It’s a question of discipline,’ the little prince told me later on. ‘when you’ve finished washing and dressing each morning, you must tend your planet.

– Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

In just a few seconds I’ll start sounding like a broken record.

It’s that love peace higher self-seeking bullshite again, but remember what a great bio-loving fertilizer manure can be. It feeds growth. And anyway, we are all broken a bit, then reassembled, again and again, and it all goes on karmic record supposedly, so…

Let me grab another great opportunity for some more ‘we-are-one’ hyping and unicorn-glitter-farting on the occasion of the International Day for Biological Diversity (IDB), well into the UN-established Decade on Biodiversity ending in 2020.

This year the focus of biodiversity awareness is on its conservation connected to sustainable tourism. Biodiversity can significantly affect many aspects of tourism, but most importantly, this is definitely true vice versa as well. Sustainable tourism can contribute to reducing threats, maintaining or even increasing wildlife populations and biodiversity values through tourism revenue, while in turn a rich biodiversity, at the level of species and ecosystems, can provide an important foundation for many aspects of tourism.

Ideally, protecting biodiversity and maintaining a sustainable tourism could be a well-functioning symbiotic connection, in which tourism would serve to raise biodiversity awareness, protect areas and restore habitat, and reduce its damage to biodiversity, while also growing economically, in a bio-friendly way.

And that’s just it! The infuriating part, when we realize how many of the human-induced phenomena could be managed in a more biodiversity-conscious way and the damage we cause to it – the damage we cause to ourselves! – could and can be, at least partially, avoided. Even if it meant less bank account boosts for a small percentage of ‘us’, who, perched on their diamond potties power-play around with the fate of the rest of ‘us’. Absurd.

Hopefully, the results of this year’s biodiversity-focused endeavors are more visibly fruitful than some of the previous ones. Undoubtedly, I am no expert, and usually only see just a segment of the big picture, but I wonder what the tangible results of the 2004 ‘Biodiversity: Food, Water and Health for All’ or the 2013 ‘Water and Biodiversity’ campaign have added up to, when contaminated water is still a massive health risk (e.g. Dakota Access pipeline), humans are still fighting for their right not to be, at least not overtly, poisoned by GMO’s, while other living beings haven’t even got this privilege, and all the while we know that Earth, biodiversity and all its goods and ecological services could nourish all life on the planet, unless crippled, damaged or prevented by us, humans, in doing so.

Have we made any noteworthy steps, have we trod on any new paths in the 2005-2015 International Decade for Action ‘WATER FOR LIFE’, or was it again only cosmetic surgery, skin-deep pain-relief?

What a bad joke we are, people! Whose emergence and impact here on this planet has contributed more to the ongoing reduction of biodiversity and a loss of genetic diversity than any other life form. It even has a name, just so you know, Holocene extinction, which is especially effective through habitat destruction.

You’d think we’d be more mindful, knowing that more than 99.9 percent of all species (over 5 billion) that ever lived on earth are today extinct, mainly due to rapid environmental changes. There have already been five major mass extinctions since life began on Earth about 3.5 billion years ago, the most recent one being the Cretaceous-Paleogene extinction that ended Dinoworld.

So, the timeworn, but forever timely, Cree Indian prophecy comes to mind now, for the umptieth time:

When the last tree has been cut down, the last fish caught, the last river poisoned, only then will we realize that one cannot eat money.

Humans are great at making things disappear. We seem to be magicians, who with the wave of their industrial-revolutionary wand have performed unbelievable magic tricks. Like turning the colorful corals of the Great Barrier Reef, the largest living ‘thing’ on Earth, a deadly white color.

Today, one of the world’s greatest natural wonders, a 2,300km-long ecosystem visible from outer space even, is in imminent danger of mortality at a level higher and over an area greater than ever before. The way I see it, ‘bleaching’, when colorful corals die, is just another way of bleeding. Thank you global warming, thank you ‘us’. I guess the 2012 – Marine Biodiversity awareness campaign didn’t get there in time.

