“THERE’S a term biologists and economists use these days — ecosystem services — which refers to the many ways nature supports the human endeavor. Forests filter the water we drink, for example, and birds and bees pollinate crops, both of which have substantial economic as well as biological value.“
Actually “nature” never does anything to “provide services” – that’s an artificial human construct. We exploit bees doing what they do for our advantage but that does not mean “nature” is “providing” any sort of service at all. We are simply good at exploiting that which we find around us and/or altering it to better suit ourselves. It is extremely foolish to anthropomorphize the unimproved environment and pretend it is “serving us”. What you see is what you get – exploit it or improve it because it is a dangerous and hostile environment in its unimproved state.
“Ecosystem services” are imaginary values applied by pagans and gaia-cranks to “protect” things from humans who would otherwise improve them or modify them to make them better suit our purpose. They were invented because tales of forest fairies and angry spirits no longer work to suppress human development:
If we fail to understand and take care of the natural world, it can cause a breakdown of these systems and come back to haunt us in ways we know little about. A critical example is a developing model of infectious disease that shows that most epidemics — AIDS, Ebola, West Nile, SARS, Lyme disease and hundreds more that have occurred over the last several decades — don’t just happen. They are a result of things people do to nature.
Disease, it turns out, is largely an environmental issue. Sixty percent of emerging infectious diseases that affect humans are zoonotic — they originate in animals. And more than two-thirds of those originate in wildlife.
Teams of veterinarians and conservation biologists are in the midst of a global effort with medical doctors and epidemiologists to understand the “ecology of disease.” It is part of a project called Predict, which is financed by the United States Agency for International Development. Experts are trying to figure out, based on how people alter the landscape — with a new farm or road, for example — where the next diseases are likely to spill over into humans and how to spot them when they do emerge, before they can spread. They are gathering blood, saliva and other samples from high-risk wildlife species to create a library of viruses so that if one does infect humans, it can be more quickly identified. And they are studying ways of managing forests, wildlife and livestock to prevent diseases from leaving the woods and becoming the next pandemic.
It isn’t only a public health issue, but an economic one. The World Bank has estimated that a severe influenza pandemic, for example, could cost the world economy $3 trillion.
The problem is exacerbated by how livestock are kept in poor countries, which can magnify diseases borne by wild animals. A study released earlier this month by the International Livestock Research Institute found that more than two million people a year are killed by diseases that spread to humans from wild and domestic animals.
I didn’t know that ~40% of human diseases come from wild animals, presumably wild mammals. Great way to get a grant: study the ecosystem so you find ways to manage it to prevent disease jumps. I already knew that a portion of the ecosystem thought I was food.
The classic book “Guns, Germs and Steel” by Jared Diamond has the evolution of resistance to germs during domestication as a major feature. It’s a very interesting book.
I’m concerned about your views on nature. There are ways that we can use nature without destroying which is what I believe this article was getting at. We should not destroy things that we don’t fully understand.
Of course we use what we find around us nondestructively quite frequently ash but that is very different from provision of services. What we get from it depends on human ingenuity, not “nature”.