Objective: Explain four ways in which biodiversity is important to ecosystems and humans.
Indigenous people often live in areas of great biodiversity. These groups are at the very least not damaging the ecosystems. This is likely due to a different view of the environment that fosters relationship and respect. For example, the Yanomamo “still living a lifestyle of intimate connection to their forest home” (Arms, 266). Many industrialized societies today have greatly contributed to the devastation of biodiversity. Indigenous knowledge of the environment often centers on relationships and respect and this fosters biodiversity.
Objective: Analyze the potential value of a single species.
For centuries, the King Salmon and other species have provided for the native people of Alaska. Sam remembers seeing a fish wheel catching three or four, maybe more every time it rotated and fish nets with twenty or thirty, sometimes even more, so that it was hard to pull out. People along the river, never thought of the salmon being depleted, it was unthinkable. How could something like that become real? Then gradually, the salmon population began a decline, and steadily dropped. How could this happen? If you look at fisheries all over the world, the same trend has happened and is still happening today. Overfishing, fishing without regard to how a fish population sustains itself, has been a part of the decline. Specifically, commercialization of fisheries and high seas fisheries without regard for the whole population, makes it easily possible for a fishery might collapse. One must try to understand how high seas’ fishing is done. (Demientieff)
Objective: Explain which types of threats are having the largest impact on biodiversity.
When colonizers arrived to the Americas, they thought that the environment was naturally abundant. However, they didn’t realize that the abundance was due to the indigenous people’s cultivating practices. (DeWitt)
Sam also explains that commercialization or exploiting natural species without regard of over doing it will have lasting consequences. (Demientieff)