Chapter 10. Chapter 10: Biodiversity

What can be done to protect biodiversity?

Interactive Study Guide

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Guiding Question 10.5

What can be done to protect biodiversity?

Why You Should Care

By now, you have learned several reasons that biodiversity is important to our lives and the biosphere as a whole, so it may not be surprising to learn that many people are interested in protecting it. There are non-governmental agencies, like the Sierra Club, Nature Conservancy, and World Wildlife Fund, which raise awareness and monetary support to either preserve natural areas or endangered species. Governmental agencies that protest biodiversity include the National Park System and the Environmental Protection Agency. Laws, the most prominent being the Endangered Species Act, function to prevent the actions of other parties to threaten or endanger species. Lastly, there are international agreements like the International Biosphere Preserve program, which is governed by the United Nations.

There are many ways that you yourself can protect biodiversity. Simply living as "green" as possible protects natural resources and decreases the pressure put on natural areas. Supporting smart urban planning is another way to protect biodiversity: Re-developing land that has already been in human use and strategically locating new development both serve to protect natural areas. What other choices that you make could possibly impact biodiversity?

Personal Choices that Help

Question 10.1

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999

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Correct.

Incorrect.

Question 10.2

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999

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Correct.

Incorrect.

Question 10.3

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999

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Correct.

Incorrect.

Question 10.4

Thought Question: Have you ever bought an energy beverage that contained ginseng? Would it surprise you to learn that buying products containing ginseng may contribute to biodiversity loss? Ginseng is only one of several plant species native to the United States that is at risk for overharvesting; just walk down the supplement aisle at your local discount store and you'll find plenty more. Do some web research on ginseng or another North American medicinal herb, and find the answers to the following questions:

Why is this species in demand?
Where is it found?
Is it cultivated or only collected from the wild?
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Your answer will of course vary. Ginseng is thought to provide energy to those who consume it and is highly prized around the world, but especially in some Asian countries, where related species are also found. Ginseng takes a long time (years) to produce marketable roots, so collecting too much of it from any population could severely limit that population's ability to grow back. Furthermore, ginseng is usually only found in well-established forests where there may be other threatened species that will become unintentional victims of the harvest. This story is repeated for many of the most popular herbal additives, like black cohosh and goldenseal.

Question

Short-Answer Questions

In the course of surveying streams that would feed into a hydroelectric dam already in the process of being built, researchers find a small species of minnow that has not previously been described to science. It apparently only lives in a few streams and needs shallow, fast-moving water to survive: When the river backs up, covering the streams after the dam is closed, the minnow would most likely be extirpated and possibly become extinct. According to the United States Endangered Species Act, this minnow should be protected, which would mean stopping construction of the dam that has already cost millions of dollars in taxpayer funds, and that would provide much-needed cheap electricity and flood control to an impoverished area.

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1) The intrinsic value is somewhat easier to infer since we know that all species contribute to the proper functioning of an ecosystem, and it’s unclear what the impact of allowing this minnow to go extinct would be.

Any direct human value of the minnow (instrumental value) is harder to infer. You could hypothesize that the minnow might be important food for sport fish, but that’s really a guess.

2) It’s difficult to decide whether or not a species should be protected from extinction when allowing its extinction would provide many benefits to people. Obviously, many people would have many different stakes in this decision, so you could predict, say, that the politician would support his constituents’ needs, his constituents would probably want the electricity, the scientist would support the minnow’s intrinsic right to exist, etc.