Director of the Missouri Botanical Garden Peter Raven spoke last night about the impact of U.S. citizens on diminishing natural resources.
The speech, titled "Biodiversity: Its Meaning to Us," was the inaugural lecture in the George Link Jr. Environmental Lecture series and took place in 105 Dartmouth Hall, which was crowded with students and professors.
The series was funded by the George Link Jr. Endowment for Environmental Studies, which is dedicated to supporting the College's interdisciplinary Environmental Studies Program.
Raven addressed the complex issues of the world's ecosystems through the interaction and biodiversity of organisms. He stressed the huge impact of the "industrialized world on the world as a whole."
The number of people living in urban areas is only 22 percent of the total population, but "80 to 95 percent of the impact on the globe is caused by activities of industrialized countries," he said.
"We in the United States ... consume 25 percent of the world's products," he said. The population of the United States is 270 million, he said. Raven said the country's actions will lead to endangerment of 20 to 25 percent of the world's biodiversity over the next 30 years.
"The U.S. is wasting what the world produces," he said. The nation uses 80 percent of the world's energy, according to Raven.
Raven also spoke about the valuable resources in the wildlife.
But, he said, "Tropical ecosystems are being reduced to small patches." In 1950 western Ecuador was heavily forested and had only three roads; now 30 roads occupy the area and only 3 percent is forested, he said.
"We've got to realize that we live in a limited world," he said. "Collectively people have got to realize that there's no more out there to consume."
Raven advocated the promotion of agro-cropping, a form of restoration ecology that relies on multiple cropping of the same soil.
Raven has won an international prize for biology from the Japanese government, was a MacArthur Fellow and a professor of biology at Stanford University. He is a professor of botany at Washington University.
