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2 - Biodiversity and Global Change

From Creator to Victim

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  19 August 2019

By
Timothy M. Lenton
Edited by
Partha Dasgupta ,
Peter Raven  and
Anna McIvor
Partha Dasgupta
Affiliation:
University of Cambridge
Peter Raven
Affiliation:
Missouri Botanical Garden
Anna McIvor
Affiliation:
University of Cambridge
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Summary

We owe our very existence to the activities of past and present life forms, which have created a world that we could inhabit (Lenton and Watson, 2011). This is true not just in the evolutionary sense that we are descended from earlier life forms, but in the Earth system sense that the atmosphere would be unbreathable and the climate intolerable were it not for the accumulated actions of other members of the biosphere, past and present (Lenton and Watson, 2011). This fundamental role of biodiversity in maintaining our life-support system is strangely under-recognised by utilitarian arguments for preserving ‘nature’. We are part of biodiversity and have been born out of this world, only to be transforming it now in ways that are bad for us and bad for much of the rest of life.

Type
Chapter
Information
Biological Extinction
New Perspectives
 , pp. 34 - 79
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2019

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