Читать книгу Fundamentals of Conservation Biology - Malcolm L. Hunter Jr. - Страница 14

PART I
Biodiversity and Its Importance

Think about our world and its wild things: a marsh splashed and flecked with the colors of flowers and dragonflies, the rhythmic roar and swoosh of waves punctuated by the strident calls of gulls, a dark forest pungent with the odors of unseen life teeming below a carpet of leaves and mosses. Now imagine a future world utterly dominated by concrete and regimented rows of crops – a hot, dry, monotonous, and unhealthy home for us and the species we have chosen for domestication. This book is about hope in the face of forces that would degrade our world. This book is about the rich tapestry of life that shares our world now and about how we can maintain it, sometimes in places that we protect and set aside, more often in places where we share the lands and waters with a wide range of other species.

The abundance and diversity of life is often apparent where water meets land, especially intertidal zones. In this photo representatives of four different phyla are evident and there are likely to be dozens of species unseen. (Terry Allen/Flickr)