by DK
Fertilizers have hugely increased food grain production in India—whose population of 1.3 billion people makes food security paramount—but the chemicals also destroy soil fertility.
VANDANA SHIVA
Environmental campaigner Vandana Shiva was born in northern India. Her mother was a farmer, and her father a forester. She studied in India and Canada, obtaining a doctorate in the philosophy of physics. After returning to India, in 1982 she founded the Research Foundation for Science, Technology, and Ecology. Following the Bhopal pesticide plant disaster in 1984, her interest in agriculture grew and three years later she founded Navdanya to protect biodiversity and native seeds. Shiva campaigns against the World Trade Organization’s Trade Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) agreement, which broadens patents to include plants and animals. TIME magazine hailed Vandana Shiva as an Environmental Hero in 2003.
Key works
1989 The Violence of the Green Revolution
2000 Stolen Harvest: The Hijacking of the Global Food Supply
2013 Making Peace with the Earth
See also: Human activity and biodiversity • The legacy of pesticides • Humankind’s dominance over nature • Ecosystem services
IN CONTEXT
KEY FIGURE
Gretchen Daily (1964–)
BEFORE
c.400 BCE Greek philosopher Plato is aware of the human impact on nature, noting that deforestation can cause soil to erode and springs to run dry.
1973 German statistician and economist E.F. Schumacher coins the term “natural capital” in his book Small is Beautiful.
AFTER
1998 The UN Environment program, NASA, and the World Bank release a study on how protecting the planet serves human needs.
2008 A study at the University of California, Berkeley, shows that ecological destruction by the world’s richest countries means they owe the world’s poorest countries more than the developing world’s debt.
The benefits that humans derive from ecosystems are referred to by ecologists as ecosystem services. Some of the natural processes most important to the continuation of human life can be classified as ecosystem services, such as pollination of crops, decomposition of waste, and the availability of clean drinking water. Ecologists argue that because the enormous contributions of ecosystem services to human life are not readily quantifiable, humans drastically undervalue these services while exploiting the natural world’s resources for profit.
Although the idea that humans benefit from nature has a long history, it was not until the 1970s that the balance between nature and human needs came to the forefront of ecological debate. The term “ecosystem services” first appeared in the mid-1980s, and in 1997 the concept was developed in two key articles: “Ecosystem Services: Benefits Supplied to Human Societies by Natural Ecosystems,” edited by Gretchen Daily, and “The Value of the World’s Ecosystem Services and Natural Capital,” edited by American ecological economist Robert Costanza. In 2001, UN Secretary General Kofi Annan launched the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment (MEA), which helped popularize the concept of ecosystem services in 2005, when they published a wide-ranging appraisal of how humans impact the environment.
As a sacred mountain, Mount Fuji supplies a cultural ecosystem service for the people of Japan, while the surrounding rich volcanic soil provides a service to the local tea plantations.
“If current trends continue, humanity will dramatically alter virtually all of Earth’s remaining natural ecosystems within a few decades.”
Gretchen Daily
The four types of service
The MEA’s 2005 report detailed four categories of ecosystem services: supporting, provisioning, regulating, and cultural. Supporting services, such as soil formation and water purification, allow for the existence of all other services. Provisioning services consist of freshwater; food, such as crops and livestock; fibres, including wood, cotton, and other materials used for human essentials such as building and clothing; and natural medicines, and plants used in pharmaceuticals. Regulating services include nature’s ability to control pests—as opposed to humans’ use of pesticides—and the atmosphere’s capacity to clean itself naturally, as well as the control of weather hazards through natural buffers such as wetlands and mangrove forests. Pollination is another important regulating service, one that is endangered by the global decline of pollinators such as bees. Cultural services involve the ways that humans assign cultural or spiritual significance to elements of ecosystems such as sacred trees, animals, rivers, and mountains. The esthetic or recreational value of a natural landscape is another type of cultural service.
At its heart, the concept of ecosystem services allows humans to see how inextricably connected they are to nature, and how without the natural world human existence would be impossible. Ecologists use the concept to illuminate how precious these systems are for basic life conditions and to convince industries, businesses, and governments of the necessity for ecological preservation.
“Plans to protect air and water, wilderness and wildlife are in fact plans to protect man.”
Stewart Udall
American politician and conservationist
GRETCHEN DAILY
Born in 1964 in Washington, D.C., Gretchen Daily developed a passion for ecology at a young age. After her family moved to West Germany in 1977, she witnessed a national crisis over acid rain, and saw people protesting in the streets over environmental degradation. Daily earned two degrees and then her Ph.D. in biology at Stanford University, where she is now the Bing Professor of Environmental Science.
Daily studies biodiversity within the framework of “countryside biogeography,” or the portions of nature that have not been used for human development, but whose ecosystems are still impacted by human activity. She is a cofounder of the Natural Capital Project, which aims to incorporate environmentalism into business practices and public policy.
