“When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the Universe.” (Muir, 1911)
According to the Oxford dictionary, biodiversity is defined as “the variety of plant and animal life in the world or in a particular habitat, a high level of which is usually considered to be important and desirable.” (Oxford Dictionaries, 2015)
Due to the ignorance of mankind, and our yearning for progress and development, the environment, and its many inhabitants all of the world, have been gravely affected. In some cases, so much so, that for certain species, it ended in extinction. A well known example of this would be the Dodo bird.
This flightless bird was native to the island of Mauritius, first sighted there in the 15th century. However, they became excessively hunted by man, once discovered, and preyed by the animals brought onto the island by humans. This ultimately resulted in a drastic decrease in the numbers of dodo birds, which eventually led to their
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In other words, we have discovered the importance of biodiversity.
There are many examples of its importance, from all areas of the environment, and all levels of the food chain. Discussed in the following, the above statement from John Muir will be clarified using examples of different ecosystems, and how they are all interconnected.
From Large to Small
In his TEDTalk presentation, George Monbiot spoke of the term “re-wilding”, which he firstly defined as “the mass restoration of ecosystems”. An overwhelmingly fascinating example he gave of this was the reintroduction of wolves into the Yellowstone National Park, in North America. Monbiot described the result of their reintroduction as a “trophic cascade”, which he explains as “an ecological process which starts at the top of the food chain, and tumbles all the way down to the