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Tomorrow's Biodiversity 

Vandana Shiva Thames & Hudson 2000

PREFACE

I was trained as a physicist and had imagined my life would be passed in the company of elementary particles. Instead, I have spent the last twenty-five years with forest species and crop varieties and with the farmers who have conserved the amazing diversity of plants and animals. In the past two decades I have been trying to understand why so many of our fellow creatures are being pushed to extinction, why more and more people are permanently hungry in spite of technologies that are supposed to increase food production, why farmers are being dispossessed and pushed into debt by economic models that are supposed to improve their incomes and create prosperity. Philosophically my training as a quantum physicist has been helpful in trying to address some of these complex issues. While the classical physics of Descartes and Newton presented the world as atomized, isolated, immutable entities, quantum theory reframed the world as constantly changing and inseparable systems in dynamic interaction, with indeterminate potentials rather than with unchanging properties with fixed outcomes. It is these qualities of inseparability and indeterminacy that guide my approach to natural systems and the human impact on the environment. I have looked at biodiversity in the inter-relationship between species, and between genetic structures and their context. Through the lens of biodiversity, the world looks different and demands a change in the dominant concepts of technology and trade. Such a shift is necessary for sustainability. I would, in fact, say that biodiversity is the indicator of sustainability - the more we can conserve it, the more sustainable our actions are - the more we destroy it, the more non-sustainably we are living.

What is the future of biodiversity? Uncertainty is another legacy of quantum theory. The future of biodiversity is as uncertain as the future of the human species and the future of society. There are many initiatives and processes underway for the conservation of biodiversity, from local actions to global treaties (such as the Convention on Biological Diversity signed at Rio at the Earth Summit in 1992). On the other hand, the destruction of biodiversity is simultaneously expanding and accelerating. The worldwide spread of industrial agriculture through the forces of globalization, including the trade liberalization rules of the World Trade Organization are leading to a rapid erosion of diversity. In 1992, the conservation of biodiversity was the dominant trend. By 1995, with the elevation of the trade rules of WTO above environmental treaties and national laws, the destruction of diversity had started to appear inevitable. In 1999, that inevitability was challenged with the protests at Seattle. Alternatives became possible to imagine globally, not just locally - alternatives that paid attention to the needs of people and our non-human kin, and were not preoccupied with trade and profits. But there is no certainty about which trend will shape our future and the future of biodiversity. Will greed win or will compassion survive? Only the future can tell. 

INTRODUCTION

What is Biodiversity and Why is it Important?

Biodiversity means the diversity of life - the rich diversity of life forms on our beautiful planet. Biodiversity is the very fabric of life - it provides the conditions for life's emergence and maintenance, and the many different ways in which that life is expressed. Biological diversity and cultural diversity are intimately related and interdependent. Biodiversity is in fact the embodiment of centuries of cultural evolution, because humans have co-evolved with other species in the diverse ecosystems of the world. Biodiversity in its turn has shaped the world's diverse cultures. The erosion of biodiversity and the erosion of cultural diversity are related. Both have been threatened by the globalization of an industrial culture based on reductionist knowledge, mechanistic technologies and the commodification of resources.

Throughout the twentieth century it was considered that substitutes could be found for resources supplied by biodiversity: renewable sources of energy - wood and animal energy - could be replaced by fossil fuel; manure for growing food could be replaced by the products of fertilizer factories; and medicines could be made from synthetic molecules. But fossil fuels have given us climate change; agrichemicals have threatened species, undermined soil fertility and human health; and synthetic drugs have had fatal side effects.

People everywhere are looking for alternatives that will conserve our fellow beings and produce sustainable solutions for human health and nutrition. Biodiversity and cultural diversity hold the key to these sustainable alternatives. Around the world organic agriculture is again in favour and on the increase, and alternative medicine, inspired by Chinese, Indian and other indigenous knowledge systems is gaining popularity even in the West.

However, while the movement for the rejuvenation of bio-cultural diversity is growing, new threats are emerging. Economic globalization is rapidly expanding biological and social monocultures, pushing out the diversity that remains. New technologies, such as genetic engineering, are creating new risks of biopollution while increasing chemical pollution.

