Talking Biodiversity at the Huffington Post

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Talking Biodiversity at the Huffington Post

August 21, 2008 by lamarguerite

New post on biodiversity, at The Huffington Post: “What the Heck is Biodiversity? And Why Should We Care?”

There is one typo. Can you find it?

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Posted in Solutions | Tagged biodiversity, Huffington Post | 4 Comments

4 Responses

on August 21, 2008 at 12:41 pm | Reply Meryn Stol

Very strong article. In terms of writing, much better then your first. The article starts off really professional, and I’m going to judge it by this standard.

One thing that I found missing is an explanation of a way biodiversity affects humans, preferably a shocking example of course. In lay-man’s terms of course. Your article misses the “gulp” factor:

“Because these tiny little fishies are missing from the sea, these birds can’t eat, and thus can’t poop and thus the plants on the land are missing vital nutrients, and thus your child gets a worse quality spinach, and because of this, he’ll die ten years early.” – or something, because I really don’t know how this stuff works. You do at least a little, I hope. If only people in developing countries are hurt, say so. It doesn’t help being vague. It may yet be another example of the poor carrying an unfair burden of our ecosystem stresses.

Quoting other reports is nice, but if someone has previously discounted these headlines, they’ll probably do it once more. Yet, if they’ve come this far in your article, you have the chance to explain it to them quickly. You have the advantage of not being affiliated with any organization, so you can write about things from a distance, not like some random piece of nature is the only thing you care about, which could be thought of people directly affiliated with a local environmental group.

Explaining these things in your own words also signals that you understand the subject matter, and not just accept a claim like “essentials for life — human and otherwise — are maintained as a direct result of the Earth’s biodiversity, the abundance and variety of species and populations on the planet.” at face value. After reading your article, I still don’t know if this is true. You haven’t written anything to back this up.

After that, you go beyond the title of your article, and list possible solutions. I think you should try to first make your case for biodiversity much stronger.

Another tip – one I also gave to Edouard – is on your “quotability”. I always try to quote one or two sentences of an article for in my bookmarks. I like that to be one very information-dense thought. A strong statement, often found at the end of articles, which certainly should be supported by earlier writing. In this case, the statement I’m seeking is the short answer to the two questions posed in the title. “What is biodiversity, and why should I care?”

The statement that comes closest to this is what the quote from the sciendaily article, yet for me this doesn’t qualify, because 1) it’s not a statement by you, but by some other author (which I don’t necessarily trust) and 2) the claim isn’t backed up anywhere close.

On top of that, the Sciencedaily article is already talking about taking action, and uses your quote more as a preamble, something that should be obvious to the reader. Well, it isn’t to me, and I think this only proves how much ground-work there has to be done before we’re all on the same page on this.

Of course, I could go digging and form my own opinion on biodiversity. But then, if everyone would, there wasn’t a need for opinion writers. For now, I hope you will help me with this, and not directly jump to recommendations for action.

Please understand that I’m only writing in this in the hope your writing will improve, and we can soon greet you as a NYT op-ed author.
on August 21, 2008 at 3:39 pm | Reply lamarguerite

Thanks Meryn. I appreciate your feedback. Lots of great points for me to take into account. I just went through first few comments from HuffPo readers, including one from Nadine. What strikes me is the level of emotionality. People who know about the topic, have very strong feelings about it. That tells me, one way to engage the unaware, is to help them re-establish emotional connection with nature. How to go about it, that’s the question!
on August 21, 2008 at 8:39 pm | Reply paul t. horan

Couldn’t find the typo and I read your huff-piece twice.

So glad you’re helping raise public awareness of biodiversity. Let’s not underestimate the robust value of warmly welcoming this meme into our current, critical collective-cognitive-competence conversation. This word has a wealth of life-affirming meaning and whatever we can do to help cultivate more of that meaning into common sense behaviors is well worth the effort!

Along with sustainability, biodiversity is another essential property of our species’ life-support systems = Earth’s ecosystems; the services of which each of us individual human beings NEEDS at the most fundamental Maslovian-level, whether we’re consciously recognizing that fact or not.

Lighting such candles of recognition and learning to appreciate much more the ecosystemic-branches upon which we sit are the kinds of activities that get sparked by the authentic “emotionality” people feel when they “know about the topic”.

So many of us human beings seem to have forgotten and/or lost touch with the various living systems that keep us alive. Facilitating critical pathways of communication between/among those of us who’ve forgotten and those who passionately appreciate biodiversity’s importance is in itself a crucially important activity that requires the kind of passion your work embodies, Marguerite.

BTW, in this regard I gave you some Love last night via Dot Earth (2nd pp from the bottom of my posted-comments):

http://dotearth.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/08/20/denuded-islands-planetary-emergencies/#comment-75557

On another not-totally-unrelated note, if you haven’t already checked out the history of the good folks organizing the amazing conference Andy’s now enjoying, then let’s kindly treat ourselves to another couple of good reasons for keeping hope alive:

http://www.ccsem.infn.it/

http://www.federationofscientists.org/

Also, I got this World Cafe piece this morning and felt quite inspired after reading it = appreciating the not-yet-sufficiently-tapped “soft” resource of loving conversation we humans get to enjoy whenever we consciously choose to do so:

http://conversationsthatmatter.typepad.com/coevolution/2008/08/ive-recently-re.html?cid=127290082#comment-127290082

*************************
Life-affirming memes

emerge from and make sense to

simple human hearts.
*************************

Ciao for now,

paul
on August 21, 2008 at 9:32 pm | Reply lamarguerite

Thanks Paul, for the links!

For those of you who don’t know, Paul is referring to Andrew Revkin, the soul behind New York Times Dot Earth, one of my favorite green blogs.

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La Marguerite

A girl’s view of sustainability and social media

Talking Biodiversity at the Huffington Post

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