I don’t want to sound too off-putting. We do our best to fight off aliens though! The 2009 theme for IDB was ‘invasive alien species’, and we’re still just talking about ourselves. Nothing extraterrestrial about it. The threat is posed by plants, animals, pathogens and other organisms that are non-native to an ecosystem and are introduced or spread outside their natural habitat, eventually causing economic or environmental harm and affecting human health. Why is it happening? Directly or indirectly, because of humans, and climate change, pollution, habitat loss and all the other kinds of disturbance we induce.

Indirectly, when the originally Amazonian water hyacinth has spread on five continents, blocking waterways, killing aquatic wildlife and creating ideal conditions for disease. When deadly new disease organisms like avian influenza attack humans and animals around the world. Then there are the results of more direct meddling. Don’t think that Killer Bees is merely a low-grade horror film title. It’s what you get when people want to cross-breed the African honey bee with European ones to increase honey production (more!more!more!), but then accidentally let 26 swarms escape quarantine. That was in Brazil in 1957. This year, on the other hand, for the first time in U.S. history, an insect, the tawny patch bumble bee more precisely, was placed on the endangered species list. It feels as if we’re killing Maya the Bee, one of my childhood cartoon friends.

So, considering our achievements on this planet so far, I don’t think we’ll have the luxury of being less aware of our oneness, our interdependent and co-supportive togetherness in three years’ time, after this so-ordained Decade on Biodiversity comes to an end.

But what does biological diversity actually mean, you ask? The collection of all species living on Earth, from humans, pandas and banyan trees, through fireflies, magic mushrooms and seahorses to the millions of other macro- and microorganisms found on this planet. Biological diversity is our Gaia-ness.

You can look at it two ways, in my opinion. One, honoring and respecting Gaia aka Terra, or any name you call Mother Earth, as if we were merely traveling through, visitors, guests here for a while. Polite, considerate and compassionate guests who are not out to trash the house and kill the household. The other, the one that stands even closer to my heart, you can read about in Isaac Asimov’s Foundation’s Edge (1982), where he describes a planet named after the Greek earth goddess, based on independent research scientist James Lovelock’s earth feedback hypothesis, now known as the Gaia Theory.

Asimov’s Gaia for me is a symbol of our potential as ‘Earth’, as One, having recognized our all-encompassing ‘Earthian’ nature and purpose.

In science-fiction, the human beings on Gaia evolved their ability to form group consciousness and extended it to the flora, fauna and even the inanimate matter of the planet, becoming a kind of super-organism with exceptional mental and other powers. If we know so much about how alive everything around and within us is, how much we are a biodiverse concentration of life energies interacting on a multitude of levels and dimensions, aren’t we all together really like a semi-awakening Gaia? Or couldn’t we be…?

In real life-fiction, James Lovelock defined Gaia as:

a complex entity involving the Earth’s biosphere, atmosphere, oceans, and soil; the totality constituting a feedback or cybernetic system which seeks an optimal physical and chemical environment for life on this planet.

In other words, according to the Gaia Theory, biomass modifies conditions on the planet to make the conditions on the planet more hospitable. Where, for example, sea creatures produce sulfur and iodine in about the same amounts as required by land creatures.

homeostasis noun ho·meo·sta·sis \ˌhō-mē-ō-ˈstā-səs\
: the tendency towards a relatively stable equilibrium between interdependent elements, especially as maintained by physiological processes.

Earth is a complex interacting system, a single organism, striving towards equilibrium.
I’d describe you like this. And myself too. So let’s quit being our own worst enemy.

In Isaac Asimov’s words:

We cannot afford enemies any more … Within a generation or two human society will be in total destructive disarray. Heaven knows how bad it will be. The most optimistic view I can take is this: Things will get so bad within a dozen years that it will become obvious … that we must, whether we’re like each other or not, work together.

Be or die versity.