- At this point, people have
been studying the impacts that humans have had
on the world around us for a solid 50 years, and while it's hard to get a handle on exactly how the choices we make every day affect the environment, there is no question that our lifestyles, our cars, our need for more farmland, and our love of all kinds of plastic stuff are putting the hurt on ecosystems all over the world. Human activity all by itself, just people doing what they
do could be responsible for the extinction of nearly 1000 plant and animal species to date, most of them over the last century, and even if you don't
particularly care about the Barbary lion or the Saint Helena olive or the passenger pigeon or anything else we've
driven into extinction, the thing is, we need
these other organisms. The ecosystems of the world are working very hard for us every day, filtering water, sucking
carbon dioxide out of the air, producing all the food we eat, all very important ecosystem services, benefits that the natural
world provides us for free. So having ecosystems and keeping
them intact is important, not only for the organisms who
live in them but also for us, the animals who rely on them for thousands and thousands of things that we could never do for ourselves. Over the next two episodes, we're gonna look at these systems and how our actions are
affecting the ecosystems that we need for our survival. Basically, we are messing
up the environment six ways from Sunday but to make
it easy on ourselves, let's start with the top five. (upbeat music) We've all been hearing about all the different ways that our behavior is affecting the biosphere, extinctions, climate change, deforestation, acid rain, desertification, pollution, and more, but you're asking, oh, well, why are all these things bad, what's going on, how is this stuff turning the earth into sausage, I don't understand. Well, I do understand,
which is why I'm qualified to make this video, so
let me lay it on you. The services that
ecosystems provide for us, all the dirty work they do, could be broken up into
four different categories. There are things that we could
never ever ever duplicate or work around no matter what kind of smarty-pants
technology we come up with. First, healthy ecosystems
provide support services that create and replenish the foundation of the earth's biological systems. These services include
recycling all of the compounds that are necessary for life through the carbon, water, nitrogen and phosphorus cycles. They also include other processes
we've talked about before like forming new soils and
producing atmospheric oxygen. Some ecosystems contribute more to these services than others, but none of them can get
these basic jobs done unless they are intact. Two, ecosystems also perform
provisioning services, getting us the raw
materials we need to live, like the ocean provides food
in the form of fish sticks and stuff, and rivers and aquifers and other freshwater
sources give us water. Plants and animals also
yield all kinds of fiber that we use for clothing and
shelter and all around us, we find sources of fuel, whether it's biomass in the
form of grasses or wood, hydropower in the form of flowing water, whether the carbon locked in
millions of years old trees that we're now re-releasing
into the atmosphere, but I'm getting ahead of myself. Ecosystems also perform super
important regulating services, moderating many of the earth's systems that can get dangerous
if they get out of whack. Like as we learned in biology, fungi and other organisms take on the task of decomposing dead things and poop. Meanwhile, plants help
filter the water you drink and the air you breathe and provide flood control and they also absorb all
that carbon you exhaled and that your car belches out, which in turn helps regulate the climate, and finally, number four, ecosystems are just kind of awesome. It's nice to be surrounded by happy plants and critters doing their business. Nice robust ecosystems
give us places to play, scenes to inspire us and things to just discover and learn about. These are their less tangible but still important cultural services. An interesting thing
about ecosystem services is that economists actually can and do calculate the monetary value they provide for humanity. If, for example, we had
to do all of the things that ecosystems do for us, it would cost us $46 trillion per year, which is a lot considering that the output of the global economy is $66 trillion per year, so yeah, we should be happy that we don't have to pay for that. But you'll notice that I keep saying that ecosystems can only serve up all this awesome sauce if they are intact. By that, I mean they specifically have to have their biodiversity intact, because ecosystems are
just a bunch of living and nonliving things working together, so unless their living parts are healthy, they're basically just rocks and weather. The main reason
biodiversity is so important is that it makes ecosystems
more resilient to that never-ending change we
talked about a few weeks ago. Ecosystems with high biodiversity
are way more resilient to disturbances than those
with low biodiversity. In a high biodiversity system, if you take one species out of the mix, it's less likely that the
ecosystem will collapse. Take a hectare of Amazonian rain forest. In that little patch of land, there are more different species of plants and animals than there
are in all of Europe. Some of those species
of insect goes extinct, there's less risk that the whole house of cards will fall than
say in the Sonoran Desert, where there are very few organisms, so the disappearance of one species could effect
the entire ecosystem. So the best way to understand
our impacts on the environment is a through how we affect biodiversity. Unfortunately, it turns out that we've been doing a really
bang up job of endangering some of the highest biodiversity
ecosystems on the planet. In some cases, we are having impacts on the organisms themselves directly. In other cases, we are affecting
biodiversity indirectly by creating one or two changes in that ecosystem that
cascade into all kinds of problems for living things. First, let's look at that hectare of Amazonian rain forest again, because even though it's one of those super resilient ecosystems, we're having a serious impact on it. How? Well, first, by removing a lot of what makes a forest a forest, trees. According to some estimates, we're clearcutting around 8000 hectares of trees a day to provide
land to graze cattle on and to harvest wood to make
coffee tables or whatever. When you cut down a
hectare of rain forest, suddenly a place where a
few thousand species used to live turns into a place where just a handful of species live, some grass and weeds,
maybe some rats or mice, some insects and you know, some cows, 'cause man, we love cows. And when you take out so
many of the living things on that hectare of land, a
bunch of things happen. For starters, you're not just
affecting that ecosystem, but neighboring ecosystems as well. For instance, all of those trees that were cut down provided the service of regulating the flow of all that rain that rainforests get, not only by absorbing some of it, but also by slowing down runoff, letting the water seep into the soil before slowly making its way into streams and rivers and ultimately the ocean. But when those trees are gone, the water hits the land and shoots off into the nearest tree and causing erosion and washing minerals and chemicals all the way to the sea, where it affects marine
ecosystems and when I say affect, I don't mean in a good way. This, my