The destruction of biodiversity translates into the destruction of the diversity of the livelihoods of the large majority of Third World people who make their living as farmers, fishermen, craftspeople and healers. The diversity of life forms is also fast becoming the 'green oil' or raw material for the next industrial revolution based on the emerging biotechnologies. Industry is reorganizing itself as the 'life sciences' industry, changing property laws, environmental laws and trade policies to create markets for genetically engineered products and to establish monopolies in the vital sectors of food and medicine.

Different approaches to scientific knowledge raise fundamentally different problems and give fundamentally different answers to basic questions about the nature of biological organisms, their functions and values, their economic utility, and the impact of genetically engineered organisms on people's health and the environment. Reductionist biology is in conflict with relational biology. The reductionist approach is characterized by the assumption that organisms are mechanical constructs made of genes, their functions are determined by genes and life forms are 'gene machines' that can be redesigned to perform new functions. It provides the basis of genetic engineering and the patenting of life. If organisms are merely bundles of DNA, shuffling DNA around is like moving bricks around in house construction, or moving machine parts in automobiles.

The Erosion of Biodiversity

At the Earth Summit at Rio de Janeiro in 1992, the Convention on Biological Diversity was drawn up. It provides a comprehensive definition of the term biological diversity, which it defines under Article a as: 'The variability among living organisms from all sources including inter alia, terrestrial, marine and other aquatic ecosystems and the ecological complexes of which they are a part; this includes diversity within species, between species and ecosystems. Estimates of the number of species in existence vary from 3.6 million to 100 million, of which, to date, scientists have described an estimated 1.7 million. According to present counts, bacteria have 3,058 recognized species; vascular plants have 260,000; fungi have 70,000; viruses have 500,000; vertebrates have 45,000; and insects have 950,000.

All life forms have an intrinsic worth and a right to evolve freely on their own terms. Humankind is one among millions of other species. It does not have a right to push other species to extinction, or to manipulate them for greed, profit and power without concern for their well-being. Compassion for all living things has been the basis of most ancient faiths in the world, and is the basis of contemporary movements for animal welfare, for wilderness protection and for the conservation of biodiversity. Native Americans refer to other species as brothers and sisters. In India we think in terms of the Earth Family.

For agribusiness, the biotechnology industry and the technicians who serve them, however, other species have value only as sources of raw material and profit, and can be manipulated and engineered regardless of their welfare. For instance, cows are just udders for the maximization of milk production using recombinant bovine growth hormones (rBGH). Sheep are `mammalian bioreactors' for the production of pharmaceuticals in their mammary glands. Microbes and plants are sources of genes and provide substances which can be extracted, recombined with other organisms, patented, and bought and sold in global markets.

The ethical conflict between the intrinsic worth and the commercial value of all life forms has become a major issue in negotiations at the World Trade Organization (WTO), in the commercialization of genetic engineering of plants and animals, and in the patents taken out around the world on plants, animals and microorganisms. In Seattle where the WTO met for trade talks in 1999, in Washington at the World Bank meeting in April 2000, in Davos at the World Economic Forum, and in Millau at José Bové's trial for attacking McDonald's in July 2000, thousands of people took part in protests to call attention to the rights and the inherent value of other species.

Seeing other life forms as biological and genetic raw material is fraught with ecological risks. The smallest microbe plays a critical role in maintaining the ecological processes that create the conditions of life for all species, including, of course, our own. Our ignorance of the ecological functions of diverse forms of life is no excuse for us to push species to extinction, or to manipulate them without concern for the ecological impact. Species now become extinct at the rate of 27,000 per year -1,ooo times the natural rate and human greed and desire for profit are the primary cause of most of these extinctions.

Biodiversity, from genes to species to ecosystems, works in harmony and in concert to create and maintain life. This is at the heart both of ancient wisdom and of new holistic theories, such as James Lovelock's `Gaia' theory, which is, in summary, that the earth is a living system, self-regulating and self organizing. Just as our bodies maintain their temperature, the earth's equilibrium is maintained through ecological processes in which biodiversity plays a central role.

Biodiversity is assessed at three fundamental levels of biological organization: genetic, species and ecosystem diversity.

Genetic diversity is the variation at the genetic level, i.e. in the components of nucleic acids which constitute the genetic code. Genes are considered the blueprints of life. While gene theory is elegant for understanding replication and inheritance, it is totally inadequate when extended to a theory of life. Only one per cent of all the genetic material of higher organisms is known to relate to the form and function of the organism. We are still ignorant about the role of the remaining 99 per cent, but, in our usual human arrogance, instead of referring to our 99 per cent ignorance, we refer to the 99 per cent `junk' DNA. In any case, the complex functions and traits of biological systems cannot be reduced to the genetic level. As the eminent molecular biologist, Professor Richard Strohman of Berkeley, has stated:

Neither genes nor environments `cause' complex traits. If a word is needed there, then `cell' will name the cause. It is the cell, and the body of cells as a whole, that selects from the dynamical interactions inherent in its physical and chemical pathways, and responds formatively and adaptively to the external environment. We have mistakenly replaced the concept and reality of the cell as a dynamical center of integrative activity with the concept of gene causality.

(Interview in Wild Duck Review, Summer 1999

Reducing biodiversity to the genetic level is therefore ecologically and scientifically misguided. The value and functions of living organisms are important at higher levels of organization.

Species diversity is the species richness of an ecosystem - the word species literally means outward or visible form. All cultures have ways of organizing life forms along lines of difference. The ecological significance of species can vary tremendously. A tree of the tropical rainforest can support more than a hundred species of insects, whereas a European alpine plant may have no other species wholly dependent on it.

Ecosystems are ecologically and biologically organized systems consisting of diverse flora and fauna. Since an ecosystem is an ecological unit by definition, a simple arithmetical count of variation is not enough to assess biodiversity. Ecological interactions between diverse species become the key measure for ecosystem diversity. Tropical rainforests are the richest terrestrial ecosystems. They cover 7 per cent of the world's surface area, and may well contain 70 per cent of all species (Groombridge, ed., Global Biodiversity, 1992). Oceans occupy two-thirds of the Earth's surface, and, although they are as rich as forest ecosystems, they have been viewed as 'a vast desert, desperately short of nutrients and with living things spread most thinly through them' (Colinvaux, Why Big Fierce Animals are Rare, 1980).

For the first 2 billion years of the 3.5 billion years or more that life has existed, bacteria and other microorganisms were the only living things on earth. As the famous geneticist David Suzuki says in From Naked Ape to Super Species (1999), 'We owe practically all life to bacteria.' Microorganisms create the planet's living environment which supports life. According to James Lovelock, photosynthetic cyanobacteria were instrumental in producing oxygen, without which human life would not be possible. Microorganisms continue to play a critical role in maintaining biogeochemical cycles. The recycling of water, oxygen, methane, carbon dioxide, nitrogen, sulphur and carbon is made possible by diverse species working incessantly to maintain the ecological processes that support life. Forty per cent of the carbon fixed by photosynthesis is carried out by algae and cyanobacteria in the seas and oceans. Fungi that decay wood release about 85 billion tonnes of carbon as CO2 into the atmosphere each year. Each year, bacteria fix zoo million tonnes of nitrogen, release 210 million tonnes of nitrogen by denutrification and release 75 million tonnes of ammonia (Groombridge (ed.), Global Biodiversity, 1992). The work of microorganisms reduces industrial activity to insignificance.

The greatest biomass in soil, on the basis of current evidence, is that of the microorganisms, above all the fungi. Soil microorganisms maintain soil structure, contribute to the biodegradation of dead plants and animals, and fix nitrogen, and so are the key to soil fertility. Their destruction by chemicals threatens our survival and our food security. When scientists in Denmark scooped up a cubic metre (35 cubic feet) of earth from a beech forest and took it into their laboratory, they found 50,000 small earthworms, 50,000 insects and mites, and 12 million roundworms. A gram of the same soil revealed 30,000 protozoa, 50,000 algae, 400,000 fungi and billions of individual bacteria Of 4,000 unknown species.

Bacteria, fungi and protozoa in the guts of animals perform crucial functions in digestion, without which the so-called higher animals could not exist. Microorganisms are also powerful factors in disease and death.

In the oceans, which are so central to the maintenance of Gaia's life, up to 80 per cent of the biomass and productivity in open waters is contributed by ultra planktonic algae (Anderson, 'The Diversity of Eukaryotic Algae', in Global Biodiversity, 1992).

Human beings are dearly highly ignorant of other members of the Earth Family and, at least in the Western worldview, have thought of themselves as sitting on top of a biodiversity pyramid or tree rather than forming a part of a complex web of life. Even the most popular conservation programmes have focused on the species closest to human beings, the large mammals: 'Project Tiger' and 'Project Elephant' have been the dominant models for biodiversity conservation. Microbes have had no conservation movements or campaigns for 'microbe rights' for their protection. Nor has it been recognized that in the final analysis microbes are more powerful than 'Man'.

