Far be it from me to want to ruin readers' holidays, but the fact is that there is something insidiously sinister behind the exuberance of many tropical islands around the world. From the Bahamas to Fernando de Noronha, from Hawaii to the Galapagos, it is very common for globalized tourist destinations to be scorched earth from an ecological point of view.
Despite the multitude of colors and swaying coconut trees, the flora and fauna of these places are usually nothing more than a shadow of their original richness or a simple catastrophe of invasive species, with the occasional native survivor in between.
Some of these surprising and not very encouraging stories are told with precision and vividness in “A Naturalist in the Anthropocene”, a new book by Mauro Galetti, researcher at the Center for Research in Biodiversity and Climate Change at Unesp in Rio Claro.
Over the years, I have written several times about studies signed by Galetti and published in the main scientific journals in the world; now, with the book, he shows that it is possible to put together the puzzle of his specific discoveries to explain how our species became a geological force as powerful, in a certain sense, as the sum of all the volcanoes on Earth or the fall of an asteroid.
This is the idea behind the Anthropocene, the so-called “Age of Humanity”, which, although its official classification was rejected by an international committee of geologists some time ago, is still a tremendously illuminating way of understanding what has happened to us. the world from the 20th century to now.
As an expert on the web of relationships that ties animal and plant species to one another, Galetti tells this story from the perspective of biodiversity. It is difficult to imagine, for example, that the “forest” of one of the Galápagos Islands — from a distance, with all the appearance of a “natural” tropical forest — is actually made up mainly of guava trees (from the tropical Americas) and European mulberry trees. . And this is in a Pacific archipelago, almost 1,000 km away from the continent.
The same goes for Fernando de Noronha, whose forest areas are now dominated by trees from Australia and Africa. Islands, it is true, because of their restricted biodiversity and little natural competition, are notoriously vulnerable to invaders, but they are only the most extreme case of an increasingly omnipresent remodeling of the Earth's ecosystems, caused by agriculture, livestock and trade. internationally so dear to Homo sapiens.
Another poignant story is that of orphaned fruits. Forged by evolution to be swallowed by large mammals and birds, which would later defecate the seeds, planting the next generation of a tree, many of them today no longer have seeders. The reason, of course, is that the first human impact on a given ecosystem is usually the removal of large animals, which are particularly tasty and require little-disturbed forests.
Fruits like pequi and cacao are probably orphans of the giant mammals of the South American Ice Age, but even trees that could be seeded by tapirs and wild pigs are now running out of threshing floors and verges.
Despite documenting so much ecological rubble, Galetti's narrative has nothing defeatist about it. There are countless examples that it is possible to avoid the loss of the gigantic wealth of life that we have inherited, he highlights. Every species counts. And we need to act.
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