Protect/Sustain our Way of Life!

My reading digest suggests rather clearly that we humans are losing the variety of life on Earth–biodiversity–at an accelerating rate. Chief among reasons: air pollution. And ocean acidification and warming, induced by fossil fuel burning, where coral reefs are dying as are other marine life, such as sharks, which feed there.

Another is poaching where the elephant is nearing extinction; to name one animal.

In last week’s post, I mentioned learning about USGBC board member Dr. Aaron Bernstein of the Harvard School of Public Health. I said he’d co-written/-edited the book called Sustaining Life: How Human Health Depends on Biodiversity. It’s a tome; textbook format with beautiful cover and over 540 pp. (Got a used copy nearly new for a nearly give-away price.)

I think a good share of the “Preface” is worth offering you. We need to sharpen our awareness of human’s place in the biosphere!

“Edward O. Wilson once said about ants, ‘We need them to survive, but they don’t need us  at all.’ The same, in fact, could be said about countless other insects, bacteria, fungi, plankton, plants, and other organisms. This fundamental truth, however, is largely lost to many of us. Rather, we humans generally act as if we were totally independent of Nature, as if we could do without most of its creatures and the life-giving services they provide, as if the natural world were designed to be an infinite source of products and services for our use alone and an infinite sink for our wastes.

“During the past 50 years or so, for example, our actions have resulted in the loss of roughly one-fifth of Earth’s topsoil, one-fifth of its land suitable for agriculture, almost 90 percent of its large commercial marine fisheries, and one-third of its forests, while we now need these resources more than ever, as our population has almost tripled during this period of time, increasing from 2.5 to more than 6.5 billion.

“We have changed the composition of the atmosphere, thinning the ozone layer that filters out harmful ultraviolet radiation, toxic to all living things on land and in surface waters, and increasing the concentration of atmospheric carbon dioxide to levels not present on Earth for more than 600,000 years. These carbon dioxide emissions, caused mainly by our burning fossil fuels, are unleashing a warming of Earth’s surface and of the oceans and a change in the climate that will increasingly threaten our health and the survival of other species worldwide. And we are now consuming or wasting or diverting almost half of all the net biological production on land, which ultimately derives from photosynthesis, and more than half of the planet’s renewal fresh water.

“We are so damaging the habitats in which other species live that we are driving them to distinction, the only truly irreversible consequence of our environmental assaults, at a rate that is hundred to even thousands of times greater than natural background levels. As a result, some biologists have concluded that we have entered into what they are calling ‘the sixth great extinction event,’ the fifth having occurred sixty-five million years ago when dinosaurs and many other organisms were wiped out. That event was most likely the result of a giant asteroid striking Earth; this one we are causing [italics mine].

“Most disturbing of all, as a result of all of these actions taken together, we are disrupting what are called ‘ecosystem services,’ that is, the various ways that organisms, and the sum total of their interactions with each other and with the environments in which they live, function to keep alive life on this planet, including human life, alive.”

Kind of a wake-up call–if not an indictment. Tons more to learn in this tome…

P.S. Use the search tool to find previous posts about air pollution and ocean acidification.