(From "Conserving Biological Diversity in Our National Forests"-1986)*

Some people might ask, "In a world with so much poverty and misery, where droughts, famines, plagues, terrorists, dictators and wars never seem to leave us, shouldn't we focus all our efforts on improving our own lives and those of other people? Why should we care about the loss of trees, bugs or swamps?" A basic answer is that human life cannot exist without the other kinds of life on Earth. By reducing biological diversity, humanity is squandering its greatest natural resource, on which we depend for food, medicines, clothes, energy, building materials, clean air, clean water, psychological well-being and countless other benefits.

Wild plants, animals and microorganisms have provided essential products since humans first walked the Earth. During the first 99 percent of human history, our ancestors depended almost completely on wildlife for food, clothes, medicines, fuel and tools. In the 10 millennia since the first agricu1ture, permanent settlements and metal tools, and especially in the 150 years since the start of the Industrial Revolution, geological materials (minerals, coal, petroleum) have increased in importance. Yet both industrialized and less developed nations still depend on living things to sustain them. As supplies of nonrenewable geological resources decrease, and as we gain greater ability to design organisms with new combinations of characteristics through genetic engineering, biological diversity will likely provide a growing share of the products that sustain humankind.

Food does not come from supermarkets or restaurants. It comes from agricultural fields, grasslands, forests, rivers and oceans. Virtually, everything we eat has biological origins. Domestication of a few species in our diets, such as wheat and rice, began 10,000 years ago, but intensive use of many species is much newer. Tomatoes, for example, were not eaten much by the natives of the American tropics and were thought to be poisonous for centuries after they were introduced to Europe, so their heavy use is relatively new. Widespread growing of soybeans (one of our largest and most versatile crops) in the U.S. dates only from the last few decades. Kiwifruit, Napa cabbage and monkfish have become popular foods in our country only in the last few years. Indeed, most of the sea-foods we eat have not yet been domesticated at all. Many more wild organisms or those grown only in a small area could become more important foods in the near future.

Biological diversity does more than provide new food resources. It is essential to maintaining the food supplies we already have. Wild relatives of domesticated species, and primitive varieties grown by traditional peoples, are used by breeders of modern crops and livestock. Genes from these varieties improve productivity, tolerance to extremes of weather, and resistance to pests and diseases. Their importance will grow as biotechnologies that are now experimental become routine, so that transferring genes between species will be faster and easier. For example, some plants, such as beans, alfalfa, locust trees and other legumes, can take nitrogen from the atmosphere and convert it into valuable nitrogenous compounds that serve as fertilizers. Genetic engineers are now trying to introduce the ability to "fix" nitrogen into nitrogen-hungry crops such as wheat and corn to cut the use of expensive nitrogen fertilizers. Of course, without genetic diversity--the raw material of biotechnological innovation--such improvements will be impossible.

Biological diversity helps food production in other ways. For one, bees and other insects pollinate billions of dollars worth of crops each year. Without them, we could not afford to pollinate some of our most important crops. We would have no grapes, apples, peaches, cherries, strawberries, almonds, peanuts, soybeans, peas, tomatoes, peppers, broccoli, lettuce, cucumbers, squashes or a whole host of other foods.

An increasingly important use of biological diversity in food production is in controlling crop pests. Some synthetic chemical pesticides, including insecticides, nematicides and herbicides, can pollute groundwater, kill wildlife and contaminate people. Pesticides tend to become less effective with time as a growing number of pests evolve resistance to them. Many are also expensive; when crop prices are low, some farmers pay more for pesticides than they realize in benefits. But agro-ecologists are finding that pesticide use can be cut sharply by using integrated pest management practices that employ animals, fungi and microorganisms as biological pest controls. Carefully chosen biological control agents are much less harmful to the environment than pesticides. They maintain their effectiveness because these insects, spiders, fungi, bacteria and viruses can co-evolve with the pests, countering defensive adaptations with their own adaptations. And they often make good sense economically, producing high benefits to farmers for what they cost. Unfortunately, just as we are learning how useful these organisms can be, people are destroying their habitats and driving them to extinction. We will never know how many important pest control agents have been paved over, plowed under, sprayed or clear-cut into extinction.

