【正文】 guably the single greatest resource that humankind has garnered from nature during our long cultural development. He adds that due to modern agricultural practices, we are eroding the very ecological foundations of plant biodiversity and losing unique gene pools, species, and even entire munities of species forever. The essays in this collection make it clear that the future of the human endeavor is linked now, as in the past, with the natural world. Many observers now feel that one of the prime responsibilities of human munity, for spiritual, aesthetic, and extremely pragmatic reasons, must be to take steps to preserve biological diversity for future generations, before the richness of life on this pla is diminished forever. WHY BIODIVERSITY MATTERS By Niles Eldredge From Chapter 5 of Life in the Balance: Humanity and the Biodiversity Crisis, by permission of Nevraumont Publishing Co. Copyright ? 1998 Niles Eldredge. The San people of the Kalahari have no trouble whatever understanding the value of biodiversity: Until fairly recently, the San had been living in small bands wholly within their local ecosystems. All their food, their clothing, their shelter, their medicines, their cosmetics, their playthings, their musical instruments, their hunting weapons, everything came from the productivity of their surroundings, the plants and animals on which they pletely depended for a living. Why, then, is it so difficult for most of us in the industrialized nations urban dwellers but also rural farming folk to grasp the significance of biodiversity? The answer, I truly believe, is that we have simply fotten what the San and all other huntergathering peoples still know. We have fotten because of a profound and radical change in our relation to the natural world that came as a direct consequence of the invention of agriculture. We need to understand how people fit into the natural world both as huntergatherers and as agriculturally based industrialized societies before we can assess realistically what biodiversity means to human life. For the first time in the entire history of life, one species, our species, Homo sapiens, has stepped outside of the local ecosystem. Agriculture changes the entire relation between humans and everything else living in the vicinity. To plow a field, to cultivate a handful of crop species, means the destruction of the dozens of native plant species that would otherwise be there naturally. No one ever heard of a weed until we began dictating what limited number of plant types we wanted to be growing on a given plot of land. What is the difference between living off the natural fruits of the land and living off those we grow ourselves? The answer is simple: To live off our own cultivars, we must disassemble original ecosystems. There is very little native North American prairie left in the Midwest, and therein lies the gist of the dilemma. Most of us genuinely think we don39。 (Posted April 2020) Biodiversity Series CONTENTS Introduction Why Biodiversity Matters Appreciating the Benefits of Plant Biodiversity Bibliography IN FOCUS Coral Reefs Forests Wetlands Northlands THE PROBLEM OF BIODIVERSITY Since the human species first became fully conscious of the natural world, nature has usually seemed unassailable, and abundant with plant and animal life, from mountains, to oceans, to continental prairies. Over the course of the 20th century, however, this view has changed. Man39。s power over nature, assisted by machines, has grown, and human population has increased exponentially. For centuries, nature has been in retreat in the face of human settlement, but in the last 50 years, destruction of the natural world has picked up speed. Scientists believe that when human development and agriculture reduce the natural world, the loss is not simply a matter of size. The remaining natural areas, it is believed, harbor fewer species and plex ecosystems. Scientists who study biodiversity posit that many wild species are being extinct, and that this extinction of wild species many of them still unknown or not well understood bodes ill for the future of the pla. Since the dawn of agriculture, human survival has been based on the domestication for food purposes of wild plants. Yet, many plant species are being destroyed in the wild, before their food or medicinal value can be assessed. The continuation of wild or partiallywild varieties of plants such as corn is necessary to the future health of domesticated varieties. In addition, whole ecosystems, such as riverine estuaries, coral reefs, montane forests, and the creatures that live in them, are under stress due to humancaused pollution or overdevelopment. Yet, these ecosystems, in all their marvelous plexity, cleanse water of pollutants, provide the air we breathe, and produce much of our food, making human existence possible. In effect, the the vast web of biological diversity, with its millions of species on this pla, is what has made human survival possible, and human life fulfilling. This electronic publication contains two essays by respected authorities in the field of biodiversity. Four short essays focus on specific ecosystems of concern. In Why Biodiversity Matters, an excerpt taken from his book Life in the Balance, Humanity and the Biodiversity Crisis, Niles Eldredge, curator at the American Museum of Natural History, explains how the invention of agriculture made it possible for the human race to increase its numbers exponentially and spread across the pla. The sheer bulk of human numbers, he writes, probably nearly doubling to over 10 billion [thousand million] by mid21st century is wreaking havoc on Earth, on its species, ecosystems, soils, waters, and atmosphere. Eldredge foresees a ing Sixth Ex