‘Rewilding’ the World: A Bright Spot for Biodiversity
As burgeoning human populations place greater pressure on wild areas, a strategy is emerging for preserving threatened lands and wildlife. Known as ‘rewilding,’ it involves expanding core wilderness areas, connecting them via corridors that allow humans and animals to co-exist, and protecting and reintroducing top predators.
by Caroline Fraser
(Check out my report on rewilding at Yale Environment 360)
Fireflies’ Glow Helps Researchers Track Cancer Drug’s Effectiveness
In a scintillating example of biodiversity providing crucial tools for medical research, ScienceDaily.com reports that researchers have borrowed light-producing genes from firefly genes to create a new diagnostic technique called “bioluminescence imaging” that may help determine the effectiveness of cancer drugs. “The technique requires a substrate called luciferin to be added to the bloodstream, which carries it to cells throughout the body. When luciferin reaches cells that have been altered to carry the firefly gene, those cells emit light.”
For more about the interdependence between health, medicine, and biodiversity, see Sustaining Life: How Human Health Depends on Biodiversity , an essential new book from Oxford University Press that has been enthusiastically endorsed by Al Gore.
Photograph by Alanna Krause
14 NEW SPECIES DISOVERED IN BRAZIL
Researchers have discovered a legless lizard, a tiny woodpecker, and this fat-tailed mouse opossum of the genus Thylamys, along with 11 other suspected new species in Brazil’s Cerrado, a wooded grassland that once covered an area half the size of Europe, but is now being converted to cropland and ranchland at twice the rate of the neighboring Amazon rainforest. Scientists from Conservation International and Brazilian universities found 14 species believed new to science – eight fish, three reptiles, one amphibian, one mammal, and one bird – in and around the Serra Geral do Tocantins Ecological Station.
Drosera anglica, the insectivorous English Dew, from the Darwin’s Plants gallery at the Darwin Digital Library.
"The most complete and powerful argument I have seen for the importance of preserving biodiversity." - Al Gore
An amazing new book— Sustaining Life: How Human Health Depends on Biodiversity — offers an astounding array of reasons, both selfish and wondrous, for human beings to protect non-human life on earth.
