Biodiversity

Here are some facts about biodiversity that might startle you:
Total number native woody plant species in the UK - 30
Number of woody plant species in a 52 hectare sample plot in the Rainforest in Borneo - 1175

Number of species in the world - we don't know somewhere between 5 and 100million. 30 million is often cited.
Number of species we have identified and described - 1.8million.
Number of species of Vertebrates - 50 000.

Therefore, most of life is small, is in the Tropics, and has never been identified by humans.

The trajedy of this is that the reason it is cheaper to produce food outside of the UK is mainly because it is cheaper to employ people elsewhere. Frustratingly many of these people live in countries that also happen to contain enormous boiological diversity, and employing them to create food for an export market (oil palm etc) is driving the great loss of biodiversisty that we are living through.
Our demand for food (and biofuels) is creating the market forces that directly lead to the destruction of the rainforests.
If we value biodiversity then we must ensure that countries with vast biological wealth but ecomnomic poverty can generate some economic value through maintaining biodiversity, or at least generate none through detroying it. The promise of future drugs derived from undescribed plants is not enough for this, nor are aesthetic or moral imperatives to act as Stewards, though of course these are important.

One option that arises from my very limited knowledge of economics seems to be a much more global labour market, so that we can make the food we need in the areas that can produce maximum food with minimum environmental damage (the UK, for example), and not where it is cheapest to employ people.
The other more readily available option that i know of is sustainable forestry certified by the Forestry Stewardship Council (http://www.fsc.org/en/) . They have stringent guidelines for sustainable forest management, and track the wood through the supply chain so that the consumer can "vote with their wallet" to maintain biodiverisity.

These ideas about biodiversity also affect how we should view local food - promoting local food in the UK means that we are encouraging the production of food on land whose value to biodiversity is relatively small, and thereby slightly decreasing the economic incentive for producing food on land whose value to biodiversity is greater. This is all very indirect, but it seems that allowing Britain to be fallow because British labour is too expensive, in times when land shortages are leading to enormous loss of habitat and biodiversity in other countries would be foolish.


If we put a value on biodiversity then we need to see that it's current destruction - the Sixth Great Extinction - is a truly global problem, and act accordingly.
The complexity of the modern world means that every 'solution' will cause more problems, but the global inbalance in biological resources means that our environmental concerns must not only consider, but focus on the damage we are causing far away by global market forces.