Theme: “Many Species, One World, One Future.” Thoughts on: Conserving Biodiversity

Biodiversity is the variation of life forms within a given ecosystem, biome, or on the entire Earth. Biodiversity is often used as a measure of the health of biological systems. The biodiversity found on Earth today consists of many millions of distinct biological species. The year 2010 has been declared as the International Year of Biodiversity.
The loss of the earth's biological diversity is widely recognized as a critical environmental problem. We as a species are rapidly altering the world that provides our evolutionary and ecological context. The consequences of these changes are such that they demand our urgent attention. The large-scale problems of unprecedented population growth and inappropriate development are degrading the land, water, and atmosphere, and progressively extinguishing a broad array of the Earth's organisms and the habitats they inhabit. By downplaying these problems or putting them aside in favor of what seem to be more imperative personal, group, or national priorities, we are courting global disaster. By attending to them, we can begin to build a more stable foundation for lasting peace and prosperity.
We live in a world in which far more people are well fed, clothed, and housed than ever before. We also live in a world in which thousands of people, primarily women and young children die each day of starvation; in which human beings consume well over a third of total terrestrial photosynthetic productivity; and in which human activity threatens, over the next few decades, to eliminate a quarter of the world's species-species we may not use directly, but on which our survival depends in many other ways.
So let’s join our hands to Conserve Biodiversity.


Dipak Behera