Read The Moth Snowstorm: Nature and Joy for Free Online

Logie Baird and Alexander Fleming;yet in the period of scientific ferment between the wars when all were active, Tansley, Professor of Botany at Oxford, conceived and popularised a concept which was to be just as influential as Rutherford’s nuclear physics, Baird’s television or Fleming’s penicillin: it was the ecosystem.
    It had taken natural scientists, obsessed with classifying things, a long time to realise that individual species of plants and animals do not exist in isolation, but in close communities formed with other living organisms, which all interact not only with each other but also with their surroundings; it was a perception not formalised, as the new science of ecology, until the beginning of the twentieth century. Tansley was one of the first prominent ecologists, and his introduction of the ecosystem term (in a 1935 paper devoted to an abstruse argument about ecological terminology) made graspable, even to non-specialists, the powerful idea of a living complex of animals and plants, working together with non-living parts of the environment such as the soil or the climate, as a functional unit.
    Such units could be as large as a lake or as piddling as a puddle, they could be a forest or a single tree, but it was clear that they were real and they did indeed have functions, and in the sixties, seventies, and eighties, as they began to be studied intensively, biologists started to appreciate that they played major roles in modulating the way water, and nutrients, and sediments, and carbon all flowed through landscapes, from living things to the soil and the sea and the atmosphere and back again.
    This understanding eventually crystallised into the even more pertinent perception that ecosystems and their associated wild-life did things for us , things which were vital: they provided life support services which we might always have taken for granted, but which we could not do without. Pollination of crops by bees and other insects is perhaps the most obvious example: without it, swathes of global agriculture would collapse. But by the 1990s scientists were starting to list more and more of theseservices: they included climate regulation, composition of the atmosphere, provision of fresh water, flood defence, control of erosion, maintenance of soil fertility, detoxification of pollutants, pest control, provision of fisheries, waste disposal, nutrient recycling, and more subtly, provision of a vast genetic library offering potentially life-saving new drugs and other products.
    All that and more, we took from nature, without a thought. We had being doing so for aeons, because it was all free and so it was unnoticeable. The elucidation of the real role of ecosystem services, and even more, of our absolute dependence on them, has been one of the greatest breakthroughs in our understanding of the natural world, and what gave it peculiar force and relevance was that it came just as many of these services, for the first time in history, were under threat or actually being degraded.
    Take the toppling rainforests. They could no longer be dismissed by their destroyers as mere pleasure gardens for bourgeois birdwatchers. Now we understood that they not only provided fuel and water and food, but also helped to regulate climate for us, and in a time when human carbon emissions were threatening to alter the atmosphere with disastrous consequences, they constituted a colossal carbon store which, many scientists and policymakers began to argue, it would be suicidal to sacrifice. (And their myriad plant species might very well hold an undiscovered substance which would save your child’s life, like the rosy periwinkle from the forests of Madagascar, which gave us vincristine, a cure for childhood leukaemia.)
    Our utter dependence on nature: here was nature’s best possible defence, potentially far more effective than the hopeful pieties of sustainable development. The significance was seized on by conservationists, and the