"The richness and complexity of the natural world is declining at an ever-accelerating rate, as the earth’s burgeoning human population strives for a steadily rising tecnological standard of living. Natural diversity is being brutally simplified to make way for a dizzying blend of artificial landscapes-villages, housing developments, parking lots, roads, factories, mines, shopping malls, schools, parks, gardens, golf courses, plantations, and croplands. The biggest threats to the diversity of life on the earth are habitat loss, introduction of alien species into communities, and fragmentation of natural areas caused by bulldozing, paving, plowing, draining, dredging, trawling, dynamiting, and damming. Humans are also plundering natural communities by overharvesting, overgrazing, dousing them with excessive pesticides and herbicides, raining acids and other pollutants onto them, altering the mix of gases in the air, and even thinning the ultraviolet radiation shield on which terrestrial life depends.

Many of these assaults are so massive they wipe out entire ecosystems and disrupt natural processes immediately and directly. For example, draining and filling wetlands or permanently stripping the forest from a watershed instantly eliminates the flood and erosion control, water filtration and purification, and other services those ecosystems provide… Too often, when humans disturb or deliberately simplify a landscape - say, clearcut forests or turn prairies to monocultures of corn - the result is a leakier system that lets more energy, nutrients and topsoil slip away and shows less resistance to pests and other natural shocks.

Extinction rates today exceed by one hundred to one thousand times those seen in the fossil record. Ecologists point out that these rates will be ten times higher if all the species now officially listed as threatened or endangered actually disappear in the next century. With the human population growing exponentially, demanding more land, more food, more resources, millions of species may go extinct before they can be identified and their importance determined."

A pressing question is how well weedy or impoverished systems can maintain the life-support functions on which we rely. Too often, when humans disturb or deliberately "simplify" a landscape - say, clearcut forests or turn prairies to monocultures of corn - the result is a "leakier" system that lets more energy, nutrients, and topsoil slip away and shows less resistance to pests and other natural shocks. These aren´t the robust systems on which most of us would bank our futures.

Most of us give little thought to this impoverishment because we are increasingly estranged from the workings of the natural world…cloistered in hour homes and offices, moated away from wildness by clipped lawns and pavement, nourished on piped water and shrink-wrapped foods, it’s easy to lose sight of our reliance on plants, animals, insects, and microbes, as well as the cyclical processes they drive.

The key to self-preservation lies in understanding how species contribute to the functioning of ecosystems and how the forces that threaten biodiversity may alter vital ecological services. "

Writings from the book The Work of Nature. We strongly recommend everyone to buy it and read it all.

It is our duty as human beings to discover new ways for self development without destroying the life that created and support us all, we simply cannot live on the illusion that we will be capable to survive in a more and more artificial environment, because we are ALIVE… and dependent from ALL life forms… when we kill anyone of them, we are commiting a slow suicide… every single bit of cooked food anyone eats, it is a thousand steps forward… in that direction!