Biodiversity

Lots of painted lady butterflies spied up at Avebury on Waden Hill, they arrived in their thousands this year. A common enough butterfly and we might be fooled into thinking that there is no need to worry about the environment but news tells us otherwise.


A Guardian article highlights the loss of biodiversity that our planet is experiencing at an ever increasing rapidity in the last few decades, whether by our human activity or be climate change. E.O.Wilson, hailed as the successor of Darwin, is giving a video talk at the Royal Institution in London on tuesday. There is also a corresponding article that highlights one of the great dangers that we humans play at, the continuing argument of those who say climate change is real and those so-called 'deniers' who argue that we should go on exploiting the Earth for the good of the human race.
The point of course is that its a useless argument, my Google news tells me today that the melt of ice from Greenland has lost 1500 cubic kilometres of ice between 2000 and 2008, making it responsible for one-sixth of global sea-level rise. Even worse, there are signs that the rate of ice loss is increasing, we as humans will feel the effect but our flora and fauna will have an increasingly difficult time as well.
Biodiversity is lost when we cut down Indonesian forests so that palm oil can be grown. When the great Amazon forests are cut down for more and more farming, every time we dam a river for energy we create a different set of environmental issues that have to be addressed.
Below are photographs of snow loss on the mountains in Peru and how it affects the people who live there.
Melting mountains
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/audioslideshow/2009/nov/21/helena-christensen-peru-photographs-climate