Niles Eldredge, American Museum of Natural History

Selected Presentation Visuals

Abstract
What Is Biodiversity and Why Is It Important?
"Biodiversity" (a contraction of "biological diversity") means all the species living in all the world's ecosystems. There are at least 10,000,000 species on earth right now - but some 30,000 a year (3 per hour!) are currently becoming extinct through human activity, including conversion of forests and prairies for agricultural use, overfishing and timbering, and the introduction of alien species around the globe. The baseline cause of this "Sixth Extinction" is the growth of human population from ca. 6 million only 10,000 years ago, to a full 6 billion at the year 2000 - a byproduct of the first Agricultural Revolution. The invention of agriculture caused humans to become the first species in the 2.5 billion year history of life to live outside of local ecosystems - and as a result it is difficult to see what the significance of the loss of biodiversity has for the planet as a whole - and especially for human life. Yet humans rely on some 40,000 species of animals and plants every day for food, shelter, clothing, and medicines; we continue to rely on the cycling of essential nutrients, the production of oxygen, and the availability of safe water for drinking - and all of these depend on the continued existence of healthy ecosystems (perhaps as many as 2 of the 6 billion people on earth do not currently have access to safe drinking water). Combined with esthetic and ethical considerations, these are powerful reasons for asking the question: What can we do to stem the tide of the mounting Sixth Extinction?

Biographical Sketch
Niles Eldredge is an invertebrate paleontologist who has devoted his career to forging connections between patterns in the history of life and ideas on how life evolves. Realizing that mass extinctions of the geological past have played a major role in life's evolutionary history, he has been actively examining the causes behind the modern day "Sixth Extinction" that is seeing some 30,000 species a year (3 per hour!) disappear from the face of the earth. He is the author of 20 books and over 200 scientific articles and reviews.

Relevant Publications
Eldredge, N. 1998. Life in the Balance: Humanity and the Biodiversity Crisis. Princeton University Press.

Eldredge, N. 1995. Dominion. New York: Henry Holt and Company, Inc.

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