Geology Reference
In-Depth Information
Sometimes one experiences the mass extinction in rather peculiar ways. It had
been one of those rare English summer days when the sun is hot and bright and
the air is kept cool by gentle breezes playing amongst the dappled leaves. Out in
the woods the insects were humming. I walked back along the path to Schumacher
College, as I had so many times, often under grey skies and in grey mood. But this
time, in the bright sun, something was different. I caught sight of a blackbird fly-
ing into a tree in one of the gardens, and immediately the sense of the African bush
was there. This was of course a tree in a tame English garden on a rare sunny
day, but it was also, simultaneously, a wild bird-plum tree in the Okavango delta
in Botswana, and the bird that had flown into it was both blackbird and red-billed
hoopoe. And I, who saw the bird that was hoopoe flying into the tree that was
bird-plum also became two-fold: myself in England, and the other out in the deep
wild spaces of the great bush country. My English self knew the brokenness of the
English countryside with its intensive agriculture, its pubs, pylons, roads, housing
estates and traffic noise. The other entered the deep conversation between wild
things that know they are wild and who know the profound earthly meaning that
resides in nature when it is free of the intrusive effects of our culture. This other
self, along with the bird-plum and the hoopoe, knew that everything that happens
in the bush is as right and as beautiful as a freshly painted sand mandala, with its
power, innocence and fragility. As I walked on towards the College in the bright
sun, there was a leopard sleeping in the arms of a young oak tree, and hornbills
played amongst the cherry trees. Then, closer to the old buildings, a whole host
of species, now slowly winking out of existence as their habitats fall to chain-saw
and pollution, revealed themselves: toucans, large beetles from the African rain-
forests, drongos, cassowaries. The gong spoke—time for supper. The spell was
broken, and I was left with a painful question: why must all these beings perish?
Biodiversity and Ecological Stability
Is it conceivable that the huge losses in biodiversity could feed back to influence the hu-
man enterprise in particular localities? To answer this question, we need to explore two
further questions. Do organisms living in a specific place—in one of the biomes repres-
ented by the TV images in the metal globe for example—link up into an ecological 'su-
perorganism', with valuable emergent properties such as climate regulation, better water
retention, nutrient cycling and resistance to diseases; or are they are no more than col-
lections of individually selfish organisms, each out to exploit as many of the available
resources as possible, even to the detriment of the ecological community that enfolds
