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Course: Biodiversity | California Academy of Sciences > Unit 6
Lesson 1: Harnessing science and education for biodiversity conservation- Science and education join forces to protect biodiversity
- Conservation and the race to save biodiversity
- Test your knowledge: harnessing science and education for biodiversity conservation
- Exploration questions: harnessing science and education for biodiversity conservation
- Activity: harnessing science and education for biodiversity conservation
- Glossary: harnessing science and education for biodiversity conservation
- Selected references: harnessing science and education for biodiversity conservation
- Exploration question answers: harnessing science and education for biodiversity conservation
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Science and education join forces to protect biodiversity
Want to join the conversation?
- At2:30, the speaker states that, "We really only know about 10% of the life on earth." My question is how do you come up with that number? How can we tell what percentage of life remains undiscovered if it hasn't been discovered yet?(8 votes)
- because sienticts study and estamiate the amount.(2 votes)
- Biodiversity is defined as "the variety of life in the world or in a particular habitat or ecosystem". The purpose of the video I surmised was to demonstrate how science and education can work together to save the diversity of life on the planet (and we only know about 10% of the life on Planet Earth). While listening to the narrator I asked myself - are we moving too slowly in the US on developing policies to curb global warming or to protect our environment and resources including our precious water supply? Some of the repercussions of not taking care of our planet can be seen in our extreme weather systems and storms, the polar ice caps melting, pollution and respiratory ailments, depletion of our rain forests, and so many other examples. I thought one of the major points of the video was the bottoms up approach to get things moving versus waiting for a top down one. I wonder what concrete biodiversity measures our Congress has been working on to safeguard our population and given the data that has been provided to our policy makers why more is not being done faster? Are we going to be able to move fast enough? Any thoughts?(4 votes)
- Not to be political about this, but the recent election, held after your post, seems to have increased the number of senators and representatives who do not believe that it is government's job to do this - to let the invisible hand of the market to do the job. Or worse, do not believe there is a man-made problem.(2 votes)
Video transcript
(calm music) - [Instructor] Biodiversity
can be protected and for this tutorial, we're gonna outline some of the ways we can all do that by talking about the need for more science and more education. To start things off, I wanna
use an analogy from nature to illustrate how science and education can act together in a kind of, symbiosis. Coral, as we know is a symbiotic organism composed of the coral
animal, really a colony of tiny sea anemone-like animals and the single cell plants that live in the tissue of the animal and provide nutrients to the
little anemone-like beasties. This boosts the ability of
coral to make more coral and to build reefs. And so you get these enormous structures. These reefs that are visible from space through this wonderful synergy, this symbiosis between
these two organisms. That's a result that's
clearly a lot bigger than just the sum of the parts. And for me, that's a nice analogy. A metaphor for the symbiotic way that education and research work together. It's not enough just to do the research. Nobody is gonna realize
the genius of the research if you don't know how
to tell people about it. So, education works with the research the same way that corals
work symbiotically with tiny plant symbionts so that you build something much bigger. Much more full of impact than either thing would be on its own. That's a nice little metaphor
but what does that have to do with saving the diversity
of life on the planet? The point is, more
research and more education are the two ways that I think
will increase our ability to protect biodiversity on Earth so that we do end up with
a result much greater than the sum of the parts. And that doesn't necessarily mean more professional biologists. It can mean the involvement
of more interested members of the public. It can be the involvement
of people who are doing the boots on the ground kind of work. Or it could mean something as distant as remote sensing techniques and the development of new technologies that help us understand biodiversity. The reason that we're
emphasizing this aspect, this building up of research resources and educational capacity
is that we really only know about 10% of the life on Earth. So what about that other 90%? How do we go about
figuring out where and what that 90% might be? And for this, I like to use
the burning room analogy. The Earth is in crisis. It's like a house burning and we don't know who's in all the rooms. How do you know which
rooms to go into first to try and save anyone from the fire if you don't have the knowledge
of who is in each room, much less where everybody
is in all those rooms? So we need to know the
other 90% of life on Earth. We need to be better armed
to protect what we find or protect more of what? Do we mean, not to lose too many? How many is too many? Do we mean to stop extinction completely? Or do we mean to preserve
entire ecosystems? I think these questions
are still to a large extent not yet answered. We need more science to
figure out how best to address how quickly those rooms
in the biodiversity house are all burning. We've seen how the unprecedented rates of human-caused environmental change can boost rates of extinction, can boost the rate at
which we lose environments and in turn, reduce biodiversity which can de-stabilize ecosystems. So it seems to me that
the only logical response to this rate problem is to
increase the rate of discovery and the rate of dissemination
of those results. That's the only way to
deal with the burning house because if you charge in
without the appropriate data, without the appropriate science, without the appropriate outreach
and educational efforts, without this critical symbiosis
of research and education you're gonna make costly mistakes with dire results for all life on earth. Ultimately, you do have
to have good science. For me certainly, expeditions
are always going to be crucial to that aspect. You have to have direct observations. You have to have people
looking at what is happening right there in the ecosystem
and these observations could be from people outside the ecosystem or they can be expeditions
that involve people that are actually there working with and living with the ecosystems
upon which they depend. Sure, you have to have people
who can do the solid research but who can also talk about
it in a way that other people, non-scientists can follow
what they're saying and perhaps even act on it. That is, you need scientists
who can communicate with a broad audience. You have to have people
that are not just good at talking to other scientists, but can also talk to everyone
from children to voters, to policy makers and
the people who live in and rely on the very environments
that we need to protect. And I think those scientists need help. I think they can work with educators to develop outreach programs
that work really, really well. Again, we have and need
the symbiosis of research and education and that can
be a symbiosis of people, it can be a symbiosis of ideas. We need to help people understand that we are not divorced from
that connectivity of life, that we are a part of
all of those ecosystems and that an understanding of how those ecosystems play a role in every level of our existence is really another way
of making the protection of biodiversity relevant to every single person
walking on this planet. We are part of all those food webs. Part of how all those ecosystems function and ecosystems services
which are explicitly framed in the context of humans
deriving benefit from ecosystems rest on an understanding of
what ecosystem function is. The education component of the symbiosis, the education to help people
understand biodiversity and ecosystem function
and ecosystem services can come in a lot of forms. Some ways of getting the messages out are clearly more efficient than others. Some reach broader audiences than others but their scope includes everything from a scientist working
one on one in their own lab with a young student
who's inspired by the work that's being done there,
to tweeting a result, to going on television for an interview, to developing educational videos, to giving lectures and courses, to having people come to a
museum and walk through the halls and explore messages about
the connectivity of life because knowledge is power and with the world wide web,
the lessons can be immediate. To me, that's the single
most amazing thing about being alive today to experience
this digital revolution and to use it to solve
the problems of the world. This is where the symbiosis
of science and education is most powerful. In these mass abilities that we have now to disseminate information
faster than ever before. As long as this information
is founded in appropriate, testable science, there's
hope that the symbiosis can lead to action and to change in the ways humans interact
with their environments. Data can be provided to policy makers. Not only on what's happening, but what the best steps might
be to cause positive change. Or, data can be used to organize reactions to negative situations
that harm biodiversity. We can do that faster than ever before. And what's really crucial,
children can be inspired to change the world around them. I've seen it myself. Any one of us who's ever
interacted with kids knows how important
the internet is to them and how important social
media is to their lives. How important the immediacy of
information is to all of them and we've all seen them
act on what they see, doing stuff in response to
what they see on the internet. It used to much more passive but now they're taking a
message and acting on it. They can be inspired to
change the world around them as they grow and acquire the tools to absorb and modulate the information that they're taking in. It starts with the research. It starts with asking questions and it continues with education and talking about the answers. It's hard to imagine but
I was once a kid myself. I inherited a world with problems and I began to see what
those problems were and how I might
investigate some solutions. The next generation has to be encouraged to continue those investigations and contribute to that understanding of our part in life's connectivity.