The lesson from biodiversity is co-operation, not competition. It is that the big depends on the small, and cannot survive by exterminating the small.

Since ecological stability or instability is linked to species interactions, it is the relational approach to biodiversity that is important, not the arithmetical approach. For the same reason, conserving biodiversity cannot be achieved by putting it in a museum or a zoo. Biodiversity in balance creates the conditions of life, and species in conflict and out of balance become life-threatening.

I therefore follow the approach to biodiversity which is based not on the number of species or their variation, but takes account of the ecological web of life that species create in interaction. I differentiate between the arithmetical approach and the ecological approach. The arithmetical approach is currently the dominant one. It relates to 'variation or differences among some set of entities' - and 'number, variety and variability used to describe the number, variety and variability of living organisms' (Groombridge, ed., Global Biodiversity, 1992). The extinction of a species means not just the loss of that particular species, but also a threat to the other species that are supported by it through ecological processes. When one plant becomes extinct, with it disappear the twenty to forty animal and insect species that rely on it. Salmon, which spend their adult lives at sea, return to their natal streams to spawn. Bears, eagles and wolves catch the salmon and transfer the nutrients to the land. Marine carbon and nitrogen isotopes in salmon have been tracked by scientists, and a5-4o per cent of the carbon and nitrogen in juvenile salmon was found to come from their parents. Ninety per cent of the nitrogen and carbon in the bodies of grizzly bear was of marine origin. A single bear will catch 750 salmon, of which the partially consumed carcasses become nutrients for trees. Salmon are the biggest source of nitrogen fertilizer for the forest thousands of miles from the ocean. The growth of trees is correlated to the marine carbon and nitrogen the salmon bring to the forest. As David Suzuki says in giving this beautiful example of the web of life, 'The fish need the forest, the forest needs the fish' (From Naked Ape to Super Species). This interrelationship and mutual dependence is the reason why biodiversity cannot be looked at in a fragmented, atomized context.

Mass extinctions have taken place during geological time, but the erosion of biodiversity has become a systemic product of industrialization. For animals, habitat loss, caused by large dams, industrial plantations, highways and the expansion of human settlements, is the major threat to species survival. Species of birds and fish have also been pushed to extinction by the use of pesticides; this was the story of Rachel Carson's Silent Spring (1965). In 1998, the British Trust for Ornithology (BTO) published a major review of the conservation status of breeding birds since 1992. Twenty species were placed on the BTO's 'high alert' list owing to severe population declines of over 50 per cent in the last twenty-five years (Crick, et al., Breeding Birds in the Wider Countryside). A press release of at March 1999 by the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (RSPB) stated that three-quarters of the UK's skylarks that is 4.6 million - have vanished as a consequence of pesticide use.

According to the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN), 1,029 birds, 1,083 insects, 507 mammals, 169 reptiles, 57 amphibians, 713 fish, 409 molluscs, 154 corals and sponges, 139 annelid worms and tab crustaceans are threatened. In terms of percentages, 11.7 per cent of the mammal species, to per cent of the birds, 3.67 per cent of the fish and 3.5 per cent of the reptiles are threatened.

Globalization has accelerated the destruction of biodiversity to such a pace and on such a scale that plants and animals that were common a few years ago have disappeared. Global market integration converts millions of acres of forests and farms into industrial monocultures, displacing and destroying both biodiversity and the cultural diversity of local communities.

According to the dominant paradigm of production, diversity goes against productivity, which creates an imperative for uniformity and monocultures. The irony of modern plant- and animal-breeding is that it destroys the very building blocks on which the technology depends. Forestry development schemes introduce monocultures of industrial species, such as eucalyptus, and push into extinction the diversity of local species that fulfils local needs. The Leipzig Global Plan of Action on Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture, 1995, based on 158 country reports and 12 regional and subregional papers, stated that 'the chief contemporary cause of the loss of genetic diversity has been the spread of modern, commercial agriculture'. Agricultural modernization schemes introduce new and uniform crops into farmers' fields and destroy the diversity of local varieties. In the words of Professor Garrison Wilkes of the University of Massachusetts, this is analogous to taking stones from the foundation of a building in order to repair the roof. Monocultures are ecologically unstable - this alone should be enough to prevent them being viewed as essential to production. The narrowing of the genetic base of agriculture leads to increased vulnerability of production and a threat to food security. Growing uniformity is increasing the risk of crop failure. The imperative to destroy diversity in order to increase productivity comes from a one-dimensional monoculture paradigm which fails to take the diverse functions of diverse species into account. Some of these functions include ecosystem maintenance. Destruction of diversity encourages pests and diseases. More than 70,000 pest species destroy 40 per cent of the world's harvest. During the past forty years, crop loss to insects alone has nearly doubled, despite a tenfold increase in the amount of pesticides applied (Pimental, et al., in Bio-Science, December 1997).

