Biodiversity Bonanza
This blog post is a bit different from my typical story-centered format. It is part of an application for the the National Environmental Youth Advisory Council; an appointed position for the Environmental Protection Agency in the United States government. Or stated shorter; the NEYAC for the EPA of the USA.
Part of this application stipulates a media project:
Please include a media project that further explains your viewpoint on the intersection between youth communities and environmental issues, including highlighting urgent environmental or climate issues and their impacts on youth communities.
Choose one option below:
A 2-page single-spaced 1-inch margin essay
A 2-page single-spaced 1-inch margin letter to the editor
A 2-page single-spaced 1-inch margin blog post
A 2-minute video
A 2-minute podcast
8”x11” or smaller piece of artwork as a scanned copy
3-minute original song
The topic of this project was rather obvious to me: biodiversity loss. It is an environmental issue I am deeply passionate about and intersects with youth communities. But the format of the media project was not immediately clear.
I was first drawn to the song option. I was able to come up with some lyrical poetry, but songwriting is hard.
So much biodiversity
It’s all so pretty
But a million species at risk, what a pity
I even wrote a sick rap breakdown:
When I was young I wanted to be an oceanographer,
take pictures and explore coral reefs, be a marine photographer
But now the corals are bleaching, temperatures breaching new highs, ecosystem collapse is far-reaching and species are saying their good byes
It got harder when I got to the music-writing part of the song. I started with GarageBand and proceeded to spend 20 minutes comparing different dumb machines. Without having made anything resembling a song I decided to try a different approach.
I am a pretty decent trombone player and thought about improvising on the trombone to back myself, but a heartfelt song about biodiversity loss is probably not best accompanied by trombone.
I also lost some confidence in my song-writing ability when I asked chat-GPT to “please write me a rap about biodiversity loss” and it wrote a very competent song.
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(Verse 1)
Yo, listen up, I got a tale to unfold,
'Bout a crisis that's hidden, but it's takin' its toll,
Biodiversity loss, yeah, it's a silent war,
The planet's in danger, we can't ignore no more.
From rainforests to oceans, every ecosystem,
Facing destruction, man, we gotta resist 'em,
Species disappearing, it's a heart-wrenchin' sight,
If we don't act now, it's gonna be a long night.
(Chorus)
Biodiversity, the web of life we share,
It's time to rise up, show the Earth that we care,
Let's protect the creatures, the plants, and the bees,
For a world full of life, for you and for me.
(Verse 2)
We're losing habitats, it's like a symphony fading,
Animals and plants, their futures we're trading,
Deforestation, pollution, and climate change,
Got our ecosystems caught in a deadly exchange.
Coral reefs bleaching, ice caps slowly melt,
Humanity's choices have dealt a heavy welt,
But we can't sit back, gotta fight the good fight,
Preserve the balance, bring back the light.
(Chorus)
Biodiversity, the web of life we share,
It's time to rise up, show the Earth that we care,
Let's protect the creatures, the plants, and the bees,
For a world full of life, for you and for me.
(Verse 3)
Imagine a world where the forests thrive,
Where the rivers run clean, and creatures survive,
A world of harmony, where all life has worth,
Let's make that vision real, give our planet new birth.
Educate, innovate, and change our ways,
Promote sustainable living, for brighter days,
Every choice we make, every step we tread,
Can help restore the balance, heal what we've bled.
(Chorus)
Biodiversity, the web of life we share,
It's time to rise up, show the Earth that we care,
Let's protect the creatures, the plants, and the bees,
For a world full of life, for you and for me.
(Outro)
So let's unite as one, let the message resound,
Biodiversity's value, let's spread it around,
In this rap, I've dropped the knowledge, now you know the score,
It's time to act, my friend, 'cause the Earth we adore.
Without a better Idea, took Chat-GPT’s lyrics and put them into a few AI song makers. Below are the results.
They had an audio only generator and separate software that generated audio and video.
The video generation came with a score. This is a sample.
There are other applications like elf.tech that take an already sung song and remask the voice (elf.tech turns your voice into Grimes, a tech girl-boss who has more than 6 million monthly listeners on Spotify). I don’t have any singing voice, but luckily there are other AI services that read text. I sent the AI generated text through an AI text reader then sent it through the AI voice reskinner to make this:
AI failed me. And with my own songwriting and performance skills falling short, I decided to go with the blog option for the NEYAC application.
Biodiversity 101
I was going to use the United Nations’ definition of biodiversity to save myself the work of writing a definition, but it turns out the UN has at least 234 official definitions across reports, laws, and treaties; plus more unofficial definitions found on websites and documents.
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Biological diversity — or biodiversity — is the variety of life on Earth, in all its forms, from genes and bacteria to entire ecosystems such as forests or coral reefs. The biodiversity we see today is the result of 4.5 billion years of evolution, increasingly influenced by humans.
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The variability among living organisms from terrestrial, marine, and other ecosystems. Biodiversity includes variability at the genetic, species, and ecosystem levels.
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The variability among living organisms from all sources including, inter alia, terrestrial, marine and other aquatic ecosystems and the ecological complexes of which they are part; this includes diversity within species, between species and of ecosystems. (Convention on Biological Diversity, Art. 2 - Use of terms) - - - The numbers and relative abundances of different genes (genetic diversity), species, and ecosystems (communities) in a particular area.
This is rather unhelpful. I am defining biodiversity as:
The number of unique species that exist in an area.
Simple, clean, to the point.
This biodiversity encompasses the 2 million described species on the earth, but also many more that are undiscovered. Estimates for the total number of species range from 9 million to 100 million species, depending on the methods you use. The range is so large because it’s difficult to know how much we don’t know.
There are so many undescribed species, because discovering a new species is hard work.
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Find a cool bug. This may require expensive trips to sparsely populated places in the jungle, dangerous trips to active war zones, or it could just happen in your backyard by accident.
Prove that it’s not a cool bug that we already have a name for (you can do this using it’s genetic code in a technique called DNA barcoding or by comparing morphological traits to close relatives — this may involve field trips to museums). This step is hard.
Collect a ‘type specimen’. A type specimen is an insect that gets put in a collection and is officially that species so that other insects that are collected have a physical specimen to be compared to. It is also helpful to have a male and female, so try and collect those. A few backups would also be great, and maybe a nymph — so collect multiple of your rare new species.
Name your new species (this is the fun part). It’s a little tacky to name the species after yourself, but most other things are ok.
Publish a paper with these details.
Wait for the general reaction and see if anyone publishes a paper saying that you’re wrong.
Tip: the easiest way to discover a new species is to find a group that is understudied; but in these groups it can be hard to tell what is already discovered and what is new.
Described vs Estimated Total Species
An estimation on number of species described vs estimated number of species. I went with this chart by Russell Garwood because it had the best graphic design - not because of the accuracy of the numbers.
Biodiversity Loss
Biodiversity loss is well, the loss of this biodiversity, and it is happening across the country and world. Around 1 million of the 2 million known species are threatened by extinction and this is to say nothing of the millions of undiscovered species. Entire ecosystems are also disappearing; lets look at coral reefs for a particularly scary example.
Coral Reefs biodiversity hotspots that are part of the lifecycle for around a quarter of life in the ocean.
They are also a rather fragile ecosystems in regards to temperature increase. This is an especially poignant point when costal waters off the coast of Flordia are reaching more than 100 degrees F. The Florida coast has one of the largest barrier reefs on the world and it is quickly dying.
If global temperatures rise by 1.5 C an estimated 50-70% of coral reefs will die, if temperatures rise by 2.0 C an estimated 99% will die. Already around 50% of reefs are already dead.
Climate change is one of the biggest drivers of biodiversity loss, but there are many other factors including pollution, habitat destruction, and invasive species introduction.
On our current trajectory, practically all coral reefs will die, taking an untold number of species with them. I mentioned in my ‘sick rap breakdown’ that when I was young I wanted to be a marine photographer and take pictures of coral reefs while studying them. This is simply not a career path for youth today. Our world is starting to look less like Finding Nemo and more like Wall-E. This is one example of many; terrestrial ecosystems are also in trouble.
Intersection with Youth Communities
The problem of biodiversity loss is especially important for today’s youth communities:
Once a species or ecosystem is gone, it is gone forever; it can never be recovered. Youth will forever have that loss. I will never see a Xerces blue butterfly or a Rocky Mountain locust and that is a tangible loss for me and all youth.
I am not a philosopher but there is a case to be made that the beauty and wonder found in nature is an integral part of the human experience. Loosing that can contribute to a sense of uneasiness about the future, a feeling that is pervasive in youth.
The next question is “what can be done to solve this” but the answers to that are rather complicated and not generally agreed upon. I am limited to a “A 2-page single-spaced 1-inch margin blog post” for the NEYAC application, so perhaps I’ll cover that in a future blog post.
In personal updates; I have returned back to Michigan from my year in Asia! I still have a few more travel stories to tell, so look out for those (it takes a long time for me to write these posts, so there’s usually a little lag between the events and the post).
After that I’m not sure what comes next for me or this blog. I plan to stay in Michigan for the next 1-2 months then find another adventure. In the meantime I may post more scientific communication essays or even a fiction story or two.
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