Balancing The Biodiversity Account

Fall 2003


When you write a check for more money than you have in your account, the check bounces and you get a “nasty-gram” from the bank, which assesses a fee as a penalty for overdrawing. The solution? Refrain from writing checks until you can deposit more funds.

If only the answer to dwindling resources was always so simple. When natural resources—such as habitats and the species they support—are over-exploited, destroyed, or lost, they may be gone forever. We can’t make a new “deposit.” The resulting loss of biodiversity could lead to unknown and potentially catastrophic consequences for plant and animal species, for our environment, and ultimately for us. But how can people become informed and motivated enough to keep them from “overdrawing” our natural resources?

Ke Chung Kim has made a career of finding answers to this question. The entomologist and director of Penn State’s Center for BioDiversity Research believes that the only way to convince a public whose attitudes may be shaped by apathy, skepticism, or self-interest is to link the importance of biodiversity conservation to people’s everyday lives.

“Surveys show that fewer than 50 percent of people have even heard the term ‘biodiversity,’” Kim says. “Of those, only about 30 percent really know what it is. Many people think biodiversity only relates to the rainforests and has nothing to do with them. To grab people’s attention and help them understand the importance of biodiversity conservation, we have to find ways to make it relevant by connecting it to their daily lives.”

So Kim set out to create an educational publication that was attractive and readable. The 20-page publication, Biodiversity: Our Living World–Your Life Depends on It, is a primer packed with information, factoids, and illustrations about the natural world and the species that inhabit it.

The publication defines biodiversity as “the variety and variation of all species of plants, animals, fungi, and microbes, including their genetic makeup, their ecological roles, and their interrelationships in biological communities throughout the world ecosystems.” To move beyond this abstract definition and drive home the point of why biodiversity matters to you and me, Kim came up with the concept of a “biodiversity account,” the number of species needed to produce an item for human consumption or to maintain ecological services that support humans. The reader learns how multitudes of species interact to make possible the food we eat, the clothes we wear, and the houses in which we live.

“For example, let’s look at a hamburger dinner with French fries and apple pie for dessert,” Kim explains. “Obviously, to have ground beef, you need a cow. The hamburger bun requires wheat flour and yeast, which is a fungus. For French fries, you need potatoes and corn or soybean oil to fry them. To make ketchup, mustard, pickles, and other hamburger fixings you need additional plants and plant-derived spices. The apple pie filling contains sugar and one or more varieties of apples and spices, and the crust contains wheat flour and vegetable shortening.

“You might have 15 or 20 species just on your plate,” he continues. “But the cow might eat stored grain and several of 17 species of pasture plants, including grasses, legumes, and weeds. To grow apples, potatoes, and tomatoes you need pollinators, such as honey bees. All plants grow in ecosystems that depend on many species—such as insects, spiders, earthworms, fungi, and bacteria—for energy and nutrient cycling. Add it all up and the biodiversity account for this one meal might be more than 400 species.”

Kim’s publication contains several such examples. The number of tree species needed to build the average house? At least 50, and that doesn’t count the hundreds of species of fungi, bacteria, animals, and plants that support and depend on the forest ecosystems where those trees grow.

What about that tuna fish you ate for lunch yesterday? It ate mostly mackerels and herrings, which in turn fed on dozens of species of smaller fish, crustaceans, squids, worms, and plankton. Thus, the biodiversity account of tuna includes easily 50 species of animals as food. “If pollution or other human activities harm these marine species, tuna populations can suffer,” says Kim.

“The bottom line,” he says, “is that biodiversity is the basis upon which ecological systems operate. One or two species lost may not seem significant, but when a particular species that’s crucial to maintaining the system disappears, the system could malfunction and eventually collapse. We don’t know at what level of loss this will happen, and figuring that out is a challenge for science in the future. But we can’t wait until then. We may already have lost species that we didn’t even know existed. We need to figure out what we have and save as much as we can.”

Kim is involved in several efforts to do just that. Besides founding the Center for BioDiversity Research, he leads the Pennsylvania Invertebrates Biodiversity Project, a survey designed to identify as many invertebrate species as possible in the state. He has conducted biodiversity assessments for the National Park Service and for the Indiantown Gap National Guard Training Center. He is curator of Penn State’s Frost Entomological Museum, which is a source of important reference collections for biodiversity research related to arthropods, and he chairs the DMZ Forum, a group that has worked to maintain the Demilitarized Zone in his native Korea as a biodiversity preserve.

Kim also has been instrumental in building an infrastructure for biodiversity conservation policy within and across state government departments. Several state agencies provided funding and support for Biodiversity: Our Living World–Your Life Depends on It, and the Department of Environmental Protection has used the publication widely in its educational outreaches, including with K-12 classes in school districts around the state and in connection with 2002 Earth Day festivities.

In Kim’s mind, such public education is the first priority in the campaign to save our valuable biodiversity. “Unless the public understands what’s at stake, none of our other efforts will go very far.”

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Ke Chung Kim is professor of entomology, curator of the Frost Entomological Museum, and director of the Center for BioDiversity Research. Funding for Biodiversity: Our Living World–Your Life Depends on It was provided by the Pennsylvania Wild Resources Conservation Fund, with support from the Pennsylvania Department of Conservation and Natural Resources, the Pennsylvania Game Commission, and the Pennsylvania Fish and Boat Commission. It is available online at pubs.cas.psu.edu/freepubs/uf017.html.