BIODIVER[C]ITY
Some people were sitting together working on their laptops in the cafe when I sat down do start my own work. Shortly after I arrived one stood up and declared they had to leave. They explained they were going to interview someone about urban biodiversity and how we might improve the terrible situation we find ourselves in at present. The interviewer was queried by her friends about what details she was after. She said she wanted to know about the sorts of areas (artificial or natural; little private gardens, big city parks, or massive provincial reserves) were needed to best promote biodiversity and replenish our ruinous and sterile cities. She also wanted to know if hanging baskets or apartment patio planters were of any detectable value, and what was best to plant in them for maximal benefit, as well as how and where we might plant more trees.
I hear this kind of thing all the time. It made me want to interview her. I wanted to ask where she got this vision of the world? Without even thinking about it, or so it seems to me, we know there's more biodiversity here today than at any time in the last 2.5 million years. (For much of which time there was little more than a migrating kilometre-thick sheet of ice surging down from the North across almost all of Canada and deep into the US. So, on this geological timescale, we know there was, ostensibly, an absence of life here.) This timeline, of course, covers all of human history too, which extends only from the present back maybe 250,000 years, if we're being generous. And if we zoom in on just a narrow sliver of this human story, say just the the most recent 5% of what is already a slim timeline, to the period since last major ice sheet melted back and humans arrived in North America, and take a snapshot of life found in any random century, decade, or year therein you're still unquestionably looking at less biodiversity than today. No?
It took plenty of time for the climate to warm and become favourable for life. For the rock below these ice sheets to become fully exposed, and for sufficiently long stretches of time, and then for that barren terrain to become a viable home for anything takes much more time. And it takes longer still for continent-wide swathes of these harsh environments, of mostly bare rock, to become anything like climax habitat. The first pioneer species (mostly lichens) have to arrive and begin breaking down minerals in the rock. And many generations of these tiny rust-like smears of colour have to come and go just to build up miniscule stable volumes of soil in this windy, sun-baked, rain-swept inhospitability. But eventually these pioneers do stabilize the local environment and become abundant enough to provide nutrients, substrate, shade, and protection sufficient for the survival of more sensitive plants like fungi, mosses, and ferns. These sources of food and habitat bring in more insects, birds, and small mammals; all of which eventually produce more organic matter creating a setting suitable for grasses and perennials, ones that enable the arrival of shrubs and trees which, in time, become a draw for more and larger animals. This process of succession, from rock to forest, can take centuries or eons. But not everywhere, of course, is destined to become a maximally vibrant super-habitat teeming with life.
British Columbia, for example, has surely never been more impacted by humans than today, yet only 2% of the landmass is under our modification (urban areas, swathes of suburbia, farms, parks, golf courses, etcetera.) And these places are far from being lifeless – never mind lower in biodiversity than elsewhere. By comparison, not less than twice as much of the province, 4%, is glaciers and nearly devoid of life while as much as 13% is harsh, high altitude alpine rock and tundra – absent any trees and forming a less hospitable habitat than the gravel roof of a Lower Mainland Walmart. No? And, as you are aware, the oldest cities in North America, with their expanses of concrete, brick, and tile, have only been around for a lifetime or maybe two and still host plants in the breaks, margins, medians, and planter boxes found all over the hardscape – as well as being interrupted by the city gardens and public parks we all frequent. And this ignores that plants are able to be grown virtually anywhere imaginable, including indoors and on the vertical walls of a forty-nine storey skyscraper (the surface area of which could easily exceed the building's footprint tenfold.) This is where we're at. And this reality makes these areas far less disruptive than, say, an ice sheet or lava flow. I mean, I recently spent time on Hawai'i where, in an ideal climate – sunny, wet, lush, and on a teeming ocean – there are vast stretches, maybe 200 square kilometres, of cooled lava flows that more closely resemble the surface of the Moon or Mars than downtown Montreal, Montevideo, Madrid, Maputo, or Mumbai. You know this. Everyone knows this. So what was this interviewer on about and what were her colleagues nodding in agreement with?
