A Litter Ration

If the hip bone is connected to the thigh bone, so then is the leaf connected to the fish. Huh? We call it an ecosystem, and in addition to the climate change fomented by the excessive burning of fossil fuels, man’s actions have roiled through nature, contracting available resources to increasing numbers of species and decimating nature’s food chain. Even if we stop looking at individual species, avoiding the specific “threatened” or “endangered” epithets, entire categories of nature’s creatures face severe contraction from man’s over-consumption. Forgetting about direct pollution from sloppy production processes and controls, we are disrupting population of wildlife in other dire ways. You can see it in the disappearance of about a third of “necessity of pollination” bee population… and there is one more example worth noting.

Published by a team of uber-prestigious academics (including Cambridge from the UK, York University in Canada, etc.), Forests fuel fish growth in freshwater deltas, a research study explores the impact on cutting down forests for urban expansion or capturing additional farmland: “Aquatic ecosystems are fuelled by biogeochemical inputs from surrounding lands and within-lake primary production. Disturbances that change these inputs may affect how aquatic ecosystems function and deliver services vital to humans. Here we test, using a forest cover gradient across eight separate catchments, whether disturbances that remove terrestrial biomass lower organic matter inputs into freshwater lakes, thereby reducing food web productivity.” Nature.com, June 11^th. What?

In English: leaves and other natural debris fall into rivers and lakes, winding up feeding the fish and other animal life in those bodies of water. Loose the forests, the food disappears for the critters in those freshwater venues… and they just die off, get too small and unhealthy or cannot reproduce.

“‘We found fish that had almost 70% of their biomass made from carbon that came from trees and leaves instead of aquatic food chain sources,’ explained lead author Andrew Tanentzap from the University of Cambridge's Department of Plant Sciences… ‘While plankton raised on algal carbon is more nutritious, organic carbon from trees washed into lakes is a hugely important food source for freshwater fish, bolstering their diet to ensure good size and strength,’ he added.” BBC.co.uk, June 13^th. So stuff on the land, not from the water, is the major life-source for freshwater fish? Yup!

“Dr Tanentzap observed: ‘Where you have more dissolved forest matter you have more bacteria, more bacteria equals more zooplankton… ‘Areas with the most zooplankton had the largest, fattest fish,’ he added, referring to the study's results… Dr Tanentzap added that the findings could also have implications for human food security. ‘It's estimated that freshwater fishes make up more than 6% of the world's annual animal protein supplies for humans - and the major and often only source of animal protein for low income families across Bangladesh, Indonesia and the Philippines.’” BBC.com.

In a cruel twist of fate, nature also has a way of culling humans in a nasty Darwinian mix. As swelling populations fill crowded cities, people are having fewer children – urban living costs too much for folks to have more than a child or maybe two. In impoverished lands, where having children substitutes for social security and cheap labor, drought, wearing out the land and supporting resources, creates life-extinguishing droughts and food shortages, starts wars and, well, kills millions. If you really believe that we are not intimately linked with the quality of our environment, when will nature’s call to “less or death” reach your family? This generation? Or is this the “gift that keeps on taking” that we are passing on to future generations?

I’m Peter Dekom, and the good news is that we really can do something about it… but we have to start!