The world's forests and seas are a rich and largely unexplored source of medicines. For example, the National Cancer Institute has made progress in developing anticancer drugs from plants such as yews, and mayapples from temperate forests. A chemical with strong anti-tumor activity from a small Caribbean marine animal called a sea squirt is now undergoing clinical testing. Scientists at the Walter Reed Army Institute recently found that a Chinese relative of sagebrush and tarragon called qing hao can be effective in treating the worst kinds of malaria. Because of the biochemical diversity of life, many more potential medicines from plants, animals and microorganisms await discovery. In addition to foods and medicines, biological diversity can also provide new sources of energy (such as fast-growing fuel-woods and nonpolluting hydrogen gas), and industrial raw materials (such as new sources of rubber and lubricants for jet engines).

Because we have barely begun to use the world's living resources, the future would seem ever brighter as we develop new technologies to benefit people. But by diminishing biological diversity, we are converting renewable resources into nonrenewable ones, essentially killing the goose that lays the golden eggs.

As important as these products are, biological diversity is essential for another reason: interacting communities of ants, animals and microorganisms provide us with indispensable services. These ecosystem services are free, although we can manipulate some of them to improve their usefulness. Without them, the Earth would be a very different place.

For example, the water in the biosphere--the thin film of land, air and water that supports all life on Earth--is effectively a single pool, including the oceans, ice caps, groundwater, lakes, rivers, the atmosphere, and life. As this water cycles through living things, they change its chemistry. Some of the water you drank this morning was drunk by Julius Caesar and Cleopatra more than 2,000 years ago—and has since passed through innumerable bacteria, plants, fishes and people. The wastes added by each would long ago have rendered the water undrinkable except for the fact that one organism's waste is another's vital nutrient. Decomposers such as bacteria, fungi and protozoans clean water contaminated with human wastes, dead plants and animals by breaking them down into nutrients and incorporating them into their own bodies. We accelerate this natural "self-cleaning" in sewage treatment plants by encouraging the most active decomposers. Ecologists are now investigating ways to use forest and wetland ecosystems (for example, bald-cypress "domes" in Florida) to clean polluted water more effectively. Understanding ecosystem services will become increasingly important as the world's human population rises and the remaining natural ecosystems are pressed to assimilate an ever larger volume and variety of our wastes.

Forests and other ecosystems also maintain the chemical composition of the atmosphere. Before the evolution of plants, our atmosphere lacked free oxygen and consisted largely of ammonia, cyanide, hydrocarbons and carbon monoxide. Early plants changed the atmosphere to one that can support animals, including humans, by producing the oxygen we need to breathe. Ecosystems also remove natural and human-made wastes from the air, although human activities are now overwhelming the ability of ecosystems to maintain the composition of the atmosphere.

Our dependence on diverse ecosystems goes beyond our need for clean air and water. Living things help to prevent both erosion and flooding by binding the soil surface and encouraging rain to sink into the soil where it raises the water table and is released to streams and springs slowly, rather than running off quickly. In general, crops and orchards are less effective than forest ecosystems in preventing erosion. Natural communities of species moderate climate in many ways, including minimizing temperature fluctuations and slowing winds. They also create the soil upon which all civilizations are built.

In fact, trees and soils as major pools of carbon have a major role in determining the world's climates. Along with the burning of fossil fuels, the cutting of forests and the clearing of land oxidizes carbon in vegetation and soils, increasing atmospheric carbon dioxide. Although carbon dioxide makes up only a tiny fraction of the atmosphere, it is very important to the heat balance of the Earth. Because it is increasing, the atmosphere will almost certainly grow warmer in coming decades. Shifting temperature and rainfall patterns and rising sea level (because of increased melting of glaciers) are likely to have serious consequences for world food production, real estate in coastal areas and biological diversity in the natural ecosystems that remain.

Living things maintain the habitability of the Earth. Without the services performed by diverse, intact communities of plants, animals and microorganisms, we would be starving, baking, gasping for breath and drowning in our wastes.

Clearly, we need to eat and breathe. But humans also have less obvious needs that are met by diverse living things. Although more subtle, they might be very important to our survival and well-being. People seem to have a deep-seated need for contact with living things. Psychologists have found that the blood pressures and pulse rates of people go down when they are allowed to hold and stroke a dog. Researchers recently reported that patients in hospital rooms with windows facing trees recovered from their illnesses faster than those with windows facing buildings. How else can we explain the fact that 5 percent of Americans over 12 years old eagerly trade the comforts of home to go backpacking in a given year? Or that so many more millions own pets, go day hiking, bird-watching, skin diving, car touring in the country, or visit zoos, botanical gardens and aquaria? Or that so many hunters and fishermen admit that the most important reason they participate in their sports is to be with wild living things? Or that policemen in inner cities can tell which neighborhoods are on the way up and which are hopeless, simply by the condition of gardens and the number of flower pots on window sills? Even if there were some artificial way to supply ourselves with all the food, water, oxygen and other products essential to life, what kind of life would we have without biological diversity?

Not all the reasons for protecting other living things stem from what they do for us. Many people feel that we must maintain biological diversity because it is the right thing to do. Whether their ethical concerns are based on scientific explanations or religious convictions, they recognize that all species (including humans) have a common origin. They are uneasy about eliminating a large share of the only known life forms in the universe because they believe that living things have a right to exist. They feel that the awesome power we have as the dominant species on this planet confers upon us the responsibility for the wise and careful stewardship of life.

Our forests provide benefits to Americans ranging from wood products to wilderness experiences and are home to many thousands of species, including a number in danger of extinction. They are not the most diverse ecosystems in the world. The tropical forests of Latin America, Africa and Asia are much richer in species and are disappearing much faster. Why, then, should Americans be concerned about maintaining biological diversity on our public lands?

There are several basic answers. Our living resources are especially important to us. And although we have a special feeling for redwood trees, American bison, and bald eagles; their importance to our country is more than just national pride. Trees, fishes and insects have adapted for millions of years to the unique combination of climates, soils and other organisms in our country. It is unrealistic to believe that we can allow the extinction of our native species and find others to replace them. Until this century, the American chestnut was one of the most abundant and valuable trees of our eastern deciduous forests. When an introduced disease virtually wiped it out, people planted the disease-resistant Chinese chestnut in hope of replacing our native species. The attempt failed.

In other cases, introduced organisms--brown and black rats, European starlings, walking catfish, gypsy moths, kudzu vine, water hyacinths—have fared too well in our country, becoming serious problems. It is easier and less expensive to conserve what we already have than to find an acceptable replacement or cure once we have altered the environment.

Although some ecosystem services, such as storing carbon dioxide, benefit humankind on a global scale, many ecosystem services are of greatest benefit to those closest to the ecosystems. The ecosystems of Wasatch National Forest do far more to protect Salt Lake City from flooding than do the forests of Cameroon. The ecosystems of Ozark National Forest remove far more of Arkansas' air pollutants than do the forests of Indonesia.

Furthermore, Americans have much more influence over the ways our government manages species and ecosystems than we have over the management of resources in other nations. Under international law, no nation can directly intervene to stop the destruction of ecosystems in another country. True, we can try to persuade other nations to manage their resources wisely and can offer to assist them in doing so. But it is the governments and people of each nation that decide whether to conserve their living resources or destroy them. From Costa Rica to China, an increasing number of nations are recognizing the importance of biological diversity and are trying to conserve the living resources within their borders. Our ecologists and federal agencies are helping many of them. Yet nowhere else can we have the direct impact on conservation that we have within our own borders.

Finally, the United States has long been a world leader in conservation. Our Endangered Species Act is a model for conservation of biological diversity around the world. We were the first nation to designate a National Park and among the first to recognize that forests have importance beyond the number of board feet they produce. Nations everywhere look to us for leadership in conservation. If America, the world's richest country, with all its scientific expertise and managerial know-how, does not conserve the biological diversity in its forests, then why should they? We just might find that the most important reason to conserve our wildlife and wildlands is the example we set for people worldwide.

* Elliott A. Norse (The Ecological Society of America), Kenneth L. Rosenbaum (Environmental Law Institute), David S. Wilcove (Department of Biology, Princeton University), Bruce A. Wilcox (Center for Conservation Biology, Stanford University), William H. Romme (Department of Biology, Fort Lewis College), David W. Johnston (Department of Biology, George Mason University), Martha L. Stout (Consultant); Prepared by The Ecological Society of America for The Wilderness Society