The nature of animal diversity
It is a simple fact of life, that every group of animals, and every group of plants, has comparable complexity, diversity, beauty and capacity to astonish and enchant as do birds and charismatic mammals. Every group. Not the same, for each is different, but of the same magnitude and significance.  You feel the same before beetles and flies, buttercups and mosses when you know them for what they are. Once the light of our prodigious modern understanding is brought to bear on them, especially the light of the microscope. Indeed, it is in the smallest creatures that some of the greatest wonders and beauties are to be found. The great Linnaeus, the 18th century Swedish scientist who devised the naming system for plants and animals we still use today, put it very elegantly when he wrote "natura in minimis maxime miranda" (it is in the smallest things that nature is most to be marvelled at).

Linnaeus also painted a wonderfully imaginative metaphor for life’s amazing diversity which I think you may remember more easily than most of the facts and figures that chronicle the scale of that diversity.
The museum of nature [he wrote: and I suppose if he were writing today he would have said Biodiversity] … The museum of nature, like a palace, has an enormous number of connected chambers, filled with the stupendous contrivances and wonders of the Creator, to each of which a place is assigned according to its kind; to the greatest amphitheatres of nature the first entry is open to every one, but the smaller ones are usually shut; here there is need of skill to unclose by slow degrees the doorway of each chamber, within which a new world, as it were, displays itself before our eyes … The chief key for unfastening the bars of this palace that has been for all the ages closed is afforded by the microscope, which gives us the same help in examining minute bodies that are close to us as astronomers get from the telescope in the investigation of distant bodies in the heavens.

I have the enormous privilege in my profession of looking more deeply from time to time at the lives of many groups of plants and animals: beetles, flies, spiders, snails, slugs, mosses, ferns, lichens, bugs, small water creatures of various kinds, and each time, time after time, I have been mesmerized. Maybe not all of you will relate to this yet, but there’s time. Maybe birds and trees, but you draw the line at spiders and slugs. But it is so important that our children be exposed to the opportunity to acquire something that has the potential to lift the way they view the world about them to an altogether richer level.

So now, if we ask the question: why does the preservation of biodiversity matter, it is these last two reasons which affect our response most immediately. Because it contributes or has the capacity to contribute so enormously to our human lives on all levels; and because this care is enjoined on us by God. If God doesn’t matter to you there is a compelling ethical imperative on humanistic grounds. Any diminution in nature’s diversity we experience here of course pales in comparison with the losses in other parts of the globe. But it is more important than the loss of rainforest in the special sense that this is the only part of the world where we experience contact with nature and nature’s values. The natural diversity of our home place is more important for our lives in this sense than the tropical seas or forests.
If you look at the few groups of animals and plants we know reasonably well (flowering plants and the various vertebrate groups, especially birds), although a small number of species have been lost from the county in the last 50 to 100 years, they are all to be found elsewhere still. They are not extinct. But they are lost to the experience of life’s diversity by Irish people in their everyday lives. And not particularly rare things: wild things, plants and animals, which were common fifty years ago are common no more.
But does it matter all that much really? Ireland is still a great place to live. In a lot of ways it is a better place to live than it was 50 years ago. It matters beyond words. We don’t know what we are losing, in both senses of the term. When we say to each other "you don’t know what you’re missing" we mean you don’t know because you have not had, or you’ll never have, the experience in question. I spoke in this connection earlier about the corncrake. And when it comes to the enrichment that understanding of, contact with, experience of, the multitudinous lives of all the wild things that inhabit our country brings, most of them too small to be noticed in our busy everyday lives, believe me, there is more on our doorstep to wonder at, more to thrill us, than our short lives lived a hundred times over can appreciate. We don’t see it simply because we haven’t had the chance to find out what to look for or where to look, or because there was nobody there to show us.

We should be determined that this enriching experience will not be denied to our children and the generations that follow, down all the centuries that we may hope to be here. And indeed, especially now that a golden opportunity to do so is being presented to us, to recover something of it for ourselves, those of us who are adults I mean. There has never been a better time because we have resources that were not at our disposal before to do these things.

There are enormous gaps in our knowledge of invertebrates (those "little citizens" which, remember, account for the overwhelmingly greater part of biodiversity), and of non-flowering plants, fungi and lichens (to say nothing of bacteria). When you begin to look really closely at a habitat, a whole kaleidoscope of hitherto unseen biological diversity springs into focus. It’s going to be difficult to avoid name-dropping, but in the course of my own casual observations here I have encountered the most incredible swarms of nymphs of the mayfly Leptophlebia and of the phantom larva Chaoborus; over the years I have met with Echinomyia, the meniscus midge Dixa, the great diving beetle Dytiscus, the water scorpion Nepa, and all sorts of other beetles and bugs: and flies, which have included the ferocious Echinomyia grossa which if moths were intelligent would haunt with terror the caterpillarhood dreams of every large moth on the bog, the mantis-mimic fly Octeramantis, and most recently and wonderfully, Phalacrocera replicata, not to mention a host of leaf-miners including several species of Coleophora. And take my word for it, lions and tigers and bears oh my! have nothing on any one of these small creatures when it comes to excite wonder and the capacity to enchant. Several, such as Colephora milvipennis and Phalacrocera have been recorded only once or twice anywhere in Ireland.

So you can see why the other great task of the biodiversity strategy must be to ascertain what we do know, to try to fill the gaps as time goes by, and above all to plan for the sustaining of biodiversity in Offaly to make sure in the first instance that we can meet the challenge of halting habitat loss by 2010 -and to move beyond that to restore what we can of what has been lost.
We are responding to this challenge because it is imposed upon us by our obligations under the Rio Convention. But if that is the only reason we probably won’t get far. If this Biodiversity Strategy is to grow and flower the way it is capable of growing and flowering, the primary driver must be that concern on the part of those involved. And if it is to succeed it needs to be supported and driven by a structure that is permanent.

The Convention on Biological Diversity was born out of a concern and appreciation that was more than academic. It saw clearly that the preservation of biodiversity is not an issue that can be left to the handful of taxonomists* and ecologists who were the first to waken to the urgency of the issues for which it stands: or indeed, left to scientists or administrators in general. The spirit of Agenda 21 also demands this of us: that these issues be lifted onto a different plane: wrenched away from economists and academics and given political, social and spiritual power to effect change from the bottom up.

The involvement of the broader community is seen as a key element in the proper implementation of the Convention on Biological Diversity. This will require on the one hand the effective dissemination of the ecological or cultural values inherent in biodiversity; but on the other hand it needs to genuinely involve people and their lives at every stage of the process. We need to move forward to a care-for-nature policy that involves, empowers and enriches community.