Ecology and tropics and the Arctic

Hello.

Today I want to talk to you about ecology. Studying in IB, we didn't really do much ecology. Instead we concentrated on human and cells and stuff. Which is probably a big part of why I failed to get in to study biology, since ecology seems to be a big thing in Finland.
Also, I seem to think that ecology is wholly the most uninteresting part of biology. Which is weird. I think it's because when I say ecology, what I think about is studying how ecosystems in Finnish lakes work. About a third of the ecology book for the high school course was about the nature here in Finland, and I get that's important and all, for people living in Finland, but somehow I don't find that interesting.
In biology what I do find interesting is genetics, and evolution, and how things change and react and how a system like a living creature keeps working day in and day out. And biodiversity. It's amazing. How something small and simple (well, depends on how you define simple, I guess) can become something big, and something small, and something everything. How a tiny bubble of molecules has developed over billions of years to be everything we see today.
Everything.
Ok, I'm getting overwhelmed by the amazingness of DNA and all this again.

Moving on.

Then I stop and think, and realise that in fact evolution and biodiversity is pretty much what ecology is about. Kind of. It's a lot more than that, obviously, but the things I'm most interested in are a part of ecology, and in fact the rest of it is pretty amazing too. It's just that Finnish ecology isn't interesting. It might be that it's because I've grown up in the middle of Finnish ecology, so it's perfectly normal. But when I move from Finland to South America of Australia, it all gets so much more interesting in my head.
And I think I've found also another reason for this that Finland being common:

There's simply so much more everything in the tropical areas.

And that everything, and the fact that there's so much about that everything that we don't yet even know that there is to know is what fascinates me.

I have a lot of hippie friends who are regularly posting stuff on facebook about saving the Arctic. And every time they do that, I feel a little guilty, because I can't get myself to care about the Arctic areas as much as I feel someone in my social group should. There is a simple reason for that.
If the Arctic melts, polar bears are dead. And arctic foxes, and maybe a few fish species, and a handfull of other animals. But if we hack down the rainforests, a huge amount of species we didn't even know exist go extinct, alongside with all the thousands of species that we know live there. I'm sorry, but as horrible as it would be if polar bears died off, I'm more worried about the warm, tropical areas, the hot spots in the world.
 I know that the Arctic is a unique area in the world, no other like it, and we must preserve it because otherwise there isn't anything like it anywhere any more. But honestly, the biodiversity and amount of life would very likely increase in the Arctic areas if the polar caps melted. So it would in a way be good for the area if it got a little warmer there. Just not for the animals living there right now. But there aren't really that many.
Also, of course, there's the point that as the area covered in ice on the North pole decreases, the amount of light reflected back by that white, bright snow also decreases, and instead all that warmth gets sucked into the ocean, which probably isn't good for the species living in warm areas either.
But still, trying to preserve the Arctic by telling people to save the polar bear seems... I don't know, I don't like it. Trying to preserve the Arctic because of it's nature doesn't seem too important to me. There's far more amazing and lively and diverse nature elsewhere, and I think trying to preserve that is more important. Simply because there's so much more to preserve.

And it's that so much more in there, in the tropics, that truly hold my interest when talking about ecology. When talking about almost anything, really.

I had this pretty much same conversation with dad on the phone a few hours ago, and his comment was "If you're going to get into researching biodiversity in the rainforests of the world, people will have a hard time figuring out if it's you or your aunt who has written a paper." because apparently we have the same initials. And last name. And I was like "oh, well."

Ok, see you next week.

~matu

PS. Speaking of the Arctic, this just popped up on my facebook feed. So yeah, preserving the Arctic is still important, even if the nature wasn't particularly interesting.