By Stanley A. Rice
Author of Green Planet: How Plants Keep the Earth Alive
They say we cannot afford environmental protection. Not now, during the economic downturn.
But as I explain in the recently-released Green Planet: How Plants Keep the Earth Alive, we cannot afford to lose the benefits that the natural world—especially plants—provides to us. Economist Robert Costanza estimated that natural ecosystems provide $33 trillion (that’s right, trillion) of free services to the world economy. In my book, I explain what many of those services are. Natural ecosystems such as forests and grasslands put oxygen in the air, remove carbon dioxide from the air, create cool shade, prevent floods and droughts, produce food, create soil, create habitats and heal them from disturbances. The cost of doing all of these things for ourselves without the help of plants is not quite incalculable, but pretty close to it.
Forests and grasslands are more valuable to us just as they are than they would ever be if converted into commercial products or real estate. The trees and grasses are even more valuable to us than the wild animals that we love so much. For, it must be admitted, deer and bears are pretty much like us—they eat food, breathe in oxygen, and breathe out carbon dioxide. But plants are the counterpoint of renewal to our animal activities: they make food from sunlight, produce oxygen, and absorb carbon dioxide. They run on solar energy and reproduce themselves. They do everything in complete silence and unutterable beauty. We do not need to pay them or even to thank them, just give them a chance to live. They are not doing this for us, but as their own way of making a living. But by pursuing their own lives, they create life for us.
Plants cannot save the world all by themselves. We are producing too much carbon dioxide for them to absorb even under the best conditions. And the conditions are not best: warmer and drier conditions will make it harder for plants to grow. At the same time that we need them the most we are destroying them. As I argue in the closing chapter of my book, we need to live frugally, creating as small of a carbon footprint as possible—perhaps one small enough that plants can, in fact, erase it. A greenhouse disaster is now inevitable, because the carbon dioxide that is in the air already has yet to absorb all of the heat of which it is capable. But perhaps there is still time to minimize the disaster.
Read more essays by Stanley Rice at his website: http://www.stanleyrice.com.
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