Book Review - James Rebanks

Wild Solutions - How Biodiversity is Money in the Bank, Andrew Beattie, Paul Ehrlich and Christine Turnbull (Melbourne University Press, 2001)

This was my effort to learn more about biodiversity and why it is important to preserve it. Thought it would be duller than an afternoon at the cricket with John Major. I was wrong.

The basic premise of the book was to explain why all of us, especially greedy capitalist business people, have a vested interest in preserving biodiversity. Every inch of this planet is teeming with life forms, billions of little bloody things that none of us seem to know about, and everything is at war with everything else in an endless cycle of biological attrition. And survival depends upon the ability to evolve mechanisms to overcome your enemies. So far, so Darwin, but apparently recently scientists have started to get really smart and look for naturally evolved mechanisms that are useful for humans, and this is where it gets amazing.

The book is teeming with examples, my attempts to mark interetsing bits by turning over page corners resulted in all the pages being turned over and the book sort of ruined.

The thing I can't quite get my head around is the sheer quantity of species, a square inch of rainforest soil if studied in enough depth contains hundreds of new species of bacteria and stuff, one study showed that every kilomotre of ocean floor revealed a new species... There are millions of things out there that we have not yet discovered, any of which might be useful, and many of which are being destroyed.

A pinch of soil contains as much as 30,000 protozoa, 50,000 cells of algae, 400,000 fungi, billions of bacteria, and an uncountable number of viruses... I thought this was maybe nature showing off needlessly, but apparently they all keep each other going, and we need them badly.

There is a great passage from page 41 about the failure of humans to create an ecosystem that is capable of surviving any length of time. Yes, that's right, the idea of a sealed Eden Project or space capsule to take us to other planets years away is not humanly possible. Why? Because the interaction of species is too complex for us, and needs regulating at times by other things that are not in the biosphere. Ecosystems interact... Or in my language, the Eden Project is teeming with ants because it is not a proper natural ecosystem with the right diseases, predators etc. In the real world the predators would arrive, even if they flew in from a distant ecosystem. They tried this in the Biospheres in California (the best scientists money could buy, and $200 million of kit). The soil went mental, the air deteriorated, the pollinators (bees etc) went extinct almost immediately, the plants that relied upon them could not reproduce, 19 of the 24 veterbrate species went extinct immediately, and the 8 people would have died if they hadn't cheated. Bad news, we can't get to another planet unless we take lots of sandwiches, or tinned fruit.

The recent breakthroughs in crop protection and performance (with two billion new people on the way in the next few decades this matters a lot, even to me) have come from the DNA of wild relatives of oats, wheat, barley, corn or rice and finding genes that naturally protect the plant against diseases. If we lose the wild, seemingly insignificant, relatives we potentially lose the life sustaining super crops as their enemies overcome them through evolution. The soil in your garden may literally save the human race someday as it may contain a 'wild solution' that exists nowhere else in the world. So raise the price of your house, its amazing!

Plants develop chemicals to put off insects that eat them, so scientists realised that a species of ant in South America was decimating the cabbage fields, but leaving the bean fields. Solution; spray extracts of the bean plants onto the cabbages. Result? Ants leave the cabbages alone, something that millions of dollars of chemical research had failed to achieve. Some of this stuff is basic observational science, some of it is so technical my head hurts, like spider silk being 300 times stronger than steel and computers manufacturing stuff to copy it.

We all know the story about smallpox being cured because some smartass realised that milkmaids didn't die of it, and made the link to the dairy girls having had cowpox and gotten immunity to the far worse smallpox. This is the motif of this book, the world is full of these solutions that we are only starting to understand, cures for diseases, and ailments, and preventative solutions for crops, people and animals, and product ideas that the wit of man has never got close to figuring out.

I won't go on, this is well worth reading. It is not your usual green rant about how evil I am for shopping at supermarkets and flying to Corsica for my holidays. It is sort of grown up and sensible, and it advocates a sensible mix of new human technologies and practices and using wild solutions created by evolution. And it makes the sensible point that biodiversity is our genetic library, and it would be a mistake to throw lots of the books away before we get a chance to read them, because we will never know what we have lost, until it is too late.

I'm really looking forward to Greece now, I'm going to be wondering what genetic secrets the endangered Monk Seals and the Loggerhead Turtles might hold. This book makes you wonder.

Final point, how do earthworms eat muck, germs and crap all their lives and never get ill. Answer; they do get ill, but very rarely, even when they are eating soil packed with deadly stuff, and something in their bodies enables them to beat bacteria that would finish off any of us, it is for scientists to identify how they do this, and find whether the genes responsible can be tranferred to humans to beat certain diseases etc. Then we will live forever and eat soil if we want to.

End.