Biophilia and Biodiversity 2: Nature – love it or leave it, why we need it!

Earth is not a platform for human life.  It’s a living being.  We’re not on it but part of it.  Its health is our health.  Thomas Moore (archetypal psychologist and mythologist).

I really do not think that indigenous peoples go around saying I love nature.  To people that live within the natural world I do think that they revere it and accept their place within it naturally and celebrate that connection as easily as we take a breath of fresh air without having to think about it as such.  To people that live with the concrete jungles of modern cities and sprawling towns, getting into natural setting is a step into something that we intrinsically feel is both different and releasing of tension and stress.  It is hard to feel stressed in a natural setting – unless you are being stalked by a wild predator, but that is more an unusual occurrence these days.  Natural settings make us feel a connection to something that is more nostalgic for a time gone but not totally forgotten.

In his 2005 book, The Last Child in the Woods, Richard Louv describes Nature Deficit Disorder as an alienation from biodiversity and the natural world that has severe sociological/societal implications.  While not an official medical diagnosis, Louv really explains how a natural setting and nature in general is absolutely necessary for our mental and physical health.

Why should we save nature – well, I could go on about how it is essential, but there are many pragmatic reasons to save, conserve, or preserve natural areas.  Even to the most ardent industrialist who sees nature as merely a resource for their profits, the monumental aspects of nature (e.g. The Grand canyon, the Alps, the Serengeti Plains) are appealing as something spectacular outside of humanities ‘normal’ setting.  Yet, even beyond the wonderful views and setting, an even more pragmatic need for nature comes through Biodiversity, or biological diversity.  This is the sum of an area’s organisms, considering the diversity of species, their genes, their populations, and their communities and their interaction with the mineral systems to create unique ecosystems.

There is no one exact definition of biodiversity; people have conceived of it in many ways.  At the most pragmatic level, even the most ardent and extreme anthropocentric worldview must see why preserving the natural world is an absolute given. It’s not about saving the planet, but about saving humanity.  If we save humanity, we save everything else.  I used to teach about the economics of ecosystem services and what it would cost if we had to start using expensive technology to compensate for our destruction of such services.   Consider the following list of why preserving biodiversity preserves ecosystem services (that are currently FREE to us to use), and directly provides things of pragmatic value to the health of the planet and hence our human health.

• Food, fuel, and fiber
• Shelter and building materials
• Air and water purification
• Waste decomposition
• Climate stabilization and moderation
• Nutrient cycling
• Soil fertility
• Pollination
• Pest control
• Genetic resources

As a rough guide to why these are more than important.  The GDP of the entire planetary human economic system is about $33 trillion and the cost of technologically having to cope with the free ecosystem services we ruin has been estimated at $35 trillion if we can actually do the technology.  Human hubris at ruining a free service and expecting no consequences has to be the height of insanity.

Currently, extreme industrial farming using monocultures have reduced crop diversity and meat diversity (eating meat is yet another big problem – for another post).  Over 90% of all human food worldwide now comes from only 15 main crop species and 8 livestock species.  While these farm species currently give us good yields (we won’t talk quality at this time – yet another post) we are literally putting all our ‘eggs into one basket’ when it comes to food security.  Many species not now commonly used for food could be.  Genetic diversity within crop species and their relatives enhances our agriculture and provides insurance against losses of prevalent strains of staple crops.  Our rush to grow perfect crops and strains of preference for market value has literally demolished our crop diversity.  Notably, some of the lost heirloom species have seeds saved in seed-banks, but more are simply not here anymore – those seed varieties are extirpated.  For instance, the following list is crop strains for select varieties we once had (100 years ago) versus what we currently have available to us.

• Sugar Beet 288 – 17
• Cabbage 544 – 18
• Tomato 408 – 79
• Cucumber 285 – 16
• Pea 408 – 25
• Sweet Corn 307 – 12
• Squash 341 – 40
• Lettuce 497 – 36
• Radish 463 – 27
• Muskmelon 338 – 27

A short story about human hubris and the rush to economic profits.  A few years ago, I met with the late British economist Richard Douthwaite (The Growth Illusion).  One of his stories about the need for heirloom crops is that of the Cornish Cauliflower.  It grew well in the south west of England and for most of history was a staple of the local diet.  The problem however was that the curds were large and not particularly attractive even if they were highly nutritious.  Once Britain joined the European Common market, the local Cornish farmers trying to sell to a larger European market were obliged to grow a prettier small white curd French Cauliflower that we usually see on the supermarket shelves today.  For the first few years the Cornish farmers struggled to grow this French variety in enough numbers to be economically feasible.  They couldn’t keep the new strain from succumbing to a local fungus found to be living in the soils of the area.  Eventually, the farmers realized, too late, that the French strain could not be grown in the area.  When they tried to revert back to the fungal resistant local strain (an ecological adaptation) of Cornish cauliflower, they found that in their rush to be economically viable, no one had saved any seeds from this heirloom strain.   It is now lost to history.  This story is being repeated all over the world as industrial farming tramples local growers under foot.  Especially in the MDCs, the food bought at a local supermarket has to look symmetrical and unblemished.   It has been estimated that upwards of 50% of food grown in the fields of MDC countries is left to rot or used for other purposes (like blemished tomatoes to ketchup, or blemished apples to apple sauce or juice).  When organic produce was first introduced to supermarkets and farmers markets, it took a while for customers to get used to food that didn’t look perfect.  This is a great example of how finicky affluence has changed our perceptions of what constitutes good and bad food.  Yet, the absolute crap that is added to ‘fast and processed food’ goes unnoticed.  We put all our agricultural eggs in one basket, waste immense amounts of crops, add toxic chemicals to the food and fields, and remain largely ignorant of how big corporate systems fight to remain unregulated, and we wonder why our overall health for the planet and ourselves is diminishing.    TBC…….