Key works
1997 Nature’s Services: Societal Dependence on Natural Ecosystems
2002 The New Economy of Nature: The Quest to Make Conservation Profitable
See also: Human activity and biodiversity • Ecological resilience • The Gaia hypothesis • Human devastation of Earth
IN CONTEXT
KEY FIGURE
Paul Connett (1940–)
BEFORE
1970 The first Earth Day takes place in the US to raise awareness of clean waste disposal and recycling.
1988 The Resin Identification Code is introduced in the US to encourage the recycling of plastic goods.
1992 At the Rio Earth Summit, 105 heads of state pledge their commitment to sustainable development.
AFTER
2010 The United Nations launches its Global Partnership on Waste Management to promote resource conservation and efficiency.
2012 Goals outlined at the UN Conference on Sustainable Development include waste reduction and eco-friendly production methods.
More than 65,000 people from at least 180 nations traveled to Johannesburg, South Africa, in 2002 to attend the United Nations World Summit on Sustainable Development. Its final resolutions included a call to minimize waste and maximize reuse and recycling, and to develop “clean” waste disposal systems.
In the last decades of the 20th century, it had become clear that refuse was reaching unmanageable proportions. Industrialization, the growth of large urban populations, and increasing use of plastic were all adding to the world’s garbage heap. Traditionally waste had been burned or buried, both options now associated with toxic greenhouse gas emissions and, in the case of landfills, the potential for poisoning ground water. The answer to the world’s growing waste heap had to be found elsewhere.
“Pollution is nothing but the resources we are not harvesting. We allow them to be dispersed because we’ve been ignorant of their value.”
R. Buckminster Fuller
American inventor and architect
The recycling revolution
Rec
ycling for reuse is not a new concept, but its use as a way of reducing mountains of public waste that would otherwise go into landfill has its origins in the 1960s and 1970s, when organizations such as Greenpeace made the public more aware of environmental issues. Recently, campaigners such as Paul Connett, author of Zero Waste (2013), have renewed the global call to reduce consumption, and reuse or recycle items, rather than discard them.
Since the 1970s, many US states and most European countries, as well as Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, have introduced curbside collections of recyclable items sorted into bins. Sweden has been especially active. In 1975, Swedes recycled only 38 percent of their rubbish, but today they lead the world, recycling 99 percent of household waste. About 50 percent of this waste is burned in recycling plants that generate heat for the nation’s homes. Sweden also imports waste from other countries to process in its 32 incineration plants. In 2015, it imported some 2.5 million tons (2.3 million tonnes) of waste from Norway, the UK, Ireland, and other nations.
“Mining” electronics
The fastest-growing type of waste is discarded electronics. E-waste from mobile phones, computer hard drives, TVs, and other electrical goods reached almost 46 million tons (42 million tonnes) in 2014—almost 25 percent more than in 2010. E-waste often contains precious metals, such as the gold, silver, copper, and palladium used in circuit boards. It has been shown that “mining” landfill sites to extract the metals can be more cost-effective than mining natural mineral deposits. However, e-waste also includes toxic metals, such as cadmium, lead, and mercury. In countries that both generate and import e-waste, landfill scavenging for metals can be polluting. While Europe now has an e-waste reprocessing industry, relatively few efficient schemes exist elsewhere.
There are many new initiatives, but the world is still very far from Connett’s zero waste ideal. A huge challenge remains for individuals and governments: cut consumption and recycle global refuse that will soon reach 21⁄4 billion tons (2 billion tonnes) a year.
Methane from landfill
Methane is extracted at the Payatas landfill, Manila—the first in the Philippines to have the gas converted to energy, as part of a United Nations program.
After carbon dioxide, methane is the most critical greenhouse gas. Although its atmospheric concentrations are lower than CO2, methane is 25 times more powerful at trapping heat in the atmosphere. Atmospheric methane comes from various natural sources, including the decay of vegetation in habitats such as bogs and wetlands, but also from livestock rearing, from the use of fossil fuels, and from the decomposition of trash in landfill sites.
In many places, including the UK and US, a number of landfill sites are now trapping and collecting methane to produce energy. Landfill gas contains up to 60 percent methane, depending on the composition of the waste and the age of the site. Vertical and horizontal pipelines are placed through the landfill to collect the methane, which is then processed and filtered. Most of it is used to generate electricity, but it may also be used in industry. After further processing, it can be turned into fuel for vehicles, too.
