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So What is it all about, eh? this Planet, Life, Humanity?
Who runs this Planet? The stockmarket? The Media? The politicians and CEOs of large companies?
Nah!
Is it all about Nature? David Attenborough?
Let's face it: Plants and animals are everywhere in our life.
My jacket's filled with down - from birds.
The cord inside the hood is made from cotton and silk: plants and silkworms.
It's nice and warm - insulation is a great idea from animals that live in cold climates:
like the sheep, down there.
My boots are waterproof - so I can walk through shallow rivers. It's an idea invented by ducks,
to keep their feathers dry and their bodies buoyant and warm.
Rivers - they're like the veins of our planet - channelling water in one of the most important
cycles on earth.
You see, good, healthy rivers originate in healthy catchments and where do you think
this stuff comes from?
You really don't need to go into the pipe and find out. All you need to do is look up
at the sky:
Clouds - rain and snow - down streams and rivers - or via ground water - lots of it
is taken up by plants and trees (evapotranspiration back into the clouds) - some is taken for
drinking water - and the rest goes out to sea - evaporation to clouds.
Now, if our water in the soil and in streams and rivers is of bad quality, the stuff that
comes out of the tap will also be bad. If the water is good - then everything downstream
is good as well.
As I said before: good, healthy rivers originate in healthy catchments, and they are full of
invertebrates that are food for small fish; which are food for bigger fish, which are
food for US.
Talking about food: everything is food for something else (have you noticed?)
If I sit here long enough, I'd get bitten by mozzies and sandflies - they want my blood
- it's their food - they need it to lay their eggs in the water.
People often ask me: "Bugman, Why can't we get rid of all those mosquitoes? Life would
be a lot easier!" True. But their larvae clean our water of bacteria and slime; these larvae
are also food for small fishes.
Adult mosquitoes are food for birds, reptiles, bats beetles, mantids and spiders.
Oh - and have a look at all those pretty native wildflowers everywhere. Mosquitoes are also
excellent pollinators of flowers; like most insects they like pollen and nectar.
So: "Why can't we get rid of all those mosquitoes?"
Why would we want to get rid of them?
We'd end up with dirty water, bad drinking water, no fish, hungry birds, geckoes and
bats and far fewer insects and spiders!
And wild flowers? Well, you can forget about them too!
Shows you, eh, everything is connected! We may even be connected to life on galaxies
far, far away - Who Knows?
I suppose we could possibly live with dirty water and hungry birds, geckoes. But, let's
step it up a wee bit and take a look at our honeybees:
They're in big trouble, world-wide. Each year 30 to 40% of them die!
Causes? Some say cellphone towers, pesticides, exotic mites and predators on the bees' bodies,
foreign diseases and bad land use, without flowering plants. We just don't get it, do
we?
Bees pollinate one-third of all our food crops; they even pollinate the clover that provide
nitrogen in the paddock with grasses that feed the beef and sheep that provide us with
meat. Did you get that? Without bees, growing food and farming meat is a heck of a lot harder!!!
Under my feet live millions of tiny critters. Some live in the fallen leaves; others live
in dead branches; others again tunnel though the soil. All they do is recycle, re-use and
they reduce the final amount of rubbish. Heard that before? The three R-s! Reduce, re-use,
recycle!
Mother Nature knows no waste; it has no landfills and no toxic residues.
There's always another organism that uses the waste products from somebody else. Slowly
stuff turns into smaller and smaller fragments, until it becomes food for plants again.
So when we talk about our "throw-away Society", I always ask: "Where's that magical place
we call 'away'?"
What about recycling dung? That’s the hard-core bug work we often don’t even think about
on a daily basis. Yet a great number of invertebrates do exactly that sort of work. Scientists have
calculated that if there were no dung-processing organisms on earth, we’d be covered in 7
feet of poo within a few years.
Just make a cup of tea and think about that for a while, will you. How will you get to
work, to school, to the cinema? And playing a game of rugby would be an even messier affair.
Just think about it: there are creatures that distribute seeds, pollinate flowers, get rid
of rubbish, do our pest control for us, help other creatures in all sorts of ways, act
as a bus-service or even an airline!
We know that every creature is food for a bigger creature, some plants and animals are
providing us with new medicines and technology or even new materials!
So what is it all about then?
You know - it's not just Nature that runs this planet. It's the variety of life and
the interactions or connections between all these millions and millions of species that
makes this place a well-oiled machine.
A living ecosystem.
We've got a word for that:
biodiversity biodiversity
It literally makes the big picture.
It's what it's all about - it's the balance and it provides our well-being.
But are we looking after our biodiversity? Do we really value it? Or have we lost the
operating system of Mother Earth?