The Value of Biodiversity

My 35 or 40 apple trees didn't bear fruit in 1998. They bloomed, they just didn't bear fruit, which is unusual since in a normal year (the last 20), the ground is littered with wormy apples. I don't spray, so my apples have "worms." We either "eat around" the worms, ignoring the apple scab blemishes at the same time, or we don't eat the apples.

So what does all of this have to do with anything? Ecology, friends. Ecology. I and the worms had no apples because apparently no bees came to pollinate the apple blossoms. I don't know why the bees didn't show up this year. Maybe they didn't come because of El Nino. It's easy to blame El Nino. Maybe the winter was too warm for the apple trees and they didn't get enough of a chill. Maybe the blossoms came too early for the bees.

Although the bees didn't visit my backyard apple trees, they did visit a nearby commercial orchard. I know because I ate some of the excellent apples. I guess that gets El Nino off the hook. And the bees. Let's forget the worms. Maybe my backyard is in a microclimate where the negative cosmic forces of fate came together this year and nixed my apple crop. I dunno.

What does all this have to do with Ecology? It makes me think about biodiversity, friends. Biodiversity. An article by ENN in December 1997, citing an article in Bioscience, quoted Cornell University biologists as having estimated that the planet's plants, animals and microorganisms are worth $2.9 trillion a year. $2.9 trillion!

Furthermore, the biologists estimated that if the United States had to pay for the benefits it received from biodiversity, the cost would be $319 billion ($2,928 trillion worldwide). Within that $319 billion is an estimated $40 billion for pollination in the United States (worldwide, $200 billion). Pollination of my apple trees fits into this number somehow.

Since I don't eat 99 percent of my apple crop, yellow jackets and a variety of black beetles chow down on them every year. But not this year. For the past 20 years, however, insect consumption has been the norm and whatever was left over, the majority I'm sure, simply rotted and became, I suppose, soil.

According to the Cornell biologists, the estimated annual economic benefits of annual soil formation in the United States is $5 billion. Worldwide it is $25 billion. My apples fit into this number somehow.

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