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TODAY Tuesday 16 September 1997 Each weekday. Conn Nugent on what's new in the world, on the site.

 

TODAY IN THE WORLD: In the Preservation of the Funky

One of the reasons that it's great to be an American is that we haven't yet gotten around to settling the place. There are only about 280 million of us, and the country is both vast and ecologically various. Now that poor Russia has lost her Czarist and Stalinist conquests to the south and west, we really don't have any rivals in the geographic diversity department. Everglades and Adirondacks, Great Plains and Olympic Peninsula, Mojave and Mississippi. On to Toronto!

Among the wealthy nations of the north, we are also unusual in the degree of biological diversity found within the geographical diversity. Other rich countries have wonderful open spaces and rural landscapes, but rarely do they contain the number of plant and animal species found in many North American ecosystems. A telling example is the English countryside -- the Cotswolds, say. Beautiful, invigorating, but essentially artificial, sheltering only a small fraction of the pre-agricultural life of the mixed hardwood forests that once covered the view. You get "nature" in England, but you don't get the wild.

We are realizing in this country that the preservation of greenery and open space is not the same as the protection of biodiversity. Even the most crass of suburban developers these days keeps an acre or two for grass and woods. People have come to see that wet places (over a certain size) are assets to be saved (except during mosquito season). Homage is paid in our elementary schools to the value of saving endangered species and the places they live.

The problem is that it's turning out to be harder than we thought. It now appears certain that humans have underestimated the size of buffer zones needed to protect all the denizens of typical natural habitats. Last month there was a study from southern Ontario (On to Toronto!) where it was revealed that sparsely-traveled roads near forest ponds had a dramatically bad effect on many sensitive species ("A Little More Room"). Now comes a similar report from the frontlines of the American suburbs. According to Andrew Revkin in last Sunday's New York Times, a team of investigators has found that many swamp species seem to need wider buffers between the swamp and the proliferating backyards than were heretofore thought necessary. Among animals, it is usually the reptiles and amphibians who require the most breathing room. Other species -- Blue Jays, raccoons, deer -- seem to thrive along thin edges. Parallels exist in the plant world.

In fact, left to its own devices, land that has suffered a 50% decline in species will still look pretty good. There seems to be a worrisome tendency among humans to place a high aesthetic value on cleared spaces (an inheritance from our origins in East Africa?). Perhaps as civilized life becomes ever more unsurprising, there will develop in more people a countervailing taste for the messy and the alien. Actually, it may be happening already. Yukky creatures like newts and snakes seem to be winning new partisans, and there seems to be a broader appreciation -- even unto love -- of tangled forests and teeming funkiness. There lies hope.

 

TODAY ON THE SITE:

We are more or less finished with the redesign of the "cover page" and contents page of this Website. Was it worth the effort? Anything we can do to make things more easy for the experienced reader, more attractive for the neophyte?

 

Recent "Today" columns:

9/15: The Problem With Health
9/12: The Automobile Crisis of 2020
9/11: Gratifyingly Inept Adversary
9/10: The Porkbarrel Works for You
9/09: Climate Change Changes
9/08: More or Less Voluntary Simplicity
9/05: Man Bites Cougar
9/04: Logging
9/03: Fishing
9/02: Our Biodiversity Problems

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