The Pimm Group » Interviews

Listen to Dr. Pimm podcast on the BP oil spill

Roger — Fri, 16 Jul 2010 14:22:18 +0000

An oiled bird struggles to get over a boom in the middle of the Gulf oil spill. AP Photo

Stuart Pimm is interviewed by the Endangered Species Coalition about the BP oil spill disaster in the Gulf of Mexico.

Listen to this podcast (with intro by ESC’s Leda Huta) in which Stuart describes the value of the Gulf as a marine ecosystem and which species are most at risk from the spill. He discusses how scientists are helping to clean up the spill and trying to figure out the long-term effects on affected species populations and on the services nature provides. He criticizes government approaches to conservation and the need for independent peer review and monitoring of conservation programs.

Going, Going,…

ahedgehog — Tue, 09 Jun 2009 18:37:31 +0000

By Stuart Pimm, Doris Duke Professor of conservation ecology

This century will surely be remembered as the time the Earth bit back—not that Mother Nature hadn’t been a little testy before now. In the fourteenth century, plague spread more easily as the population both grew and became more concentrated in urban areas. When Europeans began to travel widely to other parts of the world, they took diseases with them to vulnerable continents—smallpox to the Americas, for example. And, there were plenty of regional examples of cultures, some sophisticated, that declined precipitously, abandoning long-occupied sites where people had abused the ecological services nature had supplied them.

Tackling the Biodiversity Crisis – BBC 4 Interview with Stuart Pimm & Georgiana Mace

ahedgehog — Wed, 03 Oct 2007 20:08:48 +0000

The Earth is losing its biodiversity at an alarming rate. Species are becoming extinct between 100 and 1,000 times faster than normal, as a direct result of human activity. In 2005, the UN-commissioned Millennium Ecosystem Assessment highlighted the damaging effect that declining biodiversity is having on human well-being, by for example threatening food supplies and the provision of clean air and water that we all depend on to survive.

Listen to it here

But what should we do to tackle the problem? One strategy, first proposed by Professor Norman Myers of Oxford University is to focus conservation efforts on ‘biodiversity hotspots’. These are special places where there are very high concentrations of threatened ‘endemic’ species – that is, species that are found nowhere else. A recent assessment has identified 34 such hotspots, covering just 2.3% of the Earth’s land surface, yet harbouring between 40 and 50% of the planet’s estimated 10 million species.

The hotspots idea has certainly caught the public’s attention and has attracted a great deal of funding. So far at least $900 million has been raised to support hotspot conservation and there are many successful hotspot conservation projects running around the world. But some conservation biologists worry that hotspots are the wrong priority for conservation. They question whether the strategy is cost effective and wonder if the goal to save the maximum number of species is the right one.

Some have suggested that a focus on conserving ‘protected areas’ is like putting money into intensive care beds as opposed to vaccination – it’s a distraction from the real issue which is the need to change people’s attitudes by integrating conservation into our everyday lives. To debate the arguments for and against focussing conservation efforts on biodiversity hotspots, Sue is joined by Stuart Pimm, Professor of Conservation Biology at Duke University in the USA, who has his own hotspot conservation charity – savingspecies.org; and also by Professor Georgina Mace, Director of the Centre for Population Biology at Imperial College, who worked on the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment.