We will not be able to avoid the loss of species if we do not make an effort to know them

We do not know with precision the number of existing species on Earth. There are many of them uncatalogued and only a rough estimate can be made. Figures vary wildly between 5 million and 15 million, but could be as high as a trillion if simple organisms such as microbes, bacteria, and archaea are included. So far only about two million have been described.

They represent only a part of what has existed on our planet in the past. About 95% of the species of the last million years of life on Earth have disappeared, especially during the five mass extinctions that have occurred since 450 million years ago.

The first of these mass extinctions was due to a glaciation at the end of the Paleozoic, in the Ordovician period (485-444 million years ago). It is estimated that 86% of the species that then inhabited the planet disappeared, which were mainly aquatic because there were still no animals on land due to the lack of oxygen in the atmosphere. This was also the time when oil and gas fields were formed in some regions.

It is estimated that approximately 20,000 species per year are currently becoming extinct. If their disappearance continues at the same rate, in about 300 years all species on the planet will have disappeared in what many consider the sixth mass extinction.

One million species in danger of extinction

The latest data from the United Nations puts the number of species currently in danger of extinction at one million. The latest report from the Intergovernmental Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services concludes:

“The health of the ecosystems that we and all other species depend on is deteriorating faster than ever. We are eroding the very foundations of our economies, livelihoods, food security, health and quality of life around the world.”

Given the urgency of avoiding the loss of biodiversity, closely associated in the collective imagination with climate change, maps are being drawn up of the places where the vertebrates included in the Red List of Threatened Species of the International Union for Conservation of Nature are in danger. risk due to deforestation, practices and increasing extension of agriculture, hunting, the introduction of invasive species and environmental pollution.

With regard to Spain, the List of Wild Species under Special Protection Regime and the Spanish Catalog of Endangered Species includes 204 species in danger of extinction, 139 vulnerable and 630 under special protection regime.

In all the countries of Latin America and the Caribbean, of the more than 2,250 species that are included in the Red List of Threatened Species, at least 665 are in critical danger of extinction.

Conservation and technological solutionism

The solutions that have been proposed for a few decades now go through, firstly, conservation strategies for natural spaces and ecosystems and, secondly, technological innovation in general, and specifically cloning techniques.

In addition, economic solutions are deployed to solve possible difficulties and conflicts with human communities. In a broad sense, the profitability of ecosystems is promoted. According to the Biodiversity Foundation in Spain, “the environment is a clear business opportunity, capable of generating employment and a way to guarantee a long-term sustainable economy.”

However, this vision carries risks if it is not executed properly. Sometimes the conservation of biodiversity and of certain species has been defended due to their alleged utility for recreational-economic activities such as hunting, only justifiable with precise population control objectives to avoid irreversible imbalances in the ecosystem.

Precisely the popularity of hunting activities in the Aragonese Pyrenees was the main cause of the extinction of the Pyrenean mountain goat, the bucardo, in the year 2000. Its latest specimen, Celia, is a good example of the use of cloning techniques to the conservation of biodiversity.

Celia’s cloning is considered the first (failed) experiment of the so-called deextinction procedures. This alternative generates quite a few controversies, since it is based on a technological solutionism that could weaken the efforts to protect existing populations by avoiding the problems that threaten them and divert the financing destined to the conservation of ecosystems towards technological development projects.

Celia, the last bucardo specimen, dissected at the Ordesa National Park Visitor Center (Huesca).
Wikimedia Commons / Jose Miguel Pintor Ortego, CC BY

The third of the solutions necessarily involves cataloging and characterizing the largest possible number of currently existing species and promoting their knowledge by society. This means improving our scientific culture, intensifying communication efforts to promote a culture that makes biodiversity visible. While the term climate change returns 104 million results in the Google search engine, biodiversity returns 79.4 million and extinction of species only 26.2 million.

As the scientist and popularizer Carl Sagan said:

“We have prepared a global civilization in which the most crucial elements depend deeply on science and technology. We have also arranged things so that no one understands science and technology. That’s a guarantee of disaster. We could go on like this for a while, but sooner or later this combustible mixture of ignorance and power would blow up in our faces.”

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