| >In what way? Because we are all completely dependent on ecosystem services provided by those species, such as erosion control (without which your country erodes away to desert), rainwater buffering (without which you experience catastrophic flooding), and transpiration (without which you lose almost all inland rainfall[1]). Loss of individual species is just the symptom. The real problem—and what this article discusses—is wholesale destruction of wilderness. Don't imagine that just a handful of species can provide these services either. Since ecosystems are complex adaptive systems, a particular species' role is almost always subtle and interconnected. See: the services provided by wolves in Yellowstone, which were never fully understood until they were removed and then re-introduced[2]. So why is wilderness important? Fundamentally, wilderness is arranged (and so, it functions) in completely different ways than human-tended landscapes. Now it's obvious that a suburb is different from a forest, but what's less obvious is that the way wilderness works is much more efficient. It's not dependent on a constant stream of material extracted from "somewhere else", but on average it produces far more economic value when ecosystem services are accurately accounted for. Surprise, surprise: economics seems to suggest that those living on a spaceship shouldn't take a sledgehammer to the life support system… (of course, the ultimate trick would be to design human landscapes that also function like wilderness ecosystems) [1] http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v496/n7445/abs/nature11... [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ysa5OBhXz-Q |
The vast majority of the external effects of forests and wildernesses is the effect of a few major species. In nature, those species are supported and interacted with by a complex network of other species. However, this established relationship isn't necessarily optimal for the few species of interest to us.
I find it likely that we're able to cultivate select main species of interest in forests if we set our minds to it, especially considering the large scale agriculture that we already do.
There's simply nothing to suggest that you can't construct an ecosystem with many fewer elements or the elements rearranged to, say, make room for houses, that has the same external effects as other ones. In fact, the success of many environments-in-a-bottle, indoor marijuana production, etc, suggests that we do have the ability to make relatively stable environments in which the necessary components of an ecosystem can thrive.
No one is suggesting that we do something silly like wipe out all the major predators while we let herd animals run free (which is the case with wiping out the wolves in Yellowstone), but rather that we can get away with a lot less moving parts and that we can tune the parts quite a bit to suite our fancy.
The only large scale human dependencies on plants relate to weather, oxygenation, water flow, and soil control. The last two we know we can do with intentionally seeded groves and other such constructs of plants we choose (using a reasonable selection), and don't need to replicate the full array of plants. In terms of oxygen, seeding the oceans with an algae would be far more efficient, but we really only need ferns, which are incredibly efficient at producing oxygen and are relatively hardy plants.
The final complexity is weather, which I must admit I know relatively little about, but am dubious there's any material reason it wouldn't work fine with planned forests.
Again, no one is saying "Fuck it, kill all the things". I just think we can get away with many fewer species - and sometimes who groups of species, where another can reasonably fill its role.
Or are you telling me we couldn't survive with 3,500 kinds of beetle... we really need all 350,000.