I'd like to ask who has a snapshot of local biodiversity and when it was taken? And I'd also like to know who's then labelling such an image as ideal, or even “normal” in any sense and, most critically, why? Humans have only now arrived on the scene and just discovered that extinction is even a thing. And, too, we've only started, basically last Thursday, cataloguing life. Even more recent is the vaguely non-arbitrary exploration of life's variety through genetics (which has corrupted previous cataloguing attempts based on mere appearance, forever transforming what we thought we knew about the living world.) So, we're only now starting to learn what's here and what is no longer with us. With that, the Stewardship Centre of BC says our province today is home to 1,258 vertebrates, 4,500 marine invertebrates, over 35,000 insects, 3,190 vascular plants, and tones of microscopic soil invertebrates essential to life (living at densities of maybe two million individuals per square metre.) However, even this is nothing like a complete or even clear picture. Though we may have some data from the 1950s there's little from the 1850s and essentially nothing from the 1750s. So, we only really have this foggy and very recent image – made up of estimates from a time period which we can be certain is no reasonable representative sample of the last million years, hundred thousand years, or even the most recent millennium. (Is there any doubt that this is the time scale we should be using? We're talking about life here, not college basketball rankings or stock prices.) Of course, fossil beds, tree rings, ice cores, rock layers, and sediment and soil stratifications are powerful tools for illuminating the history of life and helping to tell us where we're at today; but all of these have their limitations and come with embedded assumptions and guesses. (And, yes, there are significant Indigenous knowledges relating to local species, their numbers and diversity; but what are the Nuučaan̓uɫ names for any of the thousands of diatom species common and critical to the ecosystem and life generally? And what were local population numbers in the 1670s, or BCE 3244? And how has their morphology, reproduction, and metabolism changed across time, particularly in relation to changes in ocean pH, salinity, temperature, as well as atmospheric CO2? ...You know, the kind of data we might want and need.) Now add to this foggy view the fact that we're continually finding new species, big and small, from large mammals like whales and primates down to infinitesimal viruses (of which there seems to be something like 200,000 floating around in our oceans) – ones that no one has ever seen before nevermind documented, studied, and understood in any real way. And don't think this lack of data is a small problem. It isn't. Especially when talking about a census of biodiversity and its natural perturbations.
My point is that now is not then, things are always in flux, and this vision of humans and the present being some sort of unnatural distortion – and thusly ancient humans and other living creatures, and more broadly the planet and cosmos, as resting in a state of beautiful and harmonious equilibrium – is pure, inexplicable delusion. The history of the Earth is a story of dynamic, dramatic change and very often abrupt ends. And the history of life is the same. Everything that has ever lived has and will go extinct. This is the norm. And virtually none of this erasure is, or will be, due to human activity. But even for those few exceptions, it's not certain that the right thing to do would be to bring them back. Life isn't a digital thing where you can just insert a new column in the spreadsheet of biodiversity and the rest seamlessly, effortlessly slides over while effectively taking up no additional resources. But let's just consider it. What would the impact be if we reanimated and naturalized the giant beaver, Castoroides (the size and weight of the largest NBA players), the wooly ground sloth, Megatherium (bigger than an elephant: four tons and six-metres-tall), the ancient bison, Bison antiquus (7.5 feet tall, 15 feet long, and more than 3,000 pounds), the mammoths, even Mammuthus exilis (that human-sized pygmy mammoth), or Yesterday's camel, Camelops hesternus (ancestor to all modern camels, alpacas, and llamas) – all of whom resided in the Americas for hundreds of thousands or millions of years before being hunted or just pushed to extinction with the arrival of the first humans? Would this result in widespread ecological disruption and threats to and extinction of other flora and fauna? Almost certainly, yes.
