This week, the foundation’s Environmental Affinity Group convened internationally renowned conservationists/ecologists Dan Janzen and Winnie Hallwachs, and presented a screening of “The Human Element,” James Balog’s urgent narrative about how environmental change is affecting the lives of everyday Americans.
On Sept. 17, in a sold-out event at The Dairy Arts Center – a grantee of Community Foundation Boulder County – the foundation’s Environmental Affinity Group (EAG) convened internationally renowned conservationists/ecologists Dan Janzen and Winnie Hallwachs, and presented a screening of “The Human Element,” James Balog’s urgent narrative about how environmental change is affecting the lives of everyday Americans.
“What’s the challenge? Stop the fires, let the forests come back in, and don’t shoot the animals,” said Dan early in his talk, describing – in a nutshell – how to achieve the preservation of species, and allow the “work” of wild biodiversity to occur.
“What can wild biodiversity do? $597K worth of annual environmental services,” continued Dan in a highly informative presentation – based on his 45 years of work in Costa Rica – about how a large and complex tropical national park can be “biodiversity developed,” and why that matters to the rest of the world.
Specifically, Dan and his wife, Winnie, are spearheading a bioliteracy project – BioAlfa – to map hundreds of thousands of species in Costa Rica. In this way, with continued sampling in coming years, the country is becoming what he calls “a huge mine canary” (i.e., a national biomonitor) for the biological metrics of climate change: who moves and where, and who survives and who dies in relation to ecosystems, elevations, towns, agriculture, seasons, precipitation, etc. Such biomonitoring helps guide the private sector, and other institutions and industries, in their planning, programs … and profit-making:
- Payments for Environmental Services (PES): In addition to compensating forest owners for the national public value of water, carbon, landscape, and other forest services, biomonitoring cost-effectively measures the biodiversity of a given forest, resulting in more accurate PES.
- Biomonitoring industrial disturbances: Every act of industrialization (e.g., deforestation, agriculture, geothermal energy, infrastructure, roads, change of land use, etc.) disturbs the biodiversity and ecosystem of a site. If the biodiversity of a country is barcoded, it’s possible to quantify the amount and extent of disturbance, and know or predict how it will continue in the future … as well as recognize analogs.
- Agriculture: Many wild species can damage (and pollinate) crops. With personal barcoders in farmers’ pockets, barcoding the wild and agroscape will provide agriculture a significant computerization capacity.
- Prospecting for biodiversity: Commercial use of wild biodiversity depends largely on knowing its species. Within a barcoded country, bioprospecting is made much easier.
- Medicine: Insects and other arthropods are transmitters of various tropical diseases. With the biodiversity of Costa Rica mapped, such species can be more easily followed and monitored in relation to climate change, deforestation, urbanization, forest restoration, and disease.
- Schools and universities: BioAlfa ensures that wild nature can be studied, appreciated, enjoyed, experienced, disseminated, and dissected by students in any grade … not only specialists.
- Ecotourism: Costa Rica’s wild areas are “huge books and green libraries unknown and almost unread.” Barcoding teaches tourists to read the forest like a newspaper, or a novel.
BioAlfa aims to “DNA barcode” Costa Rica by first organizing collection of specimens from which DNA barcodes can be easily extracted, thereby building a library of identified barcodes. For example, each animal species has a different DNA barcode, and – given rapid advances in sequencing genomes – it’s now possible to do DNA “readings” with thousands of individuals (including young people, farmers, tourists, and anyone with a mobile phone) in the field. “A barcoded country knows what it has in natural capital,” Dan summarized the globally significant experiment in tropical biodiversity restoration and conservation. Dan brings to BioAlfa 63 years’ field experience and 522 scientific papers. He’s also a DiMaura Professor of Conservation Biology at the University of Pennsylvania, and a recipient of numerous conservation awards – including the prestigious Kyoto Prize.
The EAG program – titled “Day of Inspiration and Connection” – continued with local photographer/filmmaker extraordinaire James Balog and his compelling, eye-opening documentary, “The Human Element.”
Following the four classical elements – air, earth, fire, and water –, “The Human Element” explores wildfires, hurricanes, sea level rise, coal mining, and changes in the air we breathe. “It’s an urgent story that aims to inspire a more balanced relationship between humanity and nature,” said James, who’s also founder and president of the Earth Vision Institute & Extreme Ice Survey. “We’ve structured the film around the four primal elements and how they shape our existence on this planet, while postulating that humanity is a force of comparable power.
“As we push outward and through the other elements (anthropacy), those elements push back and affect us. That’s the yin and yang we present in the film, built around human interest stories of people affecting – and being affected by – those elements.”
Continued James, “There’s a human interest story happening right now, right here in Boulder County. This has been a summer of toxic air – when you look at our changing air supply, we know we’re breathing in lots of crap from tail-pipe emissions, coal fire plants, oil and gas drilling, and smoke from wildfires.
“The consequences include increased incidents of asthma, as we show in the film. We found a family in Denver, all of whom are asthmatics.
“The human health story underlies the film’s narrative on broad philosophical and psychological levels. But the film also shows what we can do about it by addressing our perceptions of these issues.”
Thank you to INNOVO Foundation for their leadership and support of this event.
Community Foundation Boulder County’s Environmental Affinity Group comprises local donors who are passionate about working together to address environmental concerns. To learn more, contact Peggy Driscoll.
