http://www.cnn.com/2002/TECH/science/08/23/green.century.mass.extinction/index.html
Scientists
agree world faces mass extinction
August 23, 2002 Posted: 11:43 AM EDT (1543 GMT)
By Gary Strieker
CNN
(CNN) -- The complex
web of life on Earth, what scientists call
"biodiversity," is in serious trouble.
"Biodiversity
includes all living things that we depend on
for our economies and our lives," explained Brooks Yeager,
vice president of global programs at the World Wildlife Fund
in Washington, D.C.
"It's the forests,
the oceans, the coral reefs, the marine fish,
the algae, the insects that make up the living world around us
and which we couldn't do without," he said.
Nearly 2 million species
of plants and animals are known to science
and experts say 50 times as many may not yet be discovered.
Yet most scientists
agree that human activity is causing rapid
deterioration in biodiversity. Expanding human settlements,
logging, mining, agriculture and pollution are destroying
ecosystems, upsetting nature's balance and driving many species
to extinction.
There is virtual unanimity
among scientists that we have entered
a period of mass extinction not seen since the age of the dinosaurs,
an emerging global crisis that could have disastrous effects on
our future food supplies, our search for new medicines, and on
the water we drink and the air we breathe. Estimates vary,
but extinction is figured by experts to be taking place between
100 to 1,000 times higher than natural "background"
extinction.
At the first Earth
Summit in Rio de Janeiro 10 years ago,
world leaders signed a treaty to confront this crisis.
But its results have been disappointing. According to
Yeager, "It hasn't been a direct kind of impact that
some of us had hoped for."
One hundred eighty-two
nations are now parties to the
Convention on Biological Diversity. The United States
is the only industrial country that has failed to ratify it.
But there is wide agreement that the treaty has had virtually
no impact on continuing mass extinction.
The treaty is more
like a political statement than a plan of
action, setting very broad goals instead of real targets,
and leaving it to national governments to decide how to reach
them.
Many developing countries
in tropical areas, where the most
species of plant and animal can be found, wanted nothing in
the treaty that could limit their freedom to exploit natural
resources.
So the treaty was framed
as a political compromise to balance
three principles: conservation, sustainable development and
fair sharing of the benefits of biodiversity.
In the process, critics
say, the operation of the treaty
has lost its focus. It's been distracted from science and
conservation by other issues, such as "biopiracy"
- determining who profits from genetic resources
-- and "biosafety" -- controlling trade in genetically
modified organisms, such as seeds, with built-in pesticides.
Many pressure groups have forced governments to address
the issues of "biopiracy" and "biosafety."
Debbie Barker, co-director
of the California-based
International Forum on Globalization, says, "You cannot
really separate preservation and sustainability and
conservation and biodiversity without addressing,
for example, important new technologies like genetic
engineering or genetic modification."
That may be true, but
many scientists and conservationists
say almost all the work at the treaty's conferences has
been focused on these hot-button issues, including "biopiracy"
and "biosafety", during the past decade. The result,
they say,
has been a lost opportunity to address the real crisis.
The member nations
still stand by the treaty, but at a
conference earlier this year at The Hague they issued
a statement admitting humans are still destroying biodiversity
at an unprecedented rate.