Keep in mind that much evidence points to 90% of Australian megafauna, some sixty species of vertebrates, going extinct when humans made that continent home, causing the total reconfigurement of the food chain as they naturally transformed the landscape, out-competed species for resources, and consumed the largest, slowest, and, undoubtedly, tastiest. This pattern has been repeated every place Homo sapiens has settled. The chronology of megafauna mass extinctions correlates perfectly with human movement across the globe. And, of course, this is not even a human issue; instead, the comings and goings, being and cessation, of life's countless forms and the resounding disinterest of “Nature” toward this circumstance – is the default state of things. The only radical break for this convention, this default operating system of life (of ignorance, disinterest, and impotence), has only ever occurred when contemporary humans have taken notice of the situation, cared about the demise of other organisms, and made an effort to respond; as we did with the peregrine falcon, bald eagle, grizzly bear, humpback whale, the southern white rhino, panda, northern brown kiwi, and others.
Suggesting that there was an ideal time, or even better time, than the present is really a pretty wild argument and not even one I can follow. It seems to flow from the idea that humans are vile antagonists to “Nature.” But I don't get that either. You, the rest of our species, and everything you know, is a feature of the world (aka “Nature”). Your hair and skin, blood and spit, microbiome and consciousness are not aberrations. And, only just today, right now, our species has cultivated the tools, resources, and skills (though not yet the will) to make a stand against the overwhelming oblivion into which all life before us has inevitably fallen – and, you might notice, to bring rest of the living world with us, including those organisms now extinct (Variola major, Phrynomedusa fimbriata, Pachycephalosaurus wyomingensis, et al.)
“But you aren't arguing that urban sprawl is good or that we haven't pushed out species, are you?” Well, if you think cities are particularly bad and lacking in biodiversity I'm not sure what you're looking at. If there are fifty species of tree native to BC (having made this place home the last few thousand years before human arrival) then there are ten additional species that have been introduced and naturalized in just the last century – like Sycamore Maple (Acer pseudoplatanus), English Oak (Querus robur) and others. That's more species, more diversity. Now include the hundreds of exotic and hybridized tree species only surviving in people's backyards (those bananas and peaches, hornbeams and ginkos, windmill palms and eucalyptus.) Now add the countless roses, cacti, passion fruit, grape vines, and others spotted on any walk down any street in any city in the province. It's all increasing biodiversity as far as the eye can see. But this view doesn't include the indoor tropicals and desert varieties that can only live in the artificial indoor habitats created and maintained by us. Surely this group doubles or quadruples the list of local resident species. In this view, just looking at plants alone, we've seen nothing short of an explosion of biodiversity. Haven't we? And you're going to report this as a dramatic decline? Okay.
What then of animals? Ten years ago one of the world's leading bee researchers, Mark Winston, explained to me that there were more bees, and a wider variety of them, in the city than in the wilds. At first that seems surprising; yet, when you think about it, it makes good sense. Here there's a more stable and less harsh environment, with greater access to fresh water year-round, a wider variety of flowers to pollinate, and a wider variety and number of protected places to set up home – all making survival much easier. But If you're not convinced by this anecdote and go looking for evidence you might come across research from 2018, published in the Royal Society Journal, in which a team in the UK took dozens of queens and distributed them across London and the South East. After several months they found the numbers of sexual offspring, the size and diversity of food stores, and the ability to avoid invasion by parasites were all enhanced by placement in urban areas when compared to their rural counterparts; demonstrating a clear relationship between urbanization and reproductive success due to increased safety and better nutrition. With that in mind, what was the guinea pig, goldfish, bearded dragon, and emu population of Central BC or Eastern Quebec in the 1340s or 790s? Zero? Right.
So humans and the cities they build are bad and lack biodiversity? I'm not buying it. Humans and the oasis that is the city may be the only reasonable chance to maintain and enhance biodiversity. Certainly this will be the case over the long term. When (not if) another catastrophic ice age, volcanic eruption, or meteorite arrives (which has the habit of erasing 95% of life on Earth every 50 or 100 million years) it will be human efforts that preserve life in the face of Nature's relentless biocidal wrath.
