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Biodiversity: The Other Side of Multicultural
Written by David Graves, SSF Steering Commitee Member
I have an ecologist acquaintance who boldly displays on his
desk the motto “Think Like a Species”. I often comment to myself “What a great idea for a bumper sticker!” The message being that we humans are not the center of the universe. That there’s a whole lot of other distinctive life forms (that’s where biodiversity comes in) out there on earth who require their own living space for survival.
Call it anthropocentrism, call it humanism. It’s all the
same. For the last five thousand years or so of recorded history, beginning with an ancient Near Eastern tyrant called Gilgamesh who clear-cut the cedars of Lebanon to make a fortress of his city, we humans (once of the earth, as in humus) have pretty much exploited whatever we wanted from the earth without reciprocating. And that’s where biodiversity suffers.
Before this guy Gilgamesh came along, you see, nature
pretty well took care of itself, spreading out its various, diverse life forms wherever a particular earthly niche---sea, air, desert, woodlands, and so on---presented itself. Evolution unfolded in this manner through billions of years, sometimes peacefully, as when sea-borne green algae gently washed ashore to first take root as land plant, sometimes violently, as when, according to one theory, dinosaurs starved to death when plant life died off for lack of sunlight due to the impact of a meteor.
But then biodiversity kicked in again when a distant relative
of ours, a primate called a lemur, took advantage of the dinosaur’s absence and split off (leaving lemurs still) into monkeys, apes, and finally humans, which is where homo sapiens finds itself today as one of the latest examples of biodiversity. Except for one thing: other diverse life forms are experiencing increasing difficulty competing with the insatiable hunger of humans to expand their ever-growing living space.
Let’s look at a recent San Francisco Chronicle news
feature, for example, to bring the lesson a bit closer to home. It’s Wednesday, which means, of course, there’s the ever popular weekly Chronicle section called Home: all about how we humans can spruce up our living space, this time by cultivating our own “exotic garden,” as if San Franciscans lived in a tropical rain forest. How wonderful! Why not bring an attractive plant species of planetary biodiversity into our own backyards (it’s like eco-tourism, but not having to go anywhere)? The trouble is that San Francisco isn’t part of a humid, moist tropical rainforest ecosystem. But not to worry! A simple twist of the wrist and water faucets provide life-giving moisture. But not, again, without biodiversity suffering somewhere else, whether it be California Central Valley agricultural crops wilting from water diversion or coho salmon unable to reach spawning grounds because of too shallow creeks.
And finally, there’s the small matter of seeds, nature’s
way of perpetuating itself, wherever it takes root, in someone’s backyard garden or a Brazilian rainforest. Out where I live in the San Francisco Excelsior District, fierce, fog laden winds from the ocean commonly rake the landscape, carrying bits and pieces of whatever (including backyard garden seeds) to deposit finally atop McLaren Park, where a frail, struggling native plant community lives. The moisture contained in fog-laden wind aids the cause of newly introduced “exotic” rainforest plants, because San Francisco happens to have a climate---but not the same ecosystem---found in other parts of the world. Consequently, without companion animals brought along to inhibit growth, so-called “introduced” or “alien” seeds get a huge jump start, their seedlings often eventually crowding out native plants.
By now, dear reader, you might be tiring a bit of this romp
through the complexities of biodiversity and saying to yourself: “So what does all this have to do with multicultural, as your title suggests?” Simply this: as much as we San Franciscans pride ourselves in supporting our city’s multiculturalism, with all its vibrant and diverse lifestyles, we fall seriously short in supporting equally the biodiversity of our San Francisco natural heritage, including plants and animals, with all its own vibrant and diverse lifestyles. And the kicker is: We can’t expect to survive very long as a species without a flourishing biodiversity, without, for example, a wide range of agricultural crops to adorn our dinner tables, the native plants adapted to the Franciscan peninsula for thousands of years, and the myriad of dependent animals feeding from and pollinating these plants.
Therefore, you see, it’s all connected, this thing we call
life. Without biodiversity, there would be no human, multicultural values to celebrate. Like a web, biodiversity provides the essential structure and support for life to continue as we know it here on earth. Tear a few strands from its complex, intricate design and the entire system falters and possibly could collapse. Think about it for awhile. As a species, that is.
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When not taking school children and their teachers into McLaren Park to study nature, David Graves, a Sustainable San Francisco steering committee member, struggles with restoration issues like removing from the park “exotic” sweet fennel (foeniculum vulgare), a host plant for the remarkably beautiful---and successfully adaptive---“native” anise swallowtail butterfly. 15 July 1998.
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