Articles related to biodiversity and biomimicry were also looked into and analysed. This was to get an idea of whether the decline of biodiversity are getting recognised and whether the public are doing enough to help sustainability.
New climate projections paint bleak future for tropical coral reefs
As greater atmospheric carbon dioxide boosts sea temperatures, tropical corals face a bleak future. New climate model projections show that conditions are likely to increase the frequency and severity of coral disease outbreaks, reports a team of researchers led by Cornell University scientists, published today (May 4) in Nature Climate Change.
Conserving coral reefs is crucial to maintaining the biodiversity of our oceans and sustaining the livelihoods of the 500 million people that depend on coral reefs. Coral reefs are also important to the global economy, as the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration estimates the world's coral reef systems are worth about $30 billion annually.
In the agricultural world, scientists have been modeling disease risk and outbreak timing with weather for decades. However, these new model outputs of future conditions on reefs are the first to examine how expected changes in climate affect the risk of diseases among wildlife in the marine environment. The research team also compares their model outputs for coral disease with expected future changes in the more widely publicised impact of coral bleaching. "Perhaps more than any findings to date, these results indicate that increases in the prevalence and severity of coral diseases will be a major future driver of decline and changes in coral reef community composition, and at least as great a driver as coral bleaching," said Jeffrey Maynard, a postdoctoral researcher in ecology and evolutionary biology and lead author of "Projections of Climate Conditions That Increase Coral Disease Susceptibility and Pathogen Virulence."
Warmer conditions increase the susceptibility of corals to the pathogens that cause disease and increase pathogen abundance and virulence. The climate stress compounds the strain caused by human activities near reefs, such as marine pollution, sedimentation caused by coastal development and overfishing. The research team examined the implications of both of these types of stress to corals to produce global maps of disease risk. Coral reef managers and policymakers now can use these maps to target actions to reduce stress on coral reefs and to test approaches to reduce disease impact. "This is the first attempt to project the effects of synergism between climate and human-related stressors on risk of coral disease," said senior author Drew Harvell, Cornell professor of ecology and evolutionary biology.
The scientists say that the likely future impact of coral disease on coral reef community composition and condition so far has been under-appreciated, which they hope to change by publishing this scientific paper.
There are many areas where disease causes more coral mortality than coral bleaching. For this reason, Maynard and the other scientists suggest warning systems be built into coral disease response plans to help conservationists and managers reduce disease impacts. "To develop these warning systems, there is a vital need to expand upon the current, limited suite of tools that forecast conditions conducive to coral disease outbreaks. This paper is a start in that direction," said Maynard.
- Science Daily
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2015/05/150504141903.htm
- Science Daily
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2015/05/150504141903.htm
Biomimicry: Looking to nature to solve human problems
Humans have been gaining inspiration from nature for many thousands of years, yet as a formal concept "biomimicry" – which explores how we can learn from nature to solve human problems – is more recent. The word itself was coined by Janine Benyus (author of the 1997 book Biomimicry) and originates from the Greek bios (life) and mimesis (imitation). For her, biomimicry is the conscious emulation of life's genius.
Across the globe, there has been a steady increase in biomimetic innovations helping to design and deploy products and services in more sustainable ways. There are ample examples of such innovations: the Shinkansen Bullet Train of the West Japan Railway inspired by the Kingfisher's beak, the Eastgate Building in Zimbabwe taking inspiration from termites' self-cooling mounds, and British Telecom using a biological model based on ant behaviour to overhaul its phone network. Such scientific innovations inspired by nature are a vitally important part of our transformation to a more sustainable future.
Our western scientific paradigm underpins our worldview of nature and is rooted in rationalism. Rationalism seeks certainty in an uncertain world – repeatable experiments under controlled conditions. Within this science, parts of nature are extracted from their environment and examined in isolation. This approach has its merits and is a powerful tool of analysis, yet (like everything in life) it has limitations.
In separating content from context, the organism under analysis becomes an object of examination in a way that marginalises any relationships it has within its natural environment. Our quantification brings clarity of definition but in doing so overlooks the embedded qualities and relationships inherent throughout nature.
An overly-rationalistic approach to biology has led towards a way of viewing nature where the unit of evolution is seen as a discrete building block – "the selfish gene" – de-emphasising the interplay of relationships. The more we delve into nature beyond the confines of rationalistic science, the more we find all aspects of life – cells, organisms and their ecosystems – are continually sensing and responding to each other. Far from the object of examination being separate and definitive from its context, we find that it is in a continual dialogue.
Recently, a growing number of ecologists have been exploring the relationships we find throughout nature. What may have seemed like competitive or selfish relations between one organism and another, when viewed within the wider context can be seen as fostering resilience at the ecosystem level, which benefits the whole and the parts.
Ditto for us, as humans are very much a part of this participatory way of life. Our mind-body-environment relationship is in a continual dialogue between sensing and responding; improvising and participating beyond any pre-determined rationality. As the former president of the British Mycological Society, Alan Rayner, explores in his book NatureScope, evolution involves the continuous attuning of content and context, much like an improvisational dance. Dog-eat-dog individualistic competition is, at best, an oversimplification; an incomplete assumption which is certainly unwise to found our global socio-economic model upon.
Through our practical desire to understand scientifically the interplay of nature, we extract and define things in an abstract way which separates things from their lived-in context. This serves us well in our exploitation of nature, yet if we don't think about both content and context we may see separation within nature that is not actually there.
So often in today's busy humdrum life we become too confined to purely rationalistic processes as we seek to analyse, define and extrapolate the world around us. This analysis has led to great scientific and socio-economic advancement from medicine to mechanisation; yet it can also mean we overlook a deeper feeling and perception of life.
There are of course many scientific explorers who are intuitively attuned to nature's ways, yet traditional scientific thought has encouraged people to prioritise the separation of nature at the expense of attuning with it.
In this regard, we often find our scientific explorations lack empathy for the "objects" of their examination. For instance, recently there has been excitement about using spiders' silk for human benefit. One article proudly illustrates this scientific endeavour with photos of spiders lined up and pinned down alive in a laboratory while silk is extracted from them. Is this really the "conscious emulation of nature's genius" that Benyus described? It's the kind of hubris that got us into this unsustainable mess in the first place.
Mimesis within the context of its original Greek meaning requires the imitator to embody that which is being imitated. This goes to the heart of what makes us human: through perception, imagination and empathetic identification, we can share in what another feels and in doing so transform what we perceive into what we experience. It's wisdom sourced from our ability to love.
It is true that our analytical examination of nature is important, but only as part of a deeper, richer participatory engagement. If the deeper resonance of our nature is overlooked, such biomimetic transformations fail to address the root cause of our unsustainable way of life. We deal with symptoms (carbon emissions, waste to landfill, ocean dead zones, social inequality, factory farming) while neglecting the underlying cause (attuning our self-other-nature relationship).
Put more bluntly, scientific rationalism will not get us out of this mess on its own; in fact, it will only add to our dysfunctional way of living unless it goes hand-in-hand with a deeper participatory way of engaging with life: scientific, sensuous and spiritual.
- The Guardian http://www.theguardian.com/sustainable-business/blog/biomimcry-nature-human-problems-sustainability
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