This week we’ve been hearing about biodiversity — the idea that the great variety of species that inhabit our planet is crucial to its health and to ours. But biodiversity is not only a product of the plants and animals which make up an ecosystem. A biodiverse system also includes a diversity of people, cultures and traditions. I’m Jim Metzner, and this is the Pulse of the Planet, presented by the American Museum of Natural History.
Maurice Iwu is the Executive Director of the Bioresources Development and Conservation Program.
“You keep hearing that if we save the rainforests we’ll be able to save the supply of raw materials, we’ll be able to save the source of new drugs but you forget that we are talking about a whole ecosystem. People live there. That is the world as they know it. And we should be able to preserve that– not just for its material content but for its spiritual value, for its intrinsic value, for its diversity. So that if somebody comes from Mars, in the year 2020, he should be able to know that the human race has these various forms. But if you convert us all to dress and eat and talk like you do here, it means that you’ve totally done a major destruction to the human race.”
And if we consider the world in terms of the variety of cultures which inhabit it, we come closer to understanding the ties that bind one culture to another.
“How many Americans know that by giving money for conservation in Costa Rica, that you are doing yourself a favor. That by supporting the malaria research at Walter Reade, they are doing the Americans a favor because you are making the quality of life in the Congo basin to be so good that people can become our gatekeepers to a world that we are rapidly destroying.”
Additional funding for this series has been provided by the National Science Foundation. I’m Jim Metzner.