Life in the balance: our failure to recognize our connection with the global ecosystem lies behind the biodiversity crisis facing our planet today

The task is enormous. It will cost billions of dollars and will have to involve the direct participation not only of politicians and scientists but also of businesspeople, economists, demographers, lawyers, sociologists, and anthropologists--all with their particular expertise on the relation of humans to the physical, living environment.

We have arrived at the present state--worrisome as it is--simply by doing what we do best: using our brains, our culture, to wrest a living from the natural world. Yet we know we are eating ourselves out of house and home. We know we are fouling our nests in the bargain. We must remember that we got into this predicament honestly, by devising bigger and better mousetraps--contrivances to make a living. The biggest one so far, the one that utterly changed our position in the natural world, was the invention of agriculture--an experiment that, if it has perhaps succeeded too well, has nonetheless given us all the finer things of human experience.

And so, I think, if we have arrived at this exalted, troubled state through our own cleverness, surely we are smart enough to call a halt, to say "enough," to stabilize, to strike a balance.

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Tree of Life

How can we comprehend the vast sweep of living diversity--the 10 million, not to mention the millions that have evolved and become extinct over the 3.5-billion-year history of life? It helps to think of organisms in five basic groups--the kingdoms Monera, Protista, Fungi, Plantae, and Animalia. The list can also be divided into two groups. Monera (or bacteria), which lack district nuclei and the internal organelles present in all other organisms, constitute the prokaryotes. All other organisms are know as eukaryotes; their main component, DNA, is housed in a discrete nucleus and their cells contain certain structures--mitochondria and chloroplasts, for example--that supply energy to build the cell and maintain its functions.

Of the eukaryotes, plants, fungi, and animals appear to be evolutionary coherent groups; that is, the species within them share common features and seem to have descended from a single, common ancestor. But microbiologists are only now unraveling the evolutionary relationships of single-celled eukaryotes--the protists. These include amoebas, algae, and a host of far less familiar organisms. Some of them may be more closely related to multicellular plants, fungi, and animals than they are to one another.

Microbes

Earth still belongs to bacteria, despite the ubiquity and far more obvious presence of us eukaryotes. Nine major groups (phyla) of bacteria are still very much with us. Some, such as the blue-green algae, are photsynthesizer. Others, such as spirochetes, work alongside protists (such as zoomastiginans) in the hindguts of termites, breaking down cellulose. Other spirochetes are not nearly as friendly to out interests, causing syphilis, Lyme disease, and other unpleasant human afflictions.

The two most primitive of the living groups of bacteria constitute of Archaebacteria. One type, the methanogens, are poisoned on contact with oxygen (the earliest atmosphere of Earth was virtually oxygen-free), as befits holdovers of the most primitive life-forms. The other type is capable of living in the most extreme environment--highly concentrated brine pools (death to other organisms) and hot springs.