Frontlines of Understanding: Martins Earthstock Keynote Highlights Importance of Biodiversity

Our lives are connected to millions of other species, as well as to each other, and sometimes it’s the smallest and most overlooked creatures who help keep the world around us running.

Renowned Kenyan entomologist and evolutionary biologist Dino Martins, director of Stony Brook University’s Turkana Basin Institute (TBI), kicked off Earthstock, Stony Brook’s weeklong celebration of sustainability, with a passionate keynote speech highlighting this theme to a nearly full house in the Charles B. Wang Center Theater on April 21. 

Martins offered a message of hope about the future of our planet, discussing his research and conservation efforts in East Africa, focusing on the importance of biodiversity, the impact of climate change, and attention to detail. His work integrates scientific knowledge with traditional community insights, aiming to create impactful and nuanced understanding of nature.

“We’re going to go on a little journey and we’re going to learn about some of the things that are most overlooked and most ignored,” he began. “I hope you will connect with some of these interesting things in terms of how they contribute to our well-being and our survival. Also, at this moment in time in particular, we should draw hope from some of these examples of how species interact, and examples of how communities use knowledge about biodiversity.”

Equally important, he said, is recognizing how little we still know, and how much we need to know in terms of today’s climate challenges.

“Africa faces the brunt of a huge amount of the impacts of climate change and climate instability,” he said. “In the last decade alone, we’ve had four major droughts in Kenya, and while we’ve had those droughts in northern Kenya, Lake Turkana has been flooding. So in the midst of droughts, you have a lake that’s not just flooding, but has grown in surface area by over 1,000 square kilometers in one of the hottest and driest parts of the world.”

Martins said that scientists today can use technology to understand the world and share information at a scale that is unprecedented. “One of the biggest questions I get from students is ‘how can we use this knowledge and use this information to address some of the problems and the challenges in the world?’”

Martins illustrated the importance of details in science by describing two versions of a painting made about 10 years apart by Jan Brueghel the Younger in the mid-1600s. “Even though these are 400-year-old paintings, you can see that this part of the world was starting to make more contact with other parts of the world even in that 10-year-span, and a big part of that contact and exchange is centered around nature and species and biodiversity.”

Martins pointed out differences in the paintings that indicate a changing world that was coming together. 

“In the later painting you can see various birds and animals introduced that weren’t in the older version,” said Martins. “You also have plant species that are being traded across the world that are now very obvious, but at that time were new and interesting. When you look back at these beautiful paintings, to really appreciate their scientific message, think about how for hundreds of years, whether as artists or scientists, we’ve looked at and interacted with nature and we can see the details. Pay attention to those details. The ability to recognize detail is something that is very human, and we can draw many important connections and much information from that.”

Martins highlighted the intimate connection between people and nature, particularly in agricultural settings, underscoring the need for sustainable and biodiverse farming practices and the integration of traditional knowledge in modern agriculture.

“Domina, a farmer I’ve met, farms in a very remote area of Tanzania to support her family,” said Martins. “The crop she’s growing, the pigeon pea, is an amazing legume. You can eat the young leaves as a vegetable, and when the pods ripen you have the pigeon pea, which you can dry and store and keep for a long time. It’s a protein-rich food in a landscape where there isn’t a lot of protein available. But it’s 100-percent dependent on the pollination by bees. There are more than 500 bee species in Turkana.”

Martins described how Domina created a healthy pesticide-free landscape for the bees, her crop and her family. 

“Because she had created this nice habitat, she had incredibly good yields,” he said. “It was the connection between all the parts of the landscape that made this possible. I realized early on that there isn’t naturally the separation between people and nature that we often see, especially in the West. Much of the world actually has a deep overlap between people and nature, and there isn’t a boundary. And what we do to one touches so many other parts of the system.”

In the spirited Q&A session that followed, Martins was asked about his work and goals at the Turkana Basin Institute.

“Richard Leakey’s vision was that so much of the work that had historically been done in Africa had been very extractive and was part of the western science infrastructure, it was very transactional,” said Martins. “He established these institutes to try to counter that, to make this relationship be deeper, to understand that all these resources, whether they be fossils or stone tools or bot flies, come from a landscape that people are living in and have lived in for a very long time. Leakey believed that if you did science where you actually connected and involved and co-produced that knowledge, the science would be better and more meaningful.”

The keynote, which was preceded by URECA undergraduate research presentations, ended with a question on how the public can make an impact on the environment and climate change. 

“Consumers have a lot of power,” he said. “Even within a country like Kenya, we can buy in a more responsible way. We can go to the farmer’s markets, we can go to the beekeepers. Get back in touch with the people that produce the food and connect and be responsible about that. There are many dynamics that are outside our control, but we do have a responsibility to elect good leaders, and that alone will make a massive difference in the world, and improve the trajectory we’re moving in. I’m hopeful because I spend a lot of time with young people, and I see their passion and their willingness to not to see the differences between people, but to work together. And for me that is really the way we’ll solve this problem.”

— Robert Emproto