Did you know that 2010 is the International Year of Biodiversity?Are you concerned about wildlife loss? Species are becoming extinct at a rate of 1000 to 10,000 times the “natural rate”. At the current rate of forest loss in Borneo and Sumatra, orangutans will be extinct in the wild within 10 years. (FOE Report from 3 years ago). A quarter of world mammals and 1/8th of the birds and higher plants are under threat of extinction by 2050.
The term ‘biodiversity’ refers to the variety of genes, species and ecosystems on the planet. Because humans and our crops are taking up so much space, the variety of genes, species and ecosystems is reducing. For the sake of future generations we need to protect some of this variety.
Judith Allison of Christian Ecology Link in Britain reckons it is hard to find other people in churches who strongly care about biodiversity as a Christian responsibility. She is setting up a Biodiversity Action Self Help Group via the internet whereby individuals throughout the world will ‘meet’ once a fortnight by telephone conference and have a googlegroup system of communicating between times. “We may have different key wildlife concerns, but we can support each other in our enthusiasm for getting things done,” she says.
To find out more – and to see Ten Top Tips for Saving Biodiversity in the Next Ten Years – see http://bit.ly/b3JAss.
Biodiversity can be a hard concept to get one’s head around. It is, perhaps, easier to think in terms of ‘Protecting Nature’ or ‘Protecting the Rainforests’. Mike Shanahan of the International Institute of Environment and Development has written an excellent article, explaining biodiversity – see http://www.iied.org/pubs/pdfs/17037IIED.pdf.