(calm music)
- [Instructor] Biodiversity can be protected
and for this tutorial, we're gonna outline
some of the ways we can all do that
by talking about the need for more science
and more education.
To start things off, I wanna use an analogy from nature
to illustrate how science and education
can act together in a kind of, symbiosis.
Coral, as we know is a symbiotic organism
composed of the coral animal, really a colony
of tiny sea anemone-like animals
and the single cell plants
that live in the tissue of the animal
and provide nutrients to the little anemone-like beasties.
This boosts the ability of coral to make more coral
and to build reefs.
And so you get these enormous structures.
These reefs that are visible from space
through this wonderful synergy,
this symbiosis between these two organisms.
That's a result that's clearly a lot bigger
than just the sum of the parts.
And for me, that's a nice analogy.
A metaphor for the symbiotic way
that education and research work together.
It's not enough just to do the research.
Nobody is gonna realize the genius of the research
if you don't know how to tell people about it.
So, education works with the research
the same way that corals work symbiotically
with tiny plant symbionts
so that you build something much bigger.
Much more full of impact than either thing
would be on its own.
That's a nice little metaphor but what does that have to do
with saving the diversity of life on the planet?
The point is, more research and more education
are the two ways that I think will increase our ability
to protect biodiversity on Earth
so that we do end up with a result much greater
than the sum of the parts.
And that doesn't necessarily mean
more professional biologists.
It can mean the involvement of more interested
members of the public.
It can be the involvement of people who are doing
the boots on the ground kind of work.
Or it could mean something as distant as
remote sensing techniques
and the development of new technologies
that help us understand biodiversity.
The reason that we're emphasizing this aspect,
this building up of research resources
and educational capacity is that we really only know
about 10% of the life on Earth.
So what about that other 90%?
How do we go about figuring out where and what
that 90% might be?
And for this, I like to use the burning room analogy.
The Earth is in crisis.
It's like a house burning
and we don't know who's in all the rooms.
How do you know which rooms to go into first
to try and save anyone from the fire
if you don't have the knowledge of who is in each room,
much less where everybody is in all those rooms?
So we need to know the other 90% of life on Earth.
We need to be better armed to protect what we find
or protect more of what?
Do we mean, not to lose too many?
How many is too many?
Do we mean to stop extinction completely?
Or do we mean to preserve entire ecosystems?
I think these questions are still to a large extent
not yet answered.
We need more science to figure out how best to address
how quickly those rooms in the biodiversity house
are all burning.
We've seen how the unprecedented rates
of human-caused environmental change
can boost rates of extinction,
can boost the rate at which we lose environments
and in turn, reduce biodiversity
which can de-stabilize ecosystems.
So it seems to me that the only logical response
to this rate problem is to increase the rate of discovery
and the rate of dissemination of those results.
That's the only way to deal with the burning house
because if you charge in without the appropriate data,
without the appropriate science,
without the appropriate outreach and educational efforts,
without this critical symbiosis of research and education
you're gonna make costly mistakes
with dire results for all life on earth.
Ultimately, you do have to have good science.
For me certainly, expeditions are always going to be
crucial to that aspect.
You have to have direct observations.
You have to have people looking at what is happening
right there in the ecosystem and these observations
could be from people outside the ecosystem
or they can be expeditions that involve people
that are actually there working with
and living with the ecosystems upon which they depend.
Sure, you have to have people who can do the solid research
but who can also talk about it in a way that other people,
non-scientists can follow what they're saying
and perhaps even act on it.
That is, you need scientists who can communicate
with a broad audience.
You have to have people that are not just good at
talking to other scientists,
but can also talk to everyone from children to voters,
to policy makers and the people who live in
and rely on the very environments that we need to protect.
And I think those scientists need help.
I think they can work with educators
to develop outreach programs that work really, really well.
Again, we have and need the symbiosis of research
and education and that can be a symbiosis of people,
it can be a symbiosis of ideas.
We need to help people understand
that we are not divorced from that connectivity of life,
that we are a part of all of those ecosystems
and that an understanding
of how those ecosystems play a role
in every level of our existence
is really another way of making the protection
of biodiversity relevant
to every single person walking on this planet.
We are part of all those food webs.
Part of how all those ecosystems function
and ecosystems services which are explicitly framed
in the context of humans deriving benefit from ecosystems
rest on an understanding of what ecosystem function is.
The education component of the symbiosis,
the education to help people understand biodiversity
and ecosystem function and ecosystem services
can come in a lot of forms.
Some ways of getting the messages out
are clearly more efficient than others.
Some reach broader audiences than others
but their scope includes everything
from a scientist working one on one in their own lab
with a young student who's inspired by the work
that's being done there, to tweeting a result,
to going on television for an interview,
to developing educational videos,
to giving lectures and courses,
to having people come to a museum and walk through the halls
and explore messages about the connectivity of life
because knowledge is power
and with the world wide web, the lessons can be immediate.
To me, that's the single most amazing thing about
being alive today to experience this digital revolution
and to use it to solve the problems of the world.
This is where the symbiosis of science and education
is most powerful.
In these mass abilities that we have now
to disseminate information faster than ever before.
As long as this information is founded in appropriate,
testable science, there's hope that the symbiosis
can lead to action and to change
in the ways humans interact with their environments.
Data can be provided to policy makers.
Not only on what's happening,
but what the best steps might be to cause positive change.
Or, data can be used to organize reactions
to negative situations that harm biodiversity.
We can do that faster than ever before.
And what's really crucial, children can be inspired
to change the world around them.
I've seen it myself.
Any one of us who's ever interacted with kids
knows how important the internet is to them
and how important social media is to their lives.
How important the immediacy of information is to all of them
and we've all seen them act on what they see,
doing stuff in response to what they see on the internet.
It used to much more passive
but now they're taking a message and acting on it.
They can be inspired to change the world around them
as they grow and acquire the tools
to absorb and modulate
the information that they're taking in.
It starts with the research.
It starts with asking questions
and it continues with education
and talking about the answers.
It's hard to imagine but I was once a kid myself.
I inherited a world with problems
and I began to see what those problems were
and how I might investigate some solutions.
The next generation has to be encouraged
to continue those investigations
and contribute to that understanding
of our part in life's connectivity.