Not far from the elk, Miller opens an
inconspicuous security door into the
museum’s private world. The “nation’s
attic” has wide, well-lit corridors, and
when Miller reaches the giant room stor-
ing much of the pinned insect collection,
he pauses to let the sight sink in.

It’s not attic-y at all, but has the super-clean, bright feel of movie sets for secret, high-tech installations. Ranks of some 1,800 cabinets, almost ceiling-high, near-white and identical, march into the distance.

Earth’s vast diversity

Miller’s mini–New Year’s event may be
low on champagne, but it’s a world-class
demonstration of what
biodiversity is. He’s
using insects to con-
vey the variety of life by
giving a little tour of his
workplace, which hap-
pens to be the Smithso-
nian National Museum
of Natural History in
Miller starts with a few shallow
wooden drawers topped with glass. The
collection’s 135,000 drawers hold speci-
mens from just about every kind of place
an insect has ever been: tiny leaf min-
ers that excavate within
a single mangrove leaf
and harvester ants that
scurry over desert sands,
for example.

20 40 60

“It’s not because
one beetle or
one frog is going
extinct that we
are worried.…

All these insect habitats — the whole range of ecosystems on the planet — rank as a form of biodiversity, Miller says.

He lifts trays holding insects grown from larvae picked out of fruits in Papua New Guinea. The assembled rows appear to contain duplicates of a tiny brown-winged thingy, but his trained eye recognizes dozens of species. Another tray holds dozens of postage-stamp–sized brown moths pinned in evenly spaced rows. The moths also look the same at first glance, and Miller says this drawer holds nothing but a single species of spruce budworm, an infamous pest of eastern forests in North America. Staring closely, though, reveals shades of brown, from mahogany and chocolate to almost beige. And the wings are mottled with yet tinier variations on the theme.

These individual differences count as biodiversity too. Differences at the ecosystem, species and genetic levels all matter, Miller says.

It’s that the losses
are massive.”

Washington, D.C. As the

jEan-ChRistophE vÍE

Smithsonian’s deputy under secretary for science, he has a lab that looks out on part of the research collection of insect specimens — there are

35 million of them.

Leading the way through the public exhibit halls toward the stored collections, Miller strides past dramatic fossil displays: half-billion-year-old remains of weird, spiky creatures from Canada’s Burgess Shale, an Irish elk with antlers that loom like roof-mounted satellite dishes and other vanished marvels.

Percent

Though things have been disappearing for a long time, humanity has revved up extinction rates in the past few centuries to as much as a thousand times the rates during much of Earth’s history, according to the 2005 Millennium Ecosystem Assessment. That status report, the work of some 1,360 scientists, names habitat change, climate change, introduction of invasive species, overexploitation and pollution as the big causes of this anthropogenic extinction. And the report calls for urgent action.

sky-blue hairstreaks display the subtle
diversity within one butterfly species.

that greater diversity tends to boost an ecosystem’s productivity and reinforce its stability.

Biologists around the world are thus bootstrapping themselves out of despair and seizing the occasion to explain biodiversity and why it matters.

except for Andorra, the Holy See and the United States. Political opposition in 1993 prevented the full U.S. Senate from voting on whether to ratify the treaty, and the issue has lain dormant since.

At a meeting in 2002, the participants adopted the strategic plan that set the date, 2010, for achieving the reduction in losses. Now, like serial New Year’s resolvers pledging to lose 10 pounds, signatory nations have to get on the scale.

The treaty secretariat’s January preview of the reckoning provided only broad trends with arrows and pie charts to indicate whether various goals had been met. (On a global scale, they had not.)

“It’s not looking good,” says Jean-Christophe Vié, deputy coordinator of the species program at the International Union for Conservation of Nature in Gland, Switzerland. The nonprofit maintains the Red List, a registry that ranks the status of various species, from thriving (“least concern”) to extinct.

Though comparing IUCN data over time is difficult because the scope and criteria have changed, the Red List provides a snapshot of where biodiversity is now.

At the end of 2009, an IUCN report found plenty of creatures, mostly animals and plants, still in peril. Of the 44,838 species that the IUCN had evaluated by 2008, 16,928 met at least the criteria for

Categorizing concern The International Union for Conservation of Nature assigns each assessed species a category of concern. Of the groups below, amphibians and cycads have the largest portions of endangered species, thanks in part to habitat destruction and overcollection.

Red List status of species within various groups 100

80

Recent wipeout

Losses at all these levels had roused enough concern by 1992 for an Earth Summit in Brazil to produce the Convention on Biological Diversity treaty. Enough nations had ratified the treaty by 1993 for it to become a binding legal document. By now, all nations have agreed to participate