Biodiversity has rescued our food security from the risks of genetic uniformity. Wheat breeders used T. monococcum, macaroni wheat, for its resistance to rust, caused by Puccima fungi. Rust epidemics can destroy 75 per cent of the crop, and even in normal years it causes losses of 4 per cent or 2.3 million tonnes (Prescott-Allen, Genes from the wild, 1983). During the 1970s, grassy stunt virus destroyed more than 116,ooo hectares (290 acres) of rice in Indonesia, India, Sri Lanka, Vietnam and the Philippines. It is controlled by introducing resistance from the wild rice species Oryza nivara. If this wild rice had not been collected and saved in India, the food security of millions would have been threatened. Of the 6,000 varieties screened, only the wild rice from India had resistance to the disease. Similarly, wild maize varieties have the potential of saving $50-250 million dollars' worth of the maize crop in the USA from disease.

The potato famine in Ireland in 1845-46 was caused by genetic uniformity which led to an epidemic of potato blight, caused by the fungus Phyto plithora infestans. The famine reduced Ireland's population from 8.2 million in 1841 to 6.2 million in 1851. Future potato famines were prevented by wild potato varieties from the Andes. Traditional cultures have conserved biodiversity, and this is why it is still available for the rescue of industrial monocultures each time they became vulnerable to disease and pests.

A 1972 National Academy of Sciences study, 'The Genetic Vulnerability of Major Crops', stated: 'The corn crop fell victim to the epidemic because of a quirk in the technology that had designed the corn plants of America, until, in one sense, they had become as alike as identical twins. Whatever made one plant susceptible made them all susceptible.' (Doyle, Altered Harvest, 1985-)

As the food industry becomes more concentrated and integrated, uniformity is the result, and the globalization of consumption Patterns, by creating monocultures and destroying diversity, has a devastating effect on the poorest on the planet. First, they are pushed into deeper poverty by being forced to 'compete' with globally powerful forces to gain access to the local biological resources. Secondly, their economic alternatives outside the global market are destroyed.

A US Department of Agriculture list of recommended fruits published in 1897 included more than 275 different varieties of apples. Today the apple varieties sold are less than a dozen. Supermarkets around the world essentially offer three types of apples: a red one, the Starking, from the USA; a yellow one, the so-called Golden Delicious, also from the USA; and a green one, the Granny Smith or pippin, from Australia (Vellvé, Saving the Seed, 1992). A survey in France showed that a few years ago, the diet was rich with 250 plant species including vegetables, fruits and condiments. Today, barely 6o are cultivated in that country, and of these only 30 make up the bulk of local consumption. Crop genetic resources are disappearing at the rate of 1-2 per cent per annum (UN Food and Agriculture Organization, FAO, Development Education Exchange Papers, September 1993). About 75 per cent of the diversity of agricultural crops is estimated to have been lost since the beginning of the century.

Globally, domestic livestock breeds are disappearing at an annual rate of 5 per cent or 6 breeds per month (FAO, World Watch List for Domestic Animal Diversity, 5 December 1995). Of 4,000-5,000 breeds, 1,500 are threatened with extinction.

There is considerable evidence globally that the trend is towards monoculture and uniformity and away from diversity:

The Wealth of the Poor

Biodiversity is not just a conservation issue, it is an issue affecting economic survival. Biodiversity is the means of livelihood and the `means of production' of the poor who have no access to other assets or means of production. For food and medicine, for energy and fibre, for ceremony and crafts the poor depend on the wealth of biological resources and on their knowledge and skills related to biodiversity. As biodiversity disappears, the poor are further impoverished and deprived of the healthcare and nutrition that biodiversity provides. The consumption patterns of the rich and the production patterns of the powerful can undermine the consumption patterns of the poor by contributing to the erosion of biodiversity.

Agricultural biodiversity is the basis of economic life for two-thirds of the world's population - those people who live in rural economies in the Third World. The diversity of crop varieties and animal breeds have been developed as a response to the diversity of different ecosystems. Rice varieties have been developed to grow in flooded regions and in rainfed mountain slopes. Cattle breeds have been developed to match the climate in deserts and in wet rainforest regions.

There exists a very intricate relationship between local communities and biological diversity. Hunting-and-gathering communities use thousands of plants and animals for food, medicine and shelter. Pastoral, peasant and fishing communities have also developed the knowledge and skills to obtain a sustainable livelihood from living diversity, in both wild and domesticated forms, on the land, in the rivers, lakes and seas. The life of communities has been enhanced spiritually, culturally and economically as the communities in turn have enriched Earth's biodiversity.

All our food comes from wild species that have been domesticated and which need to return to their wild relatives to build genetic resistance to disease and pests. Approximately 80,000 edible plants have been used at one time or another since the beginning of agriculture, of which at least 3,000 have been used consistently. However, only about 150 have been cultivated. Globally we now rely on just eight crops to provide 75 per cent of the world's food.

India is rich in livestock. Breeds adapted to their specific local environmental and climatic conditions are indispensable to the rural economies of their regions. The animals provide draught power and transportation, dung as fertilizer and as cooking fuel, dairy products, wool, meat and leather. There are 26 breeds of cattle in India. The Ongole breed from Andhra Pradesh, excellent milkers, are also very strong, appropriate for heavy ploughing. The Desi from the same region, are hardy and disease-resistant, like the famous Vechur breed of Kerala, now on the brink of extinction. The Nagauri of the north are one of the most useful draught breeds in India, and the Red Sindhi cattle of Rajasthan are both good draught animals and sound milk producers. Rajasthan also possesses several breeds of camel, and of its eight breeds of sheep - six from the desert areas - the Nagra is the best wool producer. Sheep play a vital role in the rural economy providing wool, milk and meat. Tragically, many breeds are faced with extinction following a dramatic decline in their numbers over the last decades.

Over centuries, a delicate equilibrium has evolved between the indigenous animals and the flora of each region. The communities and their livestock are dependent on the wide range of fodder, and each species consumes different plants and trees so that a balance is sustained. A comprehensive medicinal knowledge of local plants has also developed to cure diseases in animals.

It has been estimated that three billion people - 60 per cent of the world's population - depend on traditional medicines as a principle source of cures for disease. In India and China, 80-90 per cent of traditional medicines are plant-based, and Chinese herbal treatments alone use 5,000 species. In Kenya, 40 per cent of herbal medicines come from the native forest trees. In Amazonia, an ethnobotanical team has catalogued more than 1,000 plants used by the Indian tribes, many of them as medicine. In South Africa, there are approximately 200,000 traditional healers. In total, about 3,000 species of higher plants are used for traditional medicines and of these about 300 are the most commonly used.

India has a rich and ancient heritage of medical knowledge based on its vast resources of medicinal plant biodiversity. India's medical system is called Ayurveda. Its earliest documentation is found in Aatharvaveda, one of the foremost ancient books of Indian knowledge, wisdom and culture, supposed to date from around 1500 BCE. These systems of knowledge and the sources from which they have evolved have survived millennia because they are built on sustainability. Even today, over 70 per cent of the health needs of India are met by these systems. According to an ethnobotanical survey, there are 7,500 species of plants used for medicinal purposes by local Indian communities.

India has something like 1,400 plants documented in various Ayurvedic texts, approximately 342 in Unani, and close to 328 in the Siddha system. This biodiversity-based traditional medicinal system is still being kept alive by 360,740 Ayurveda practitioners, 29,701 Unani experts and 11,644 specialists of Siddha, not to mention millions of housewives and elders who prepare homemade remedies for common ailments.

