Species in Trouble
Stuart Pimm and His Students Seek Out the 'Hottest of the
Hot Spots' in Their Efforts to Stem Global Loss of Biodiversity
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"That can't happen without some serious scholarship
support," stressed Pimm, who recalls a recent Christmas
card bearing a $2,500 check for his program. Donations that
size have historically kept the Pimm Group going, he said.
"We will probably raise $50,000 this year, the biggest
grants of which might be $5,000. That's something I'd like
to change." The Nicholas School has "a wonderful
group of fund-raisers," he says. "I'd like to build
up an endowment for getting students into these areas each
year, so that we don't have to live such a hand-to-mouth existence."
All these goals explain why Pimm always seems to be bustling.
"There will be many days this year when I'll be up before
dawn out in the field," he said. "There will be
other days when I'll be in front of congressmen trying to
get the message across." An ecological theoretician early
in his academic career, he also logs plenty of time in front
of a computer keyboard "as far from the forests and the
jungles as you can imagine." Both Pimm and his students
relish the specialized technical help available at Duke, such
as the remote sensing expertise of Dean
Urban, associate professor of landscape ecology,
and Patrick
Halpin, assistant professor of the practice of
landscape ecology. "The Nicholas School offers a wonderful
opportunity for us to pick up a broad range of necessary skills,"
he said.
It is perhaps no surprise, then, that it took him five years
to write The World According to Pimm. Describing
himself as "a measurer of biodiversity," Pimm said
the book is in part a way of explaining what he does. After
initially envisioning a book for scientists, "I realized
that the state of the planet is a hugely important subject
that every educated person ought to know about," he said.
Then he told himself that "auditing the planet is about
as dull a subject as you could possibly imagine.
"Yet it isn't dull," he finally decided. "We
have the most amazing adventures while we're doing it all
over the world." So he ended up "telling it as an
adventure story."
Pimm's book appropriately begins aboard a helicopter, where
he is being whisked up the precipitous, vertigo-inducing slopes
of the Hawaiian volcano Haleakala to reach a cold and rainy
research camp at 6,000 feet. Readers later learn the pros
and cons of working in an Amazon rain forest. The cons range
from "the thundershowers that drench you in minutes"
to "the shots against yellow fever; the nauseating taste
of the Lariam pills that ward off malaria; the threat of leishmaniasis;
and the ghastliness of its treatment if you contract it."
With the entertainment also comes some stark math.
Earth now has six billion humans. Land that covers an eighth
of it generates 99 percent of our food. Humans already use
up about 40 percent of the global production of plant material.
Most of the plants we use come from tropical places where
forests are shrinking by 10 percent per decade. About 90 percent
of the ocean is a "biological desert," and we use
up one third of the annual production from the remaining 10.
There are probably 10 million kinds of animals and plants,
about 10 of which should go extinct each year according to
past "natural" attrition rates. Extinctions are
now accelerating to between 1,000 and 10,000 times the natural
rate.
Monte Basgall is a senior writer with Duke's
Office of News and Communications and specializes in science
coverage.
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