Environment and biodiversity

Man explores but does not tarry long in the planet’s more forbidding regions. Thus their beauty and mystery remain while more hospitable lands are altered by man’s activities. The immense verity of life on earth and what makes our planet not habitable but beautiful. How we depend on the natural richness of the planet for food, energy, wood and raw materials, clean air and clean water is what makes life possible and drives our economy. Finally I found that biodiversity is the key factor.

Saturday, January 02, 2010
Nyungwe forest

Man explores but does not tarry long in the planet’s more forbidding regions. Thus their beauty and mystery remain while more hospitable lands are altered by man’s activities. The immense verity of life on earth and what makes our planet not habitable but beautiful.

How we depend on the natural richness of the planet for food, energy, wood and raw materials, clean air and clean water is what makes life possible and drives our economy. Finally I found that biodiversity is the key factor.

But also we should not look for our natural environment for less fungible things such as aesthetic pleasure, artistic inspiration and recreation.

Initially, I thought the so-called environmentalists were merely political liberals who were just using a different angle to advance some of their cause, some of which continues on.

But it goes on beyond merely advancing liberalism. There are two types of people who have made environmentalism their new home: socialists and environ-religious fanatics.

And they have chosen two constituencies which cannot speak or disagree and therefore cannot refuse help and assistance, animals and trees.

However, there are a number of advantages to the conservation efforts.

These include increasing coordination between international agreements that affect biodiversity directly or indirectly and integrating biodiversity strategies and actions within boarder development planning frameworks such as development strategies or poverty, reduction strategies.

My concern is to convey the impression of how man is unafraid to speak its mind on environment conservation and biodiversity.

The environment is a great way to advance a political agenda that favours central planning and intrusive government.

It’s actually a great way of controlling someone’s property than to subject one’s private property rights to environmental concerns.

The second group that has latched on the environmental movement are people who believe its religion: that God is the earth and that God is nothing more than the earth, which is somehow cleaner and more pure.

It’s the way things were before western people came a long and terrorised the earth by inventing things. They want to roll us back may be not to the stone-age but at least to the horse and buggy era.

Biodiversity is one of the key terms used in the conservation encompassing the richness of life and diverse patterns. It forms a large convention on biological diversity (CBD) which man claims to own.

Thus this hostility to private property, my friends is based on the belief that human beings can’t be trusted to own very much of the land: that we are selfish and cursed with desire to change nature; for instance America composes only 4% of world’s population and uses 25% of world’s resources.

How dare we be so selfish? Never mind that these countries feed the world. Never mind the fact that technology here improved life everywhere on this planet.

This great desire for owning vast land should be cursed indeed within us and instead we have to be committed to the protection of biodiversity, like our African society, our immense cultural diversity and our economies are reflected in our landscape, agriculture and natural spaces.

We are stewards of wonderful natural legacy that can pass on hopefully in fact to future generation.

Another thing that I think is successful in the control of eradication, is tackling the invasive species which will be an increasingly important biodiversity conservation action. Early interaction has been shown to be most successful and costly.

Chemical control sometimes combined with chemical removal like pruning or cutting has not proven particularly successful in eradication.

Biological control of invasive species through the introduction of other species has also been attempted, but can lead to unexpected results such as the extinction of other local species.

The social and economic aspects of the control of invasive species have received less attention.

We must convince and empower people to adopt the conservation and sustainable use of bio diversity as there are guiding principles.

Whether it’s making tourism environmentally sustainable, developing new strategies for reviving the world’s highly stressed highlands, or creating a legal regime on success to genetic resources that protects the interest of both local communities and commercial firms. We need to resolve the tough issues without delay.

Sometimes we wonder how the important causes of biodiversity loss can be addressed basically some possible major strategies include redirecting harmful subsidies such as agricultural and fishery subsidies in developed counties.

Especially in the context of biodiversity convention we must be aware of interrelation of biodiversity and poverty of the urgent need of equitable benefit sharing between the developing world and industrialised, from debt relief capacity building to the transfer of environment friendly technology of course there’s much agreement that although majority of the world’s biodiversity is not known there’s growing concern that economic and technology gains made in the last few decades threaten much of the world’s biodiversity.

The earth is remarkable creation and is capable of great rejuvenation and we shouldn’t go out of our way to damage, but neither should we buy into the hysteria and monomania which preaches, in essence, that we don’t belong here. We have a right to use the earth to make our lives better.

Joel Nturo Gashagaza, the writer is a student at Sunrise High School.

email-joelnturo05@yahoo.co.uk