Hélène Leriche

The ‘biodiversity crisis’: a catastrophe for life on Earth

The biodiversity crisis is the phrase on everybody’s lips these days, because what we’re facing is a mass obliteration of species, triggered for the very first time by human activity. Once upon a time, extinctions were caused by natural catastrophes. The same applies to the climate, which is essential to all life and now under threat from modern human activities. The sixth biodiversity crisis and the climate emergency are global changes that are combining and amplifying one another, hindering life on Earth and its ability to evolve – which is what has enabled it to adapt up to now.

But what exactly is biodiversity?

This is a relatively recent term used to describe a reality as old as time itself: the existence of life, which has continuously evolved over billions of years, and on which our own existence is entirely dependent. As it’s important to define things, I prefer to think about biodiversity as “the variety of interactions between organisms in changing environments” to quote anthropologist and economist Jacques Weber. It’s about variety at all scales; for organisms of any type, humans and human organisations included. Interactions in time and space. And above all the changes, the dynamics. A living thing that only exists because it evolves on a path, like a tightrope walker on a bicycle who only remains upright because he moves forward, to use Pierre-Henri Gouyon’s metaphor. In this dynamic, all organisms co-evolve, developing cooperative relationships, providing us with a “global living material” into which our lives are inescapably woven and with which it is a matter of working as a team, as suggested by Robert Barbault.