Ecosystem Services and Natural Capital - Part Three of Three
A multi-part series on why your life depends on nature and why it is under threat
So, now we know that the resilience of nature is critical to its health. We also know that nature provides an immense amount of value in our lives, both in terms of supporting our financial endeavors, as well as for our quality of life.
This final piece will explore two of the most vital ecosystem services which we rely on, and how the erosion of nature’s resilience is putting them, therefore human existence, under threat. Soil and Water. Put simply, and without exaggeration, without the ecosystem services these systems provide, humans, and much other life on earth, would not exist.
Note: I have left out of this piece natural capital assessments, because humans are dependent on all of these services, to exist. Therefore trying to put a monetary value on them is a redundant excercise.
Soil - Nature’s foundation
For many, when looking at soil, they see nothing but dirt. Something to be avoided. Something that makes a mess. But if the human eye could look deeper, we’d see endless amounts of microscopic life and processes. Collectively, this life and these processes enable the soil to provide a host of ecosystem services that the majority of people have no awareness of.
Habitat is the most commonly known service that soil provides. Almost everything we eat, with the exception of seafood, comes from the soil, directly or indirectly. Soil enables plants to grow, which we either eat or other animals eat, which we then eat. Warmth, nutrients, and water are all found within the soil environment. Without soil, we have virtually no food.
To enable this food to grow, nutrients need to be cycled and stored. Within this process, energy and matter are transferred between plants and animals that consume nutrients through their food and then release them back into the environment through excretion, as well as death and decomposition. This is a fantastic example of the adaptive cycle in action, at multiple scales from a worm, to a giant tree.
This cycle includes the foundations of all life, being the non-mineral elements of carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen (which make up 95% of all life) as well as the mineral elements including Nitrogen, Phosphorus, Potassium, Calcium and Magnesium.
Here, I have only scratched the surface of the services provided by soil. When you dig in, you find an array of services from direct (providing material for us to build and use for energy like clay, sand, and coal) through to filtration of water to the natural creation of new types of antibiotics. The list is long and needless to say we are dependent on healthy soils if you analyze the picture below.
Healthy soils, I argue, are a god-given right that all life on earth should be able to rely on. Unfortunately, however, that is not the case. The services made available through healthy services are under threat. There are degradative processes underway continuously across the globe. They include erosion, loss of organic matter, nutrient loss and imbalance, salinization, sealing of surface, biodiversity loss, pollution, acidification, compaction, and waterlogging.
Intensive farming practices using sprays and continuous cultivation destroy the life that exists within soils. Land clearance for clear-felled forestry exposes soils to erosion from storm events. Continual expansion of our urban boundaries covering our soils with concrete for housing, prevents us from being able to grow food, often in some of the most productive soils available.
Take a look around you. How is the soil being treated in your region? Possibly like dirt that needs to be managed? Or a garbage dump that soaks up our waste? Now imagine it as a living system, that underpins your existence, and then re-think how we should treat it.
Water
It’s second nature for us to understand that we are reliant on water for survival; we need to drink it about every three days to survive. But it’s probably also fair to say that we take the existence of water, for granted. What we all know is what water does for us and other animals. What we may not be aware of, however, is what threatens our water supply. It may seem unreasonable or alarmist to suggest you should be concerned about the availability of clean water, but as someone who lives and breathes this stuff, I can tell you categorically it is not alarmist in the slightest.
Here are three news links from the last few weeks, across the world, that gives you a taste of what is happening to our water…
Wales, six separate pollution incidents within only three river catchments…Cambrian News
CA, USA, a beach is so polluted from river flow into it, people don’t want to swim at it 10 News
New Zealand, nearly 60 % of freshwater sources assessed in a first-of-its-kind study were shown to have nitrate concentrations above a threshold considered to pose higher health risks NZ Herald
I can tell you with certainty, your water is probably under threat. Further, if you’re living in a main center, it is probably so polluted by the time it is coming your way for drinking, that you have to pay your hard-earned $$ for a massive treatment plant to make it safe to drink.
Think about that. Your god-given right for this essential ingredient for life has been taken from you, so someone can make a profit, and you’re now paying for it to be made whole again.
The State of that Water
Lakes, rivers, streams. If you’re standing on the side of the water body, they often look completely fine. But are they? If you’ve ever consumed a water-borne disease like giardia, cholera, or leptospirosis, you’ll know that the invisible can be brutal. Maybe you’ve heard about blue baby syndrome? Or maybe you’ve seen a beautiful clean water body turn into a polluted mess? I’m not going into detail on all of these risks but will give an overview of how they occur.
The illustration above shows the key elements of a water catchment in a rural environment. There’s one word I want you to have in your mind when you look at it - connectivity. The catchment is one of the most tangible demonstrations of the interconnectedness of the environment. What happens in the mountains, ends up underground 100km, or more, away.
A simple way to picture it is your shower. Clean water comes out of the shower head, and washes over your body, and the walls of the shower. Then it hits the floor, then washes down the drain, where it enters a bigger system of drains and eventually ends up in a wastewater treatment plant for recycling, or treatment before discharge to the environment. The catchment is exactly the same - all water is heading toward the same endpoint.
And, like the shower, as the water flows it collects parts of what it washes over. Shampoo, soap, grime, dirt, bacteria, dead skin cells etc. The water that goes down the drain is completely different from the water that came out of the tap. Within a few feet it’s changed from being water you’d comfortably drink, to being water you wouldn’t drink unless you were on the edge of death.
Water flowing through healthy ecosystems will typically remain clean. There will likely be pollutants in the form of bacteria if there are large numbers of land mammals that excrete into it, but certainly, groundwater should be free of such pollutants, and chemicals such as antibiotics will not be there. A modified catchment where the resilience has been eroded and the system is in a new basin of attraction is different.
So what is it that flows into the water, in a modified environment? The list is long and includes nutrients, pathogens, plastics, and chemicals such as antibiotics, heavy metals, herbicides, and pesticides. And many of these come into the water system, as part of business processes.
Farms apply nutrients and raise animals, both of which produce waste that ends up in your surface or groundwater.
Mines wash the ore, creating tailings that often sit on-site leaching into the ground which passes into the water
Manufacturing plants can have liquid discharge from their processes, which flows into your water.
Cars produce heavy metals from brakes, rubber from tires, and pollutants from the exhaust, which get washed off roads, into stormwater, and into natural waterways.
etc etc etc
All this combined requires massive amounts of treatment before consumption if that is even possible. And remember, that’s just to return the water back to what it was when it was first provided to you, as an ecosystem service.
Think about the catchment you’re in? Where is the water you drink coming from? What is happening to it between it being rain or snow, and water you drink? How is it being treated and respected in your catchment?
Wrap-Up
I’m going, to be honest with you. This third part of the series was the hardest to write, because I had to draw it to an end, and yet in the space of environment and nature, things were just starting to get underway.
I hope that as a result of this series, you have an idea of some of the services that nature provides for you. That should be a god-given right for you to have, for free. But aren’t, because they’ve been taken from you and now require a massive effort to restore.
That restoration is the work of environmental professionals. Often seen as blockers of progress or alarmist interventionists, many environmental professionals - be it scientists, consultants, government or NGO workers, or conservationists - are fighting a battle on your behalf. Because they know that we depend on nature for our survival, and as the resilience of nature is eroded, the level of intervention required to ensure the life-supporting capacity of nature is maintained, gets more and more difficult and costly.