From Plant Press, Vol. 5, No. 2 from April 2002.
By Robert DeFilipps
The Second Smithsonian Botanical Symposium, held on April 5-6 at the National Museum of Natural History in Washington, DC, gave 200 participants an opportunity to delve into the impact of the United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) in relation to scientific investigations during the past decade, and to explore the convention’s many ramifications for understanding our natural world. A treaty and strategy for the conservation, sustainable development, and equitable sharing of the benefits of biodiversity, the Convention was adopted at the famous 1992 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, and has to date been ratified by approximately 180 countries. The Secretariat of the Convention is in Montreal, Canada, and its financial mechanism is the $2.7 billion Global Environmental Fund (GEF). The entire world is affected in one way or another by the CBD, an ever-widening phenomenon which W. John Kress, Head of Botany at the Smithsonian, has referred to as the “Globalization of Natural History Science.”
The panel of specialist speakers was international, with representatives from the United States, Brazil, Panama, Kenya and Spain, and the scope of their presentations was truly comprehensive. In fact, it soon became evident that the vocabulary of biodiversity has recently been dramatically expanded, in order to keep pace with changing dimensions of research. It now includes such relatively new terms as: “GMOs” (genetically modified organisms), “biodiplomacy,” “unnatural natural products” (biocombinatorial secondary metabolites), “agrobiodiversity,” “biosafety” (the transport of GMOs), and the “taxonomic impediment.” To this may well be added a statement made by Kress during the symposium, to the effect that in the wake of the CBD, Earth’s biodiversity has become a commodity, and terms (concepts) such as commercial value, guardianship and ownership have become “the currency of Nature.”
To start the April 6 sessions, the attendees were welcomed by Kress as convenor of the symposium, and by Ira Rubinoff, Acting Deputy Director of the National Museum of Natural History. Rubinoff’s remarks included recognition of the work of museum staff as providers of an important scientific foundation to support the Convention, while referring to multinational collaborative initiatives between the museum and host-country researchers in many nations including Mexico, Venezuela, China, Fiji and Myanmar (Burma).
Next, the José Cuatrecasas Medal for Excellence in Tropical Botany was presented by Kress to P. Barry Tomlinson of Harvard University (Cambridge, Massachusetts). Although Tomlinson was unable to attend due to his recent return from extensive sabbatical field studies in Hawaii, New Caledonia and New Zealand, the award was accepted on his behalf by Dennis Stevenson of the New York Botanical Garden (Bronx, New York), and a message of thanks was read. Tomlinson, a native of Leeds, England (b. 1932), is recognized for his multifaceted research on the architecture and morphology of tropical plants, including many monocotyledons (see related article, page 7).
The first speaker was Brian M. Boom, senior research scientist at the Center for Environmental Research and Conservation (Columbia University, New York), whose talk was entitled “Caught up in the Moment: Botanists and the CBD a Decade after Rio.” Trends in activities at the New YorkBotanical Garden over the past 10 years were portrayed in order to assess the impact of the CBD on the Garden’s affairs. Among the human impacts of the CBD, one element that Boom personally experienced while at New York was in regard to his work with a particular Yanomami Amerindian village in Venezuela; he was later denied an access permit to the village because the United States has not ratified, and is therefore not a Party to, the Convention. Boom discussed interesting recent ventures at the New York Botanical Garden, including major forays into bioprospecting for potential drugs in collaboration with the National Cancer Institute, prospecting for fragrances (perfumes), and work on plant genomics.
At the same time, the number of records of virtual images made of New York herbarium specimens has increased, while the number of specimens annually added to the herbarium has declined. This seems to point to the advent of a heavier reliance on computer scanning of digital images of specimens, versus less field collecting due to permit issuance difficulties or irregularities in desirable countries as a result of strict compliance with terms of the CBD.
The next speaker, Stella Simiyu from the National Museums of Kenya, Nairobi, spoke on the topic of “The CBD Challenge in Botany: Emerging Responsibilities, Priorities and Practices.” Simiyu related the current thematic work programs of the CBD, such as biodiversity of forests, dry lands and subhumid lands, and apprised that the Convention uses an ecosystem approach as a framework for analysis and implementation of its work. Regarding the holistic implications of the ecosystem approach, one might pause to consider the words of Gregory Bateson, as quoted by Diane Ackerman in “Insect Love” (The New Yorker 68 (26): 34-54. 1992):
“The horse isn’t the thing that evolved. What evolved actually was a relationship between horse and grass…Thus the unit of what’s called evolution out there, is really not this species or that species. It is an entire interlocking business of species…The grass changes and the horse changes, and the grass changes and the horse changes, and they change in such a way that the relationship between them may stay constant.”
Concerning the Global Taxonomy Initiative (GTI), one of the CBD components, Simiyu observed that 900,000 names already exist for the world’s 270,000 known species of flowering plants. The excesses of this situation unfortunately constitute, as plainly stated by parties to the Convention, a “taxonomic impediment” to implementation of the goals of the CBD. (Scott Miller, a later speaker, also confirmed that the “impediment” is the difficulty of getting good taxonomic information and distributing it widely.) More studies to clarify various taxonomic entanglements are direly needed. One target is the compilation of an accessible working list of known species, in hopes that the exercise will stimulate the preparation of a world flora. There seems to be no time to lose on that enterprise, for as noted by Sir Ghillean Prance et al., an average of about 2,350 new species of flowering plants are being described each year (Ann. Missouri Bot. Gard. 87: 67-71. 2000).
Also, Prance has noted that estimates of the total number of flowering plant species in the world should be revised upwards to about 320,000 (Taxon 50: 345-359. 2001), while worldwide habitat destruction proceeds at an alarming pace (Journal of Biogeography 27: 51-53. 2000). In view of plant conservation being one major thrust of the CBD, at this distance it seems ironic, although not remarked upon as such in the Stepan book cited below, that what is possibly the first article ever written about neotropical species decimation, one by T.I. Patter on the destructive collection of orchids in Trinidad (The Orchid Review 5 (54): 204-205. 1897), actually appeared one year before the term “rain forest” itself was coined in 1898; it has effectively replaced the word “jungle” for most people (cf. Nancy Stepan, Picturing Tropical Nature. CornellUniversity Press. 2001). Simiyu also called for an increased harmonization of research work at the national and international levels, with broader participation in the CBD process by scientists. For this emerging priority, she stated: “The onus is on us to pick up the challenge.”
The next speaker was Cristian Samper K., the acting director of the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute (STRI) in Panama City, Panama, who delivered an authoritative presentation on “Linking Science and Policy: The Case of the United Nations CBD.” He discussed how the CBD became an important part of the environmental legislation of the South American nation of Colombia. The Convention is an integral part of Colombia’s national environmental system, and the national biodiversity policy of the country includes provisions for conservation, acquisition of biological knowledge, and utilization of resources. Research institutes and botanical gardens have been inaugurated, and presently 36 percent of the endangered plants of Colombia are being grown in Colombian botanical gardens as a result of CBD action plans.
The afternoon session began with Scott Miller, chairman of the Department of Systematic Biology, National Museum of Natural History, who spoke on the “Impact of the CBD on Taxonomy and Biodiversity Information.” Miller, a strong proponent of using museum resources for the provision of biodiversity information, observed that the basic problem remains the availability of high quality data from museum specimens in electronic form. He described how biodiversity data from the natural range of the Asian long-horned beetle, a pest that arrived in wooden packing crates at Midwestern U.S. airports, has been fed into a parallel-climate model, and is helping the development of a policy for control of the beetle (see Web site http://www.speciesanalyst.net).
In the course of his talk, Miller recalled an instance of how taxonomy has prevented biopiracy. Recently someone had attempted to patent a bark infusion from the Amazonian hallucinogenic vine Banisteriopsis caapi (Grisebach) Morton (Malpighiaceae), known by its Peruvian name “ayahuasca.” Taxonomists proved that the curious properties of this plant were known long ago by the Amerindians, and thus not unique to the people who wanted to patent it, and the patent application was rejected. On a different track, Miller also noted that molecular systematics involves routine screening for minor variations of known compounds, and thus is not a search for new compounds; therefore, molecular screening is not bioprospecting.
The next speaker was Gerald Bills, senior research fellow at Merck Research Laboratories in Madrid, Spain. He presented a talk on “Access and Discovery of Pharmacologically Active Metabolites from Fungi and Other Microorganisms.” Fungal biology is so diversified that 30 metabolic pathways were recently found in filamentous fungi alone. Cancidas®, a new Merck Company antifungal drug, is a caspofungin acetate obtained from material collected along the Lozoya River in Madrid; its effectivity is based on a pathway uninvestigated until recently. And, a small, non-peptide molecule with insulin-mimetic properties has been isolated from a species of the African fungus Pseudomassaria. Using methodologies described by Bills, it has been calculated that there are an incredible 78,732,000 possible chemical combinations (i.e., metabolic products) in fungal combinatorial genes. This has led scientists to the creation of unusual and valuable “unnatural natural products.”
The final invited lecturer was Braulio Ferreira de Souza Dias from Brasilia, who holds the governmental position of director of biodiversity conservation in the Brazilian Ministry of the Environment. His topic was “The CBD: Challenges and Opportunities in Mainstreaming Biodiversity into Society and Economy.” Representing the nation in which the Convention was born, Souza Dias pointed out that the CBD is an umbrella framework, and as such there have been some difficulties in implementing it. Seemingly, it is largely a matter of cultural values, those of individuals, groups and societies. In fact, he noted that “Nature” itself is a societal concept. From this comes the conundrum, as he remarked, where “scientists don’t understand how societies (values) work, and government doesn’t understand how scientists work.” Indeed, the existence of very disparate attitudes between ordinary people and the scientific community in Asia has recently been elaborated by F.S.P. Ng in an article entitled “Taxonomy, biodiversity and management of knowledge in Asia” (Flora Malesiana Bulletin 13(1): 48-50. 2002).
The Global Taxonomic Initiative, which, as Souza Dias explained, bridges the gap between the “bias and isolation” of taxonomists and the users of taxonomic information, may be exemplified by the Flora Neotropica Initiative. Support from the governments of Brazil, Colombia and Mexico is expected to effectuate the completion of the flora in a projected 15 years. At the rate that work on the flora proceeded in the past, it would have taken 300 years. Many taxonomists have volunteered to support it with treatments of various plant groups.
As pointed out by Souza Dias, many questions arise during attempts to implement the Convention, such as: How many species are there on the planet?; What determines high versus low biodiversity?; How much biodiversity can we afford to lose (the threshold)?; and, Is biodiversity a representation of co-evolved, or opportunistic assemblages, of plants? Statistics indicate, for example, that only 350 species are known of the estimated 55,000 species of virus in Brazil; and only 400 species of Brazilian bacteria have been described out of the 130,000 species estimated to exist in that country. All these, and the higher clades of plants and animals, are part of what is called the National Genetic Patrimony of Brazil. Another issue is the protection of the rights of traditional knowledge in a very racially mixed country. In Brazil, for example, there still exist 500 quilombos, communities of descendants of escaped slaves. Indigenous knowledge ownership can become hard to decipher if it needs to be assigned to a distinct group of persons.
A symposium discussion between panelists and audience was moderated by Paula DePriest, co-convenor of the symposium and curator in the Department of Systematic Biology – Botany. Among the questioners was Terry Irwin, Smithsonian specialist in insect biodiversity, who asked the panel to imagine what would be the situation today if the United States government had ratified the Convention. Although still awaiting ratification by the U.S. Congress, many American biological specialists serve on large delegations of observers and persons of special assistance at Conferences of the Parties (COP) to the Convention, which are held around the world to tackle the hard issues that arise.
Last speaker of the session was Tom Lovejoy (World Bank, Washington, DC), who provided a summarizing commentary. Lovejoy’s trademark bowtie, upturned at one end like a propeller blade in mid-revolution, imparted to him the correct aura: of a veteran habitué of scientific academia blended with experiences in the fragmented Brazilian forests and innumerable consultative sessions on biodiversity. He noted several major changes wrought by the CBD, including that combinatorial chemistry is now competitive with research to discover natural compounds, and that numerous advances have been made in fostering biological conservation. International collaboration remains absolutely fundamental.
Lovejoy’s remarks included one relating to Scott Miller’s (see above) concerning molecular systematics, and he cautioned the audience to avoid being caught up in “bioparanoia” (T.L.’s new term) over alleged instances of biopiracy, and instead to realize the salient difference between molecular systematics and bioprospecting. To Lovejoy, the real “biopiracy” is the destruction of biodiversity around the world, still a widespread concern of the conservation imperative implicit in the CBD.
After the evening dinner, the keynote speaker was The Hon. Bruce Babbitt, Secretary of the Interior (1992-2000), who gave the reassembled audience “A Retrospective View of the Rio Convention.” Babbitt fleshed out a context of the three important environmental concerns that face us today: population, climate change, and biodiversity. How these sensitive issues will resonate to those concerned with the sovereignty and economic well being of nations, will be an integral part of future debates and administrative policies.
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