biologists-from-england

"We live on a Goldilocks planet that has nurtured life as it has sailed through billions of laps around the Sun. Animals evolved from microbes that resembled sperm cells that wriggled in the sea; great apes, or hominids, were born 15 to 20 million years ago; apes like us, called hominins, arose in Africa more recently, and modern humans with fine-boned skeletons have been prancing around for less than 100,000 years. Plants assemble their tissues from carbon dioxide and the power of sunbeams, and we are energized by eating them and the flesh of animals that graze on fruits and vegetables. The digestive system releases small molecules from our food and these are propelled around the body in blood vessels to sustain every cell. The architecture and operation of the body is detailed in a cluttered instruction manual written in 20,000 genes spotted along 2 m of DNA. Construction takes nine months and includes wiring a big brain that endows the owner with a sense of self and the illusion of free will. Ageing of the body is unfaltering; after a few decades, the animal stops working and is decomposed."

"Humans and other bipedal apes have pursued our distinctively destructive path for a sliver of the total biotime in this corner of the galaxy. This most recent reshaping of nature began 3.3 million years ago, when an australopithecine made stone tools to butcher animal carcasses on the shores of the Jade Sea, or Lake Turkana, in Kenya. Weapons came later, with the use of stone-tipped thrusting spears by another hominid in South Africa 500,000 years ago, and the development of the bow and arrow by early humans 71,000 years ago. Projectile weapons, like the bow and arrow, allowed us to kill large animals without being excessively brave. Through a combination of these weapons, coupled with traps and fire, humans saw to the extinction of woolly mammoths, mastodons, sabre-toothed cats and ground sloths as the ice sheets receded and we pursued the animals to their last redoubts. A South American armadillo-like animal called Glyptodon was another victim of the genocide. This slow-moving vegetarian was as big as a Volkswagen Beetle and served as an easy target for hunters who ate its meat and crawled into its enormous shells for shelter. For many years, biologists argued that climate change was the most important factor in these extinctions, but more and more evidence points to the correspondence between the arrival of humans and the disappearance of large mammals. The case was pretty obvious for the spectacular bird life of islands, with a giant turkey called Sylviornis disappearing from New Caledonia soon after the prehistoric Lapita people arrived in their canoes 3,500 years ago, and the elimination of numerous species of flightless moa when the Maori reached New Zealand around AD 1300. Extinction has been reworking nature from its beginnings, but no animal has come close to having the impact that humans have had. With remarkable speed, our evolution walloped life with the power of the asteroid that obliterated the dinosaurs. The average size of mammals increased steadily throughout the Cenozoic Era that followed the crash of the Chicxulub asteroid in the Gulf of Mexico 65 million years ago. Then, around 100,000 years ago, the big animals began to disappear. The extinctions accelerated 50,000 years ago and the total mass of wild mammals has now plunged to a sixth of its pre-human maximum. According to some models, the domestic cow is on track to become the largest remaining mammal. thumb|We cannot miss something that has never existed for us. We read about extinction as an approaching horror and ecosystem damage as a work in progress rather than a done deal. Scepticism surrounding these doom-laden predictions about the precarious nature of nature is understandable. It takes imagination to escape from the influence of the diminishing expectations of each generation. Nobody has seen a live moa since the fourteenth century and so their absence does not upset New Zealanders today. The last passenger pigeon, named Martha, died in my local zoo in 1914, and the most recent sky-darkening mass migrations of these birds took flight in the nineteenth century. We cannot miss something that has never existed for us. We read about extinction as an approaching horror and ecosystem damage as a work in progress rather than a done deal. But the destruction is unabated. Despite the publicity given to deforestation, tropical woodlands continue to disappear at an annual rate of 2.7 million hectares in Brazil, 1.3 million hectares in Indonesia and 0.6 million hectares in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Turning to the direct effects of climate change, one-third of the world’s coral reefs were damaged by high water temperatures in 2016. More than 90 per cent of Australia’s Great Barrier Reef was affected by the process called bleaching, which happens when the dinoflagellate algae abandon their animal partners in the exquisite coral symbiosis. When reefs recover from bleaching, the original animals are replaced by sluggish coral species that support impoverished communities of marine life. This is not a normal phenomenon."