See also: Global warming • Pollution • Urban sprawl • A plastic wasteland • Renewable energy
DIRECTORY
In addition to the scientists covered in the preceding chapters of this book, many other men and women have made significant contributions to the development of ecology. They have ranked among the greatest scientific thinkers of their time. Some have excelled in academia, while some came from other walks of life but pioneered new approaches to advance. Still more have been formidable campaigners. Although they worked in a range of disciplines, all have contributed to our understanding of Earth’s biosphere, how it has evolved, and humanity’s place in it. Crucially, their work continues to show what needs to be done to preserve the natural world and to protect Earth from the destructive consequences of human behavior.
SAMUEL DE CHAMPLAIN
1574–1635
A French explorer, cartographer, soldier, and naturalist, Champlain explored and mapped much of Canada. He founded the city of Quebec and established the colony of New France. As a sharp observer and chronicler, he documented animals and made notes about plants, including details of leaves, fruits, and nuts, and inquired about how the Native American people used them.
See also: Classification of living things
JAMES AUDUBON
1785–1851
The pioneer of North American ornithology, Audubon grew up in Haiti and France before emigrating to the US in 1803. He developed an interest in nature, especially birds, and was a talented artist. His artistic technique was unusual: after shooting a bird, he held it in a “natural pose,” using fine wire, and painted it with a backdrop of the bird’s natural habitat. Between 1827 and 1838 he published The Birds of America in a series of installments. It included 435 colored prints of 497 species, six of which are now extinct. Audubon also discovered 25 previously undescribed species and used yarn to “band” birds—meaning he tied it to their legs, allowing him to identify individual bird—to find out more about their movements.
See also: Animal ecology
MARY ANNING
1799–1847
In 2010, the Royal Society named Anning as one of the 10 British women who have most influenced the history of science. She found fame as a fossil collector and paleontologist, and her extraordinary fossil finds, from Jurassic strata in the cliffs of the Dorset coast, included the first correctly described ichthyosaur, two relatively complete plesiosaurs, and the first pterosaur from outside Germany. Her finds helped change views about Earth’s history, providing strong evidence for extinction.
See also: Mass extinctions
CATHERINE PARR TRAILL
1802–1899
A botanist and prolific author, Traill was born in the UK and emigrated to what is now Ontario, Canada, after she married in 1832. There, she wrote about life as a settler in Canada. She also wrote about the natural environment, notably in Canadian Wild Flowers (1865) and Studies of Plant Life in Canada (1885). Her many albums of plant collections are housed in the National Herbarium of Canada, at the Canadian Museum of Nature in Ottawa.
See also: Endangered habitats
KARL AUGUST MÖBIUS
1825–1908
A German pioneer, Möbius was primarily interested in the ecology of marine ecosystems. After studying at the Natural History Museum of Berlin, and earning a Ph.D. at the University of Halle, he opened a seawater aquarium in Hamburg in 1863. While a professor of zoology at the University of Kiel, his work on the viability of commercial oyster production in the Bay of Kiel led him to recognize the various dependent relationships between organisms in the oyster bank ecosystem.
See also: The ecosystem
ERNST HAECKEL
1834–1919
Haeckel was a biologist, physician, and artist who popularized Charles Darwin’s ideas in Germany (while also rejecting many of them) and introduced the word “ecology” in 1866. Born in Potsdam, he studied at several universities before becoming a zoology professor at the University of Jena in 1861. Haeckel was the first biologist to propose the kingdom Protista—for organisms that are neither animal nor vegetable—and he researched and painstakingly recorded tiny deep-sea protozoans called radiolaria.
See also: Evolution by natural selection
WILLIAM BLAKE RICHMOND
1842–1921
Best known as a British artist, sculptor, and designer of stained glass and mosaics, London-born Richmond became an environmental activist after having to endure the poor light and smoky air produced by London’s winter coal fires. In 1898 he founded the Coal Smoke Abatement Society (CSAS) to lobby politicians for clean air. The CSAS was instrumental in the introduction of the UK’s Public Health (Smoke Abatement) Act in 1926 and the Clean Air Act in 1956.
See also: Pollution
THEODORE ROOSEVELT
1858–1919
To deal with severe childhood asthma, Roosevelt became an active spo
rtsman and outdoorsman, developing a lifelong passion for nature. When, in 1900, he stood as William McKinley’s running mate in the US presidential election, he did so on a ticket of peace, prosperity, and conservation. Roosevelt became the 26th President when McKinley was assassinated in 1901, and went on to establish the US Forest Service, five new national parks, 51 bird reserves, and 150 national forests.
See also: Deforestation
JÓSEF PACZOSKI
1864–1942
Paczoski was a Polish ecologist, born in what is now Ukraine. He studied botany at the University of Kiev and went on to pioneer phytosociology, the study of natural plant communities, first using the term in 1896. In the 1920s Paczoski established the world’s first institute of phytosociology, at the University of Poznan, where he was professor of plant systematics. An accomplished botanist, he published works on central European flora, including that of the Bialowieza Forest, which he managed as a national park. See also: Organisms and their environment
JACK MINER