Ecosystem Services
I was dismayed to read that despite all we know about the importance of rainforests to life on the planet that they are continuing to be destroyed. The rainforests are perhaps the symbol we think of when it comes to deforestation but the depletion of forests around the world is astonishing. More than half of the forest cover that once existed has been destroyed for farming, cities and pretty much every other type of human activity. We obviously need to utilize some of the materials that forests give us, and clear some of the land to make it useful for other purposes, but with the population explosion our natural exosystems have borne the brunt exponential population growth.
While the manipulation of forests has given us a vast amount of natural resources and other productive commodities such as land, we are degrading the provision of other ecological services that are necessary to life on this planet. Below is a chart from the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment that demonstrates the wide range of ecological services that the forests of the world provide. While we have been keen to exploit the resource services that the forests provide we threaten the biospheric and ecological services that are much more important.
In order to protect the natural ecosystems that sustain life we need to dispel the myth that man is seperate from nature. When one thinks of the environment we rarely think that humans exist as a part of this environment. The truth is that we are a part of the ecosystem that has gotten out of balance. We need to start thinking long and hard about how we are going to turn things around if we are going to have any chance of addressing the ecological crisis that we are approaching very quickly.
For more on the state of the planet's ecosystems, go to http://www.millenniumassessment.org
You will be surprised how much we have damaged the world's vital ecosystems.
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