Space is final frontier on earth, too

When the shuttle touched down earlier this month, the voiceover introduction for the original Star Trek series popped into my head. Boldly going where no one has gone before to explore new worlds.

As the crew ripped through the atmosphere on the flight back, I wondered if their perspectives of space would be forever changed by where they'd been. Orbiting your planet 400 miles up might do that. What's it like traveling 5.8 million miles in 13 days around a spinning blue ball full of life? Would you think about space differently?

In orbit, space outside the shuttle is lifeless as far as we know. In the distance, between suns, there's mostly nothing. Unless you count cold. Plenty of that.

Space here, though, has a different meaning. It's where we build our homes. Where we grow our food. Where we live our lives.

It's also the big soup pot the other living pieces of the planet swim around in. Biologists call those kinds of spaces habitat. Park planners say open space.

Whatever you call it, here's a general formula about it: Diminishing a chunk of space by 90 percent eliminates about 50 percent of the species that called that space home. Sand prairies are a good example. Two hundred years ago, there were about 175 square miles of sand prairie in the bootheel. With plants like bull's tongue, clasping poppy mallow, sand milkweed and critters such as the Illinois chorus frog and the prairie mole cricket, sand prairies were home to many unique species.

Today, there are about 2,000 acres of sand prairie left -- less than 1 percent of what was here a short while ago. Accordingly, more than 50 percent of the plants and animals that lived there are gone. They ran out of space. The same can be said for Missouri's historic wetlands and savannas and many of the creatures that called those spaces home.

Ecosystems, such as the sand prairie, are complex. Generally, the more complex a system, the more parts it has. All those parts take up space. They also keep the system resilient. A system with a variety of parts can usually take a hit and still function.

In nature's system, pieces adapt to and work with one another. Sunlight, photosynthesis, plants, deer browsing the plants, hunters browsing the deer. For the interconnections to occur, there has to be space for the sunlight to hit a leaf. Space for the plant to grow. Space for the deer to browse. Space for us to hunt the deer.

According to recent government figures, 365 acres of functioning biological space an hour are being converted to concrete, homes, parking lots, streets and other nonliving things in this country. The figure for family farms is 50 acres an hour.

The other species we share the planet with, the ones that call those acres mi casa, need room to do their job of cross-stitching the fabric of life together. Edward O. Wilson, thought by many to be the father of conservation biology, estimates that species extinction is occurring worldwide at a rate one thousand to ten thousand times faster than it should be. That in turn, he says, is caused mostly by humans mostly destroying the space those species need.

You can help make more space by planting native vegetation, managing some of your land for wildlife habitat and encouraging your friends and neighbors to do the same.

Because without space, other creatures great and small will continue boldly going where no species wants to go. Leaving us with something that sounds like space but it vastly different.

Emptiness.

Phil Helfrich is a community outreach specialist with the Missouri Department of Conservation.