Birds Korea: What’s in a Word?

Some words inspire, others leave us unmoved, their importance hidden. Take the word “love” for example. The mere mention of it provokes a thousand memories, some deeply personal, others collectively shared through songs, movies and great literature.  Love: it helps to nurture and define us. But talk of “biodiversity” (the shorthand for “biological diversity”) and who has much sense of its meaning and true value?

Wikipedia states coldly, “Biodiversity is the degree of variation of life.” This is an extremely dull definition, especially when describing the totality of everything that lives and has ever lived!  Biodiversity is life as tiny and brief as a virus, and as huge and ancient as the Amazon Rainforest and the Great Barrier Reef.  It includes all of the fish in the sea and all of the birds in the sky. It includes rice and wheat, fruits and vegetables.

Biodiversity includes the species we eat and it includes us. It even includes the genes and cells we are made of. Biodiversity, even more than love, nurtures us all individually and as a species.  And yet it is a word and concept that somehow remains stubbornly distant, in spite of our dependence on it every day for food and for a breathable atmosphere. Who even knew that this is the “United Nations Decade of Biodiversity”? And that the Republic of Korea will host the next intergovernmental Convention on Biological Diversity conference in October this year?

Our collective lack of passion for biodiversity is deeply worrying. As individuals we love and we mourn those both close and far from us. And yet as a species, we are unwittingly driving the loss of global biodiversity at ever faster rates – potentially threatening the long-term survival of every body and of almost every living thing.

We are now living within one of the worst extinction periods in our planet’s history. And we are the cause. In the past decade alone, here in the Republic of Korea we have witnessed the closing of the sea-gates at Saemangeum, leading to the deaths of millions of small animals, in turn pushing several bird species towards extinction. We have seen the damming and dredging of the nation’s four main rivers – leading to the extinction, locally and nationally, of many fish and plant species. And we have seen countless small quiet corners bulldozed and concreted and buried. And the rate of change and biodiversity loss we see here is not unique to any one nation. It is a global phenomenon.

Now is the time to conserve biodiversity. It is our web of life. As such, even small changes made in our own lives can help the whole, while actions taken collectively by organizations and communities can have an even greater positive impact.  We in Birds Korea, like many others, will be doing what we can throughout 2014 and beyond to help celebrate and conserve biodiversity. Would you like to join us?

For more on biodiversity conservation in Korea, please see: birdskorea.org