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Over the last few years an increasing number of scientists havesuggested that the planet's collapsing biological diversity maywell be the largest and most intractable environmental problem weface. As threatening as climate change may be, it could bemitigated substantially by making a few wrenching but nonethelessstraightforward changes in the way we do our business. (The factthat we lack the political will to make even those changes saysmore about our collective shortsightedness than about the nature ofthe problem itself.) In the interests of full disclosure, I should say that for the lastfew months I've been working to launch a non-profit, Desert Biodiversity, to promote and defend the biological diversity of North America'sdeserts. I'm not an objective observer here. The deserts of NorthAmerica are an uncharted biodiversity hotspot, largely intact andwith a surprising wealth of species: think "rainforests withoutrain." And they're ground zero for industrial renewable energydevelopment propelled by national concern about climate change. Wehave here a situation in which proponents of a solution to a hugeenvironmental problem may actually be worsening a bigger problem. Despite my non-disinterested point of view, I think it's arguablethat the collapse in biodiversity has deeper roots. Even if wetransform our society to a carbon-neutral one, as long as ournumbers continue to swell and our demand for comforts continues,other species will pay the ultimate price. As we convert more andmore of the planet to resources for our own use, we deprive otherspecies of the habitat they need to survive. Most biologists agreethat species are going extinct at at least 100 times the"background rate," perhaps more like 1,000. As one species afteranother dies out, the total biological diversity of the planetdwindles, and the resilience of the ecosystems on which we dependsuffers. The pace of extinction hastens and the web of lifeunravels even faster. A recent study out of UC Santa Barbara lends support to the idea that biodiversity and the resilience ofthe environment are deeply intertwined. The study, published in Nature on May 2, found that ecosystems that had lost species suffered losses inplant productivity. (This is important: plant productivity -- theuse of sunlight to turn water and carbon dioxide into organicmatter - is the basis of most life on Earth.) Researchers foundthat the greater the loss of plant species in an ecosystem, thelower plant productivity became. As postdoctoral fellow JarretByrnes said in a press release from UCSB's National Center forEcological Analysis and Synthesis (NCEAS), "For the past 15 years, ecologists have built a rich understandingof the consequences of humans driving species extinct. What wedidn't know before this paper is whether those impacts of speciesloss rank up there with those from the major drivers ofenvironmental change. Our work shows that, indeed, the impacts ofspecies loss look to be on par with many kinds of human-drivenenvironmental change." In other words, according to NCEAS, loss in biodiversity poses justas big a threat to the planet as climate change or pollution. NCEASisn't alone in this assessment. In January, biodiversityresearchers from around the world convened in Copenhagen tocoordinate a United Nations response to the extinction crisis. In a statement released after that meeting, Carsten Rahbek -- Director of theCenter for Macroecology, Evolution and Climate at the University ofCopenhagen -- said "The biodiversity crisis is probably a greaterthreat than global climate change to the stability and prosperousfuture of mankind on Earth." The sober-sided report out of Copenhagen speculates that if thingskeep going the way they have been, the current wave of extinctionswill reach mass extinction proportions -- with at least 50% ofterrestrial animal species wiped out -- by 2250 AD or so. Manyscientists find that assessment optimistic. This isn't news. The greater environmental world of advocacy groupsand agencies and scientists knew the gravity of the current wave ofextinctions, and agreed that it was a crisis worth immediateaction, by 1992. That's when the much-lauded "Earth Summit,"formally known as the United Nations Conference on Environment andDevelopment (UNCED), took place in Rio de Janeiro. Over the courseof the week-long meeting, representatives of governments and NGOshammered out two important legally binding agreements that werethen distributed for signatures. One was the UN FrameworkConvention on Climate Change, a precursor to the Kyoto Protocol.The other was the Convention on Biological Diversity. Both were given more or less equal weight by those assembled, butthe Convention on Biological Diversity actually attracted moreattention at the time, even from the conspiracy-mindedanti-environmental crowd, who campaigned against UN BiosphereReserves the way they do now against the jackbooted Carbon Tax. Something changed in the intervening 20 years, though. Check outthis Google 'Ngram" charting the relative frequencies of the phrases "climate change" and"biodiversity" in English-language books from 1990 to 2008. Both phrases werementioned with increasing frequency in the early 1990s, with"biodiversity" pulling ahead in the months after UNCED. Then, in2005 -- a few months before the release of An Inconvenient Truth --"climate change" started getting more attention, and mentions ofbiodiversity actually began to decrease for the first time sincethe 1980s. This despite 2010 being the year in which some of the biodiversitycommitments made 18 years earlier at UNCED started to come tofruition. 2010 was declared the UN's International Year of Biodiversity , a kickoff to the United Nations Decade on Biodiversity running from 2011 to 2020. In April, 90 governments -- workingunder the auspices of the UN -- finally established the Intergovernmental Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services(IBPES), a global scientific panel that will work to promote biodiversitythe same way the IPCC works on climate change issues. Though official policy is starting, after 20 years, to addressUNCED's 20-year-old commitment to address the threats tobiodiversity, American environmentalists lag behind. Read thewebsites and publications of the largest mainstream groups andyou'll find some mention of biodiversity as an issue here andthere, while every group seems to have a climate change campaign --even the wilderness organizations, which a person might expect tobe biodiversity focused. Of national groups, only the Center for Biological Diversity has an explicit emphasis on diversity and extinction regardless ofcause. On the "About us" page of the venerable group Defenders of Wildlife, which you might expect would be generally oriented towardprotection of biodiversity in the animal realm, Defendersexplicitly lists three topics as "issues we care about most":climate change, renewable energy, and "living with wildlife."Protection of species and their habitat are listed as topics ofinterest, but they're relegated to the "you may also be interestedin" section. The Natural Resources Defense Council has a reasonably robust species protection component , and on NRDC's priority issues page that campaign is listed fourth, with climate change listed as NRDC's first twopriorities. The Sierra Club's Goals page -- which actually contains the Goals of the Club's "ClimateRecovery Partnership," apparently synonymous with the goals of theClub -- lists the following campaigns: Beyond Coal, Beyond Oil,Beyond Natural Gas, Protecting America's Waters, ResilientHabitats, and a youth outreach program. The Resilient Habitatscampaign is a biodiversity initiative, but it's framed entirely in terms of climate change. Only the "America's Waters" campaign isn't centered on climate asan issue, addressing habitat, pollution, and other traditionalenvironmental concerns. There's nothing wrong with working on biodiversity issues in thecontext of climate change. Climate change is a major threat tobiodiversity. Climate change alters habitats, threatens specieswith narrow temperature tolerances, interferes with migrationtiming and reproductive cycles, and in general just screws upwildlife species' ability to make a living. By the same token, it would make sense for climate groups tooperate biodiversity campaigns, as loss in biodiversity greatlycomplicates the effects of climate change -- from logged primevalforests that no longer sequester carbon to loss of pollinatorsmaking it even harder to grow food in a warmer world to the hundredother ways in which losing diverse ecosystems worsens the effectsof global change. But you don't see climate groups startingbiodiversity programs. Quite the opposite, especially in the California deserts, where thethreat of climate change is being used as a reason to bulldozehabitat that is vital to endangered, threatened and rare species.Though the popular conception of the desert is of a barren placeunpopulated by wildlife, California's deserts are in fact abiodiversity treasure, with varied topography and climate breedingnew species that continue to be discovered at a surprising rate. Pick a square-mile section of the Californiadesert at random and you run about a 75 percent chance of findingat least one sensitive plant species there, usually more. And yetthe once green-leaning Governor of California has adoptedbulldozing the desert for renewable energy development as officialAdministration policy, and the California Energy Commissionroutinely grants permits to desert energy development despiteirremediable impacts to desert biodiversity, citing the need fornon-carbon energy as an "overriding consideration" more importantthan trying to forestall the coming mass extinction. Until environmentalists catch up with the science that seems to bepassing them by, this is unlikely to change anytime soon. In themeantime, May 22 is International Biodiversity Day : you might go out and enjoy some of our remaining biologicaldiversity while you still can. Chris Clarke is an environmental writer of two decades standing.Author of Walking With Zeke , he writes from Palm Springs regularly at his acclaimed blog Coyote Crossing and comments on desert issues on KCET weekly. Read his recentposts here . 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