"Humans are not the only organisms to have affected the live-ability of Earth. Microbes and plants changed the chemistry of the atmosphere long before we leapt on to the stage. Bacteria initiated a momentous change 2.3 billion years ago when they began flooding the air with a noxious gas called oxygen. Microorganisms that had been happily ‘breathing’ iron, sulphur and nitrogen for the first million millennia of biology were decimated by this highly reactive, DNA-damaging molecule. As oxygen levels rose, the metal-breathers and their kin retreated to marine muds and other oxygen-free quarters. New life forms evolved to take advantage of the peculiar conditions and found a way to use oxygen to rip more energy from their food, which is why we breathe deeply today."

"Perhaps we would have forestalled [human] extinction if Louis Pasteur had abandoned his studies on the germ theory. What about the plant pathologists who scorned centuries of superstitions and identified the fungi responsible for cereal diseases? They made it possible to combat the rusts and smuts that wasted crops and allowed modern agriculture to feed us in our billions. Science is so central to modern civilization that we will not willingly retreat from the continuing exploration and manipulation of nature."

"The love of experiment was very strong in him, and I can remember the way he would say, "I shan't be easy till I have tried it," as if an outside force were driving him. He enjoyed experimenting much more than work which only entailed reasoning, and when he was engaged on one of his books which required argument and the marshalling of facts, he felt experimental work to be a rest or holiday."

"For books he had no respect, but merely considered them as tools to be worked with. Thus he did not bind them, and even when a paper book fell to pieces from use, as happened to Müller’s ‘Befruchtung,’ he preserved it from complete dissolution by putting a metal clip over its back. In the same way he would cut a heavy book in half, to make it more convenient to hold. He used to boast that he had made Lyell publish the second edition of one of his books in two volumes, instead of in one, by telling him how ho had been obliged to cut it in half. Pamphlets were often treated even more severely than books, for he would tear out, for the sake of saving room, all the pages except the one that interested him, The consequence of all this was, that his library was not ornamental, but was striking from being so evidently a working collection of books."

"In science the credit goes to the man who convinces the world, not to the man to whom the idea first occurs. Not the man who finds a grain of new and precious quality but to him who sows it, reaps it, grinds it and feeds the world on it."

"There seems to be one quality of mind which seems to be of special and extreme advantage in leading him to make discoveries. It was the power of never letting exceptions go unnoticed."

"As the value of the in checking the depredations of s (whiteants) does not seem to be generally known, I should like to call your readers’ attention to it through your columns. My first knowledge of it came from. sleeping on the ground when camping in a compound which proved to be riddled with termite runs. Several of us used water-proof ground-sheets that we had prepared from unbleached by sprinkling grated paraffin wax over it and then running this into the fibre by passing a very hot iron very slowly over it. In the morning the undersides of these ground-sheets were found to be covered wih termite mud, but to be unharmed and to have served as a complete protection to everything upon them, whereas all campers without them had had their blankets and some even their pyjamas badly eaten, some of the blankets having been reduced to rags. At that time termites were a constant menace to the books in the , where almost all the shelves were built into the walls. In view of the above experience, therefore, I tried coating the insides of all the book-cases with paraffin wax. A great improvement resulted immediately, though termites quickly found their way through any small gaps that had inadvertently been left. This incidentally made these easy to locate and to fill in, since when all trouble from termites has ceased, the danger having been completely and apparently finally averted, for it is now a number of years since the treatment was effected. And the same method has subsequently been used with equal success in s and boxes elsewhere."

"The , though they continued the building of immense s, concentrated attention on the s or halls, marvellousily developing the carving of their many rows of monolithic pillars, as may be well seen in and ."

"The only representative of found by the was Temnocephala semperi . This species was first found by on s in and , from the plains up to an altitude of 5000 (1872, p. 307). It has since proved to have a wide distribution in the Oriental Region ... The creatures are extremely contractile and their great activity is most striking—indeed it is apt to be startling the first time living specimens are seen. They live, often in large numbers, on the lower surface of the body and among the basal joints of the legs of their host, which is apparently always a crab of the genus ' ... When separated from its host, T. semperi stands and waves its tentacles around, as though trying to perceive a new one, or crawls rapidly about. Occasionally, when it is greatly irritated, the tentacles are doubled back and tucked away beneath the concave ventral surface of the body."

"... during this expedition I was to trudge through sand wastes which had been my forest haunts when I had been in Africa thirty years ago. Here one could actually see all the process of degradation, from high forest through the stages of orchard-bush and savannah to drifting sand. When the forest is cleared for farming or other reasons, the debris is sooner or later burned up. Here we were standing on land where the which had been accumulated over thousand of years had been destroyed in a single season."

"He was given this title of "The World's Greatest Conservationist" by ... ..."

"Felling big is dangerous work, especially when the tops of the mighty trees are entangled with creepers."

"Through Chief Josiah Njonjo, my righthand man, I called for volunteers, for men who would swear before , the High God, that they would protect the native forest, plant so many native trees each year and take care of trees everywhere. The volunteers were called the Watu wa Miti () ..."

"The and Cambridge behind, I enlisted in the in Africa. In November 1920, the call came for me to go to Kenya under the ."

"... New Zealand ... transformation of to and ... The student has an opportunity of studying the various stages of , or witnessing a virgin forest turned into a sheep run. Even a neglected farm will provide valuable data and furnish splendid material for studies of great importance and intense scientific interest. It is possible in a day's ride to study the deterioration of land from virgin forest through successive years of farming or grazing to examples of and s."

"Pause in space and go back in time. Explore the genesis of life on this earth and gain a true perspective. A study of the story of the forests of the past is full of romance. How came they into being?"

"The experience of the nomadic farmer was that he would find fertile land only in the forest and it was natural for him to make clearings, piling smaller bushes around the greater trees to fell them by burning. The provided rich fertilizer for a season's growth but the land exposed to the elements failed to retain its fertility. So, after reaping a few crops, the nomadic farmer would penetrate ever deeper into the virgin forest ... The next stage in forest degradation is so-called orchard bush, with large trees widely scattered. Then comes a type of fringing forest, which in time will deteriorate into h. After that there is ever sparser vegetation and s, sometimes mobile but more often fixed; then follows the desert floor ..."

"The good will place es to attract helpful birds, and farmers will do well to plant and protect to provide nesting places for their feathered friends. Birds are great distributors of tree seeds ..."

"Lydick proved that permanent, well-arranged s and crop shelter belts are as much of an asset as barns or plows. They are as essential to agriculture as modern factories are to industry."

"Baker was born in England, educated on the Canadian frontier and at Cambridge, wounded in World War I, and joined the Colonial Service as a forester in Kenya, where he co-founded Men of the Trees (now the ) in 1922 to incite the to reforest their land. He came to appreciate the wisdom of indigenous peoples in protecting the land and forest, and was expelled from the Colonial Service for interposing himself and taking a blow intended for an African."

"One theory as to why metamorphosis is such a successful strategy is that it enables the immature stages and the adults to each specialise in different tasks, and to have a body designed for the purpose.‡ ‡Please note that I am not suggesting intelligent design by a supreme being. ‘Design’ is shorthand for the blind tinkering of evolution over millennia."

"So far are we from fully appreciating the dire plight of the natural world that it is still regarded as a perfectly normal, acceptable hobby to kill animals for fun. Thirty-five million pheasants are reared and released each year in the UK alone, so that a small number of people can enjoy blasting away at these naïve, semi-tame animals. There are simply too many of us (and soon to be many more) for it to be acceptable to carry on killing animals for amusement. We need to somehow persuade everyone to treat our environment with respect, to teach children growing up that littering, killing, polluting, are just not socially acceptable. How can we do that when the supposedly great and the good slaughter pheasants and grouse just for weekend entertainment?"

"Ants alone outnumber us by about one million to one. Until perhaps the last 200 years, an alien looking down on Earth at any time in the last 400 million years would have concluded that this was the kingdom of the insects."

"It took many millions of years for evolution to slowly create unique assemblages of plants and animals in each region of our planet, and only a couple of hundred years for us to muddle them up."

"It is sometimes said that humanity is at war with nature, but the word ‘war’ implies a two-way conflict. Our chemical onslaught on nature is more akin to genocide."

"Supporters of the chemtrail theory are generally dismissed as crackpots, and rightly so, because it is absurd to believe that a conspiracy on the scale they describe could possibly be kept quiet. It is not much more plausible than suggesting that the Earth is flat."

"Even today there are deniers, sadly including the previous President of the United States and many of his followers – but then there are also people who argue that the world is flat."

"We are committing ecocide on a biblical scale. I am in no way religious, but if you are, consider this; do you really think God created wonderful diversity and gave us dominion over it so that we could exterminate it? Do you really think He or She is pleased with what we have done?"

"As with most new technologies, however, our enthusiasm for the benefits blinded us for sometime to the downsides."

"Personally, I do not think we should dismiss GM technology. However, so far most GM crops have been developed by large corporations, with the clear goal of lining their pockets rather than benefiting people or the environment."

"Globally, beef provides just 2 per cent of the calories we consume, yet 60 per cent of the world’s agricultural land is used for beef production."

"Suppose one were to invent a new wheat variety that gave twice the yield. Would the world’s wheat farmers turn half their land over to nature? Of course not. Wheat prices would collapse, and we would find ever-more-wasteful ways of using the surplus, for example by feeding more to animals or using more for biofuels. The farmers would end up farming harder than ever to make ends meet, and nature would not benefit at all."

"Some previous deliberate introductions of non-native species to Australia had gone horribly wrong: for example, cane toads from South America, introduced to help control sugar cane pests, have themselves become a plague, proliferating to the point where there are now estimated to be about 200 million of them, eating everything except the pests they were intended to control."

"The £3.5 billion a year in farm subsidies currently takes taxpayers’ money and uses it to support an industrial farming system that produces copious greenhouse gases, damages the soil, overgrazes the uplands, employs few people, pollutes rivers with fertilisers and pesticides, drives wildlife declines, and over-produces unhealthy food stuffs while under-producing food that is good for us. Why exactly should we pay our hard-earned taxes to subsidise all of this?"

"Why he was asked to comment on a subject on which he has no expertise is unclear, but in these strange times it seems common for the opinions of celebrities to be valued regardless of qualifications or experience."

"Similar issues affect the 211,000 km2 protected by the USA’s sixty-two National Parks. These are supposed to be wilderness areas unaffected by man’s activities, yet many are affected by oil and gas drilling, or by invasive species, while quite a few allow hunting, and climate change is affecting them all. The Everglades National Park, for example, is being damaged by over-extraction of water to irrigate crops, by fertiliser and pesticide pollution, and by no fewer than 1,392 different invasive species, spanning everything from Burmese pythons to spreading spans of Australian tea trees. It is clear that trying to set aside areas for nature has not been adequate as a strategy to prevent biodiversity loss – though nature reserves undoubtedly have value – and that we need to do much more. We do not have to continue headlong towards environmental Armageddon, but to halt this process requires us to recognize that our current strategies are not working, and that we cannot carry on as we have in the past. It is not too late to save our planet, but to do so we need to learn to live alongside nature, to value and cherish it, to respect all life as equal to our own, especially the small creatures."

"I have never grasped why some folk are so desperate to have a perfectly uniform, green lawn, unmarred by pretty flowers. The concept of a ‘weed’ is entirely within our heads; one man’s weed is another’s beautiful wildflower. If we could somehow engineer a shift in attitude, so that ‘weeds’ such as daisies or clovers were seen as desirable additions to a lawn, rather than enemies to be battled against, we would save ourselves an awful lot of time, money and stress, while helping nature into the bargain."

"Glyphosate is a general-purpose herbicide, killing any plant it touches. It is systemic, which means that it spreads through the tissues of the plant to kill the roots. I hate to admit this now, but I once used to use it quite a lot in my garden, as I believed the manufacturers when they claimed that it was non-toxic to wildlife and broke down very quickly in the environment. I used to be very naïve."

"‘Normal’ is different for every generation."

"So, one can argue that insects are important, practically and economically, and one can argue that they bring us joy, inspiration and wonder, but both arguments are ultimately selfish, for both focus on what insects do for us. There is a final line of reasoning for looking after insects and the rest of the life on our planet, big and small, and it is one that is not focused on human well-being. One can argue that all of the organisms on Earth have as much right to be here as we do. If you are of a religious bent do you really think that God created all of this amazing life just so we could recklessly destroy it? Do you think He or She intended for coral reefs to be bleached and dead, littered with plastic trash? Does it seem plausible that He or She went to the trouble of creating five million species of insect so that we could drive many of them extinct without ever even registering their existence? If on the other hand you are not a believer, and accept the scientific evidence that species evolved over billions of years rather than being created by a supernatural being with a beetle obsession, then you must realize that we are just a particularly intelligent and destructive species of monkey, nothing more than one of the perhaps ten million species of animal and plant on Earth. In that view, nobody granted us dominion over the beasts; we have no God-given moral right to pillage, destroy and exterminate. Religious or not, most humans agree that the rich and powerful should not be allowed to oppress or dispossess the poor and powerless (though of course we do allow it to happen all the time). Similarly, in dozens of sci-fi movies from The War of the Worlds onwards, aliens more intelligent than ourselves arrive, decide that the human race is redundant, and set about wiping us out so they can plunder the Earth for their own ends, or build an interstellar bypass. Of course, in these films we see the aliens as the bad guys, and we root for the inferior humans who usually somehow triumph in the end despite the odds being stacked against them. When will we realise the hypocrisy of our position? On our own planet we are the bad guys, thoughtlessly annihilating life of all kinds for our own convenience. We intuitively grasp that the aliens of the movie Independence Day have no right to take our planet; I wonder what goes through the mind of an orang-utan as it sees its forest home bulldozed to the ground? There should not have to be a ‘point of slugs’ for us to allow them their existence. Do we not have a moral duty to look after our fellow travellers on planet Earth, beautiful or ugly, providing vital ecosystem services or utterly inconsequential, be they penguins, pandas, or silverfish?"

"These are beneficial creatures, and should be celebrated, not persecuted and poisoned in some misguided psychotic urge to kill anything that dares to thrive."

"Insecticides kill all insects, not just the ones that they are aimed at, whatever the doublethinkers who manufacture agrochemicals may ask you to believe."

"Countries whose efforts are woefully inadequate, and likely to see us heading towards global warming of 4°C or more (catastrophic for all life on earth), include the USA, Saudi Arabia and Russia. It is perhaps not a coincidence that these three countries happen to be the three biggest oil producers in the world. One might be forgiven for suspecting that their heart is not really in tackling climate change at all. In the case of the USA this was made abundantly clear under the Trump administration."

"The fundamental problem with the Paris Agreement is that it has no teeth at all. It relies entirely on countries choosing to cut their own emissions, with no penalty if they fail. It is very easy for a government to make a long-term promise, knowing that different politicians will be in charge by the time any reckoning is due. One only has to look at the 1992 Rio Convention on Biological Diversity, which was signed by almost exactly the same group of 196 governments as signed the Paris Agreement. In the Rio Convention our governments promised to halt the loss of global biodiversity by 2020. In reality, the period 1992 to 2020 has seen the greatest loss of global biodiversity for at least 65 million years. We cannot rely on the empty promises of our governments to save our planet."

"I am not suggesting that petitions are a waste of time – they actually take up very little time – but don’t expect them to achieve much. There is a danger that people feel that the job is done, just because their favoured petition has reached a certain number of signatures. We will not save the planet simply by signing petitions, no matter how many we sign; they are a little more than a displacement activity."

"If one looks at the bigger picture, modern farming is part of a staggeringly inefficient, cruel and environmentally damaging food-supply system."

"One man’s weed is another man’s wildflower."

"For me, the economic value of insects is just a tool with which to bash politicians over the head. They only seem to value money, so I point out to them that insects contribute to the economy. But if I’m honest, their economic worth has nothing whatsoever to do with why I try to champion their cause. I do it because I think they are wonderful."