TEXT B Britain’s east midlands
were once the picture of English countryside, alive with flocks, shepherds,
skylarks and buttercups the stuff of fairytales. In 1941 George Marsh left
school at the age of 14 to work as a herdsman in Nottinghamshire, the East
Midlands countryside his parents and grandparents farmed. He recalls skylarks
nesting in cereal fields, which when accidentally disturbed would fly singing
into the sky. But in his lifetime, Marsh has seen the color and diversity of his
native land fade. Farmers used to grow about a ton of wheat per acre; now they
grow four tons. Pesticides have killed off the insects upon which skylarks fed,
and year-round harvesting has driven the birds from their winter nests. Skylarks
are now rare. "Farmers kill anything that affects production," says Marsh.
"Agriculture is too efficient." Anecdotal evidence of a looming
crisis in biodiversity is now being reinforced by science. In their
comprehensive surveys of plants, butterflies and birds over the past 20 to 40
years in Britain, ecologists Jeremy Thomas and Carly Stevens found significant
population declines in a third of all native species. Butterflies are the
furthest along--71 percent of Britain’s 58 species are shrinking in number, and
some, like the large blue and tortoiseshell, are already extinct. In Britain’s
grasslands, a key habitat, 20 percent of all animal, plant and insect species
are on the path to extinction. There’s hardly a corner of the country’s ecology
that isn’t affected by this downward spiral. The problem would
be bad enough if it were merely local, but it’s not: because Britain’s temperate
ecology is similar to that in so many other parts of the world, it’s the best
microcosm scientists have been able to study in detail. Scientists have sounded
alarms about species’ extinction in the past, but always specific to a
particular animal or place--whales in the 1980s or the Amazonian rain forests in
the 1990s. This time, though, the implications are much wider. The Amazon is a
"biodiversity hot spot" with a unique ecology. But in Britain, "the main drivers
of change are the same processes responsible for species’ declines worldwide,"
says Thomas. The findings, published in the journal Science, provide the first
clear evidence that the world is in the throes of a massive extinction. Thomas
and Stevens argue that we are facing a loss of 65 to 95 percent of the world’s
species, on the scale of an ice age or the meteorite that may have wiped out the
dinosaurs 65 million years ago. If so, this would be only the
sixth time such devastation had occurred in the past 600 million years. The
other five were associated with one-off events like the ice ages, a volcanic
eruption or a meteor. This time, ecosystems are dying a thousand deaths--from
overfishing and the razing of the rain forests, but also from advances in
agriculture. The British study, for instance, finds that one of the biggest
problems is nitrogen pollution. Nitrogen is released when fossil fuels burn in
cars and power plants--but also when ecologically rich heath lands are plowed
and fertilizers are spread. Nitrogen-rich fertilizers fuel the growth of tall
grasses, which in turn overshadow and kill off delicate flowers like harebells
and eyebrights. Even seemingly innocuous practices are
responsible for vast ecological damage. When British farmers stopped feeding
horses and cattle with hay and switched to silage, a kind of preserved short
grass, they eliminated a favorite nesting spot of corncrakes, birds known for
their raspy nightly mating calls; corncrake populations have fallen 76 percent
in the past 20 years. The depressing list goes on and on. Many
of these practices are being repeated throughout the world, in one form or
another, which is why scientists believe that the British study has global
implications. Wildlife is getting blander. "We don’t know which species are
essential to the web of life so we’re taking a massive risk by eliminating any
of them," say’s David Wedin, professor of ecology at the University of Nebraska.
Chances are we’ll be seeing the results of this experiment before too
long. The most suitable title for the passage would be ______.