Everywhere local people have made independent appraisals of their local resources. The plant Ephedra vulgaris, which is found in trans-Himalaya, possesses broncho-dilation properties and is only found in that ecosystem. It is commonly used by the local people as a herbal tea, and taken several times a day. In Ayurveda (unlike most folk traditions, it is not oral but written down) there is a body of knowledge called dhravya guna shastra, which is the indigenous knowledge of pharmacology. Since the Vedic period a plant named tulsi (Ocimum sanctum L.) has had a very sacred place in Indian healing. In both Ayurveda and Siddha the tulsi leaves and the juices from its leaves, roots and seeds are used to cure various ailments, such as intestinal gas, coughs, worms, skin diseases and kidney disorders. It also regulates the flow of urine, subdues inflammation and restores the body by cleansing the system of toxins, while strengthening and toning every organ.

The Kani tribe of the Agastyar hills in Southern Kerala have a habit of eating the raw leaves of a plant known as arogya pacha (Trichopus zeylnicus), which they call 'health drug'. In the Central Himalayas, millet grain cooked in water is mixed with buttermilk and used in the treatment of chickenpox.

Quinine, digitalis and morphine are derived from plants, and even in the USA 40 per cent of all prescriptions still depend on natural sources. The first birth-control pills were made from a plant called Diascorea. Digitalis, the most popular medicine for heart problems, is made from Digitalis (foxglove) which contains glycosides, which regulate heart beats, in its leaves. Hypertension is treated by reserpine, derived from Rauwofia serpentia which has been used in India for centuries. Quinine, for malaria, is basically an indigenous medicine from Peru. The tree was called quinaol quina-quina by the native Indians. From the rosy periwinkle, Vinca rosea, are extracted the cancer cures Vinblastine and Vincristine, and alkaloids derived from Vinca rosea are used for Hodgkin's disease and childhood leukemia (Koopowitz and Kaye, Plant Extinction, 1990).

It is estimated that 100 million of the world's poorest people depend on fishing for all or part of their livelihoods. According to an estimate by the FAO (UN Food and Agriculture Organization), there are a million large fishing boats and z million small boats. Most of the large fishing vessels are controlled by transnational corporations and use all the latest aids to fish-detection, catching and processing, allowing them to become more efficient hunting machines, and so leading to the problem of overfishing. As a special issue of the Ecologist reports, completely automatic trawlnets that detect the approach of a school of fish electronically, and automatically pay out or retrieve warp to place the net in the path of the shoal are now appearing on the market. The 'Gloria' super trawlnet, developed in Ireland, measures 110 by 170 metres (360 by 560 feet) at its mouth, large enough to swallow a dozen Boeing jumbo jets. The reduction of all value to commercial value results in the development of technologies which are ecologically crude. Large catches are made possible by the destruction of livelihoods and of diverse species. As a Malaysian community has said:

The trawlers approved by the government 10 to 15 years ago are strongly opposed by the small inshore fishermen whose income is small and who use traditional nets. We should be concerned with the government's policy of too much dependence on modern science and technology... The root cause of the present scarcity of fish is trawler fishing. The trawler overturns the soil on the seabed and scoops up all the small fish and fry.

In India, ever since shrimp became an export commodity through export-oriented fisheries development, there is less to catch and less to eat. Until the end of the 1950s the marine fish harvest increased at a rate of 5 per cent per annum. By the mid-'8os, after 'development', the rate of growth of the marine fish harvest had decreased. Fish consumption declined in India from r9 kg (42 lbs) per year per capita to 9 kg (20 lbs) per year.

From the early 1970s, landings of most of the major seabottom-dwelling fish began to decline sharply, largely because of excessive fishing (in the case of purseining) and destructive fishing (in the case of trawling which degraded the seabed). Catches of sardines and mackerel, once the mainstay of the fisheries, fell from 250,000 tonnes in 1968 to 87,000 tonnes in 19go. In this period in South America the consumption of fish went down by 7.9 per cent and in Africa by 2.9 per cent, while European fish consumption rose by 23 per cent.

This is the reason that small fishermen worldwide have organized as the World Forum of Fish Workers to protest for their right to fish. On 23 and 24 November 1994, a million fish workers from nine maritime states in India covering a coastline of over 7,500 kilometres (4,660 miles) went on strike. They were protesting against Indian government policies that gave international joint ventures free access to fish in the country's Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ). During the week of the National Strike, one joint-venture vessel called at the port in Cochin, Kerala. Its hold contained 2,000 tonnes of perch and snapper, equivalent to the amount caught in one year by 1,000 hook-and-line fishermen in the region.

All the needs of two-thirds of the world's people are met by biodiversity. If biodiversity is reduced, they are poorer. Even the privileged one-third of humanity living in the industrialized world depends on biodiversity. Oil and coal were made by creatures living millions of years ago. The cement that builds giant skyscrapers, bridges and parking lots comes from limestone, the remains of skeletons and shells, corals and other marine life.

While industrial civilization uses the gifts of biodiversity, it abuses the living richness of our world. The C02 pumped out by our energy and transportation systems is destabilizing climates, leading to an increase in forest fires, droughts, hurricanes, floods, and a rise in sea levels and sea temperature - all of which contribute to the loss of biodiversity. Industrial agriculture, forestry and fisheries convert rich, diverse ecosystems into biologically impoverished chemically intensive monocultures, writing a death sentence for millions of species while claiming higher `growth'.

This is at the heart of the present conflicts over biodiversity. Systems that destroy biodiversity and those that conserve it both need it. In biodiversity-based economies it is the growth of biodiversity that is the measure of progress. In biodiversity-annihilating economies, it is the growth of money that is the measure of progress. We could, in fact, talk of systems that are life-centred and biodiversity-centred versus systems that are money- and capital-centred.

Rich and Poor in Biodiversity

When assessed in terms of biodiversity rather than financial capital, the South is rich and the North is poor. The wealth of Europe in the colonial era was, to a large extent, based on the transfer of biological resources from the colonies to the centres of imperial power, and the displacement of local biodiversity in the colonies by monocultures of raw material for European industry. The historian A. W. Crosby has called the biological transfer of wealth from the Americas to Europe the 'Columbian exchange', because with Columbus's arrival in America began the mass transfer of maize, potatoes, squash, tomatoes, peanuts, common beans, sunflowers and other crops across the Atlantic. Sugar, bananas, coffee, tea, rubber, indigo, cotton and other industrial crops were grown in new sites under the control of newly emerging colonial powers and their state-backed trading companies. The North accumulated wealth by gaining control over the biological resources of the South. Destroying the biodiversity that it could not use or control was the other less visible side of this process of colonization.

In spite of the immeasurable contribution that Third World biodiversity has made to the wealth of industrialized countries, corporations, governments and aid agencies of the North continue to create legal and political frameworks to make the Third World pay for what it originally gave. The emerging trends in global trade and technology work inherently against justice and ecological sustainability. They threaten to create a new era of bioimperialism, built on the biological impoverishment of the Third World and the biosphere. Patents, industrialization of food and agriculture, globalization of trade through the rules of VITO are the new mechanisms by which the biological wealth of the South is being transferred to the North, leaving the Third World poorer both ecologically and economically.

The Empty Earth Syndrome

Third World countries located in the tropics have been endowed with great biological wealth and are the cradle of biodiversity. This wealth is being rapidly destroyed. In my view there are two root causes. The first arises from the `empty-earth' paradigm of colonization, which assumes that ecosystems are empty if not taken over by Western industrial man or his clones. For five hundred years, colonization has been based on the idea of the 'emptiness' of the earth and of other cultures. The assumption of the empty land leads to the denial of prior inhabitants and their prior rights. The idea of emptiness also leads to the notion of limitlessness - that there are no limits set by nature or other cultures to be respected, no ecological or ethical limits, no limits to the level of greed or accumulation. The empty-earth hypothesis in addition creates a divided world - divisions which exist and deepen even in globalization, and were evident in the failed round of the WTO talks in Seattle. 'To us they cannot come, our land is full; to them we may go, their land is empty.' (Robert Cushman 1621, quoted in Kadir, Columbus and the Ends of the Earth, 1992.) Creating clones of Western forms of industrial production and excessive consumption is called 'development' but is actually 'maldevelopment'. (Shiva, Staying Alive: Women, Ecology and Development, 1998.) This view threatens other species and other cultures to extinction because it is blind to their existence, their rights and to the impact of the colonizing culture. The second cause is what I have described as the monoculture of the mind: the idea that the world is or should be uniform and one-dimensional, that diversity is either disease or deficiency, and monocultures are necessary for the production of more food and economic benefits (Shiva, Monocultures of the Mind, 1993). It is the scientific and technological reflection of the empty-earth worldview. The shutting out of alternative ways of knowing and making leads to the assumption that the dominant knowledge and techniques are the only option. This monoculture of the mind destroys biodiversity by blocking the perception of the multiple benefits and uses of biodiversity.

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