1. Nature is vanishing before our eyes as one million plant and animal species are threatened with extinction because of farming, poaching, pollution, the transport of invasive species and, increasingly, global warming.
2. Beside climate change issue, decline in plant and animal diversity around the world tends to get considerably less media coverage.
3. Many vanishing species are not visible or not tangible like rising sea level, wild fire, heat wave etc. And it is harder to explain what that might mean for most people’s daily lives.
4. Natural ecosystems provide invaluable services to people, from mangrove forests that protect millions from coastal flooding to wetlands that purify our drinking water to insects that pollinate our fruits and vegetables.
5. Loss of wild plant varieties could make it harder in the future to breed new, hardier crops to cope with threats like increased heat and drought.
6. In recent years, conservationists and ecologists have emphasized research around “ecosystem services,” to quantify all the benefits that nature provides to humanity in monetary terms, in order to make an economic case for conservation.
7. But, nature also has a spiritual or inspirational value that is “difficult to quantify.”
8. First global treaty to protect biodiversity was started 27 years ago but the world’s nations are still faltering in their efforts to halt the decline of natural ecosystems around the globe.
9. Life on Earth is an intricate fabric, and it’s not like we’re looking at it from the outside. We are threads in that fabric. If the fabric is getting holes and fraying, that affects us all.
10.When we destroy nature, we undermine our quality of life.
Sources: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/10/reader-center/biodiversity-loss-species-extinction.html
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