Look at what's offered in grocery stores and farmers' markets, and it's easy to conclude that we're enjoying a bounty of food like humans have never enjoyed before. While it's true in one sense -- we lucky ones in developed countries have access to more food than we need on a daily basis -- it's also true that, in the grand scope of global biodiversity, our food supply is based on a poor and tiny number of crops and creatures.
While the world might boast as many as 80,000 edible plants, society has come to rely on only a small number for their food. In fact, about 90 percent of all our food comes from a mere 20 different species, and it's estimated that more than half of humanity's food comes from three crops alone: corn, rice and wheat.
Biodiversity, though, is healthy ... for us and for the rest of the world's plants and animals. Famed naturalist E.O. Wilson has warned about the dangers of society relying on too few a number of species. By depending on such a small number of plants and animals, we're placing ourselves at potential risk from a germ, virus or other threat that could decimate our primary food sources, he has said. It's a warning that showed some signs of reality this past year, with the collapse of so many honeybee colonies that we depend on for pollinating many of our crops, from nuts to avocados.
Earlier this year, the United Nations' Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) urged an international effort to protect biodiversity and the world's food supply. The FAO found that 20 percent of the globe' cattle, goat, pig, horse and poultry species are at risk of extinction, with many of those threatened species a critical source of food for the world's poorest people.
Protecting biodiversity also offers us the promise of many yet-undiscovered benefits to come. E.O. Wilson and others have pointed to the rich diversity of plants in the Amazon alone as a potential source of many future wonder drugs, fuels or other resources.
Because a diverse variety of plants and animals is so important to all of us, and because our modern lifestyle has pretty much written off the majority of the world's species from a beneficial-to-humanity stance, Green Living in coming weeks and months will focus on one less-known but beneficial plant or animal at a time ... so we can all better understand the promises of a biodiverse world, and work more effectively to protect that biodiversity.
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