and trees into hardtop, which increases runoff and surface erosion; increased consumption of fuel and energy in inefficient, polluting mechanisms.
I don’t have an answer to any of these problems, but if more people at least acknowledged their existence, the people with the training to find answers to them might be motivated to do so.