THERE IS a general agreement among experts that prevention is the key to the conservation of biodiversity. Why? Because it costs far more to repair a damaged environment than to conserve it.

This, in a nutshell, was the gist of a highly technical lecture delivered July 24 at the Teatro Ilocandia by scientist Chris Barry, principal adviser and chief of technology and strategy of the Green Technology, Inc. based in San Carlos California.

Barry’s audience was composed of fourth year engineering, agriculture, and environmental science students, and some faculty members and staff of the university.

Expounding his way to describe the total life cycle integration through ecological principles for energy and resource use and conservation, Barry opened up the symposium proper by describing the total life cycle integration, a process by which energy is released with minimal loss at each stage of a cycle where every material output from every process is the starting position to create a new product.

“This concept is not new to the environment, because it is the way in which nature normally proceeds,” he said.

A further characteristic derived from observation of nature is that conditions may prevail in which products become locked into unreactive forms, requiring significant activation energy or catalytic intervention to facilitate any transformation.

“However, the very stability of the form may hide a considerable reservoir of bond energy, far exceeding any activation energy applied. Such products are coal and oil, representing ‘stationary pools’ of carbon and hydrogen,” he said.

It is evident that various cycles in the environment sustaining life on earth are found as repeating cycles operating within thousands of years. These overload the naturally occurring cycles which lead to building up of released gases in the atmosphere which damage the ozone layer.

“For the last 200 years, we have utilized the coal laid down in the carboniferous period, the oil laid down in the warm seas, and the sediments of the past ages, and now we wonder at the rise of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere,” Barry said adding that in 1997 alone, it was estimated that worldwide population has released 400 times the biomass of the earth in carbon dioxide alone, into the atmosphere.

Besides this, a range of other gases that pollute the atmosphere has moved the composition to having gases that are detrimental to current air-dependent life forms. “These are due to the use of high temperature combustion such as oxidizing nitrogen, sulphur, and phosphorus which form part of the structure of the biomolecules sequestered and modified in the process of fossilization,” he laments.

According to Barry, a chemical cycle that gives a diversity of fate to different environment components is another thing to consider in protecting and conserving biodiversity. Not all the components are chemically modified in the same way or lead to similar products.  In nature, the processes are sequential modifications, with many branches to deal with the different materials fixed into bio-systems through metabolic activities. Thus, a single stage oxidation, as in any burning activity to eliminate wastes, for instance, has more long-lasting consequence in the atmosphere.

“It is often remarked that planting of plants can offset this output. While this may be true in gross atmospheric balances, it is untrue when a place of human habitation is seen as a biome,” he said.

“Sometimes, builders of man-made energy systems often confine their thinking to one mechanism or another, rather than looking for an integrated harmonious approach to energy generation that may protect the ecosystem,” he added.

What can address the woes that evolved within the unique ecosystem of people’s waste?

“Certainly nature makes many transformations of our waste, most ending up as substances we define as pollutants. Let us apply our minds to work with nature by guiding and modifying our methods of decomposition for our benefit. In so doing, we enable consistent energy generation and pollution mitigation through process control,” Barry said. (By Reynaldo E. Andres)