The Work of Nature: How the Diversity of Life Sustains Us - Softcover

Baskin, Yvonne

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1559635207 ISBN 13: 9781559635202

Verlag: ISLAND PR, 1998

Inhaltsangabe

The lavish array of organisms known as "biodiversity" is an intricately linked web that makes the earth a uniquely habitable planet. Yet pressures from human activities are destroying biodiversity at an unprecedented rate. How many species can be lost before the ecological systems that nurture life begin to break down?

In The Work of Nature, noted science writer Yvonne Baskin examines the threats posed to humans by the loss of biodiversity. She summarizes and explains key findings from the ecological sciences, highlighting examples from around the world where shifts in species have affected the provision of clean air, pure water, fertile soils, lush landscapes, and stable natural communities.

As Baskin makes clear, biodiversity is much more than number of species -- it includes the complexity, richness, and abundance of nature at all levels, from the genes carried by local populations to the layout of communities and ecosystems across the landscape. Ecologists are increasingly aware that mankind's wanton destruction of living organisms -- the planet's work force -- threatens to erode our basic life support services. With uncommon grace and eloquence, Baskin demonstrates how and why that is so.

Distilling and bringing to life the work of the world's leading ecologists, The Work of Nature is the first book of its kind to clearly explain the practical consequences of declining biodiversity on ecosystem health and function.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Yvonne Baskin is a widely published science journalist whose work has appeared in numerous magazines including Discover, Earth, Science, and BioScience

. She divides her time between Bozeman, Montana, and San Diego, California.

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In The Work of Nature, noted science writer Yvonne Baskin examines the threats posed to humans by the loss of biodiversity. She summarizes and explains key findings from the ecological sciences, highlighting examples from around the world where shifts in species have affected the provision of clean air, pure water, fertile soils, lush landscapes, and stable natural communities. Distilling and bringing to life the work of the world's leading ecologists, The Work of Nature is the first book of its kind to clearly explain the practical consequences of declining biodiversity on ecosystem health and functioning.

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The Work of Nature

How the Diversity of Life Sustains Us

By Yvonne Baskin

ISLAND PRESS

Copyright © 1997 The Scientific Committee on Problems of the Environment (SCOPE)
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-55963-520-2

Contents

About Island Press, 
Title Page, 
Copyright Page, 
Foreword - Of Keystone Complexes and Nature's Services, 
Preface, 
Acknowledgements, 
CHAPTER ONE - This Web of Life, 
CHAPTER TWO - The "Keystone Club: Who's Important, 
CHAPTER THREE - Community Ties, 
CHAPTER FOUR - Water: The Essence of Life, 
CHAPTER FIVE - The Vitality of the Soil, 
CHAPTER SIX - Of Plants and Productivity, 
CHAPTER SEVEN - The Power to Shape the Land, 
CHAPTER EIGHT - Climate and Atmosphere, 
CHAPTER NINE - Do We Still Need Nature?, 
Notes, 
Index, 

CHAPTER 1

This Web of Life

Overleaf

Ecologists are starting to probe how plants and animals help to generate vital ecological services such as productivity and nutrient cycling.

* * *

Our oldest faiths and deepest symbols reflect a primal connection to the natural world, to a living planet that long ago imprinted on the human consciousness a cyclic sense of death and decay, rebirth and renewal. We do not question that flesh and bone and leaf litter will decay to dust, that seeds will sprout season after season and find renewed nourishment in the soil, that rivers can flow endlessly without running dry, that we can breathe for a lifetime without depleting the air of oxygen. Despite our fascination with other worlds and our hopeful probing of outer space, we've found no other planet where any of these things are true. What humans have not fully appreciated until recently is that these services are the work of nature, performed by the rich diversity of microbes, plants, and animals on the earth.

It is this lavish array of organisms that we call "biodiversity," an intricately linked web of living things whose activities work in concert to make the earth a uniquely habitable planet. But today, as never before, the species in this web are under siege, threatened by human activities that encroach on their habitats. At the same time, ecologists are increasingly aware that the impoverishment of species—the planet's work force—threatens to erode the basic life-support services that render the earth hospitable for humanity. Indeed, we are approaching a crossroads in time, when the survival and extinction of other species may well delimit the future of Homo sapiens.

Consider what life has done and continues to do for the earth.

Some 4 billion years ago, the primordial atmosphere was a ghastly brew, devoid of oxygen and unable to shield the earth's surface from the scorching, molecule-cleaving ultraviolet radiation of the young sun. Eventually life changed all that. Over billions of years, photosynthetic organisms in the sea released enough oxygen to create a protective ozone shield and a reservoir of free oxygen that allowed the first plants to venture onto the land. Through the alchemy of enzymes and solar energy, green plants from plankton to redwoods still carry on photosynthesis, turning water and carbon dioxide into free oxygen and also the carbon-based sugars needed to build all living tissues. These are the raw materials that underpin the earth's food webs and generate the food, fiber, timber, and fuel that sustain human societies.

Together, plants, animals, and microbes perform an array of vital services. They generate and preserve fertile soils. They break down organic wastes, from leaf litter to feces and flesh, recycling the mineral nutrients, carbon, and nitrogen needed for new plant growth. They absorb and break down pollutants; help maintain a benign mix of gases in the atmosphere; regulate the amount of solar energy the earth absorbs; moderate regional weather and rainfall; modulate the water cycle, minimizing floods and drought and purifying waters; blunt the impact of the seas that batter the land margins; pollinate crops; and control the vast majority of potential crop pests and carriers of human disease.

In addition, this rich abundance of organisms serves as a "genetic library," a catalog of solutions to the problems of living on the earth. This catalog is written in the language of DNA, and from it human societies have derived crops, livestock, medicines, and many other commodities.

On a larger scale, the earth's various species form populations that are aligned into communities and ecological systems—ecosystems, for short—which deliver such subsidies as clean air, pure water, and lush landscapes. Ecosystems, flexibly defined, are living communities interacting with the physical environment in a specific geographical place. An ecosystem may be as small as a rotting log or a pond or as large as a spruce forest or a vast lake. Of course, species are the critical components, the cogs and wheels of functioning ecosystems. Lose too many species from a forest—the trees, the truffle-forming fungi on their roots, the insects that prey on tree-destroying pests, the beavers that create ponds and meadows amid the woods—and at some point the assemblage ceases to work like a forest.

One question increasingly on the minds of ecologists is, how many species can the earth's communities lose before the ecological systems that nurture life begin to falter? To take the extreme, if nature had to run with a skeleton crew, what organisms would be absolutely vital to maintain the earth as a living planet? Probably the only truly indispensable groups of organisms are the plants that capture carbon and solar energy and the ranks of decomposers that release the nutrients and energy in dead plant litter for reuse. But a conservation agenda based on this extreme would ignore the elaborate tangle of loops and flourishes in the food webs, the intricate array of consumers that eat plants and predators that eat consumers, the symbionts, parasites, and other hangers-on who have claimed places for themselves in the earth's myriad communities. Such an agenda would overlook virtually all the charismatic creatures on today's conservation hot lists: pandas, wolves, elephants, bald eagles. Unfortunately, that agenda would also sacrifice civilization, which is supported by many of those loops and flourishes in the web of life.

If we are realistic about our dreams for tomorrow, our goal is not really "saving the planet" in some minimalist form, but perpetuating its atmosphere, climate, landscapes, and living services in a state that allows human civilizations to prosper. For that to occur, we need to preserve natural systems that are rich, healthy, and resilient enough to continue to support human welfare and economic activity for the next decade, the next century, and beyond. Some twenty-five years ago, as the space-age metaphor of "Spaceship Earth" took hold, ecologists Eugene P. Odum of the University of Georgia and his brother, Howard T. Odum, of the University of Florida first used the engineering term "life-support systems" to describe the earth's self-renewing, life-giving natural ecosystems. It is these systems, not a mere skeleton crew, that human societies must seek to maintain.

Thus, the real questions facing ecologists today center on how much biological diversity any particular ecosystem needs to remain functional, self-sustaining, and life supporting. How many species must humanity protect, and which ones and where, to assure pure water supplies from an alpine watershed; to preserve the fertility of...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: ISLAND PR
• Erscheinungsdatum: 1998
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 1559635207
• ISBN 13: 9781559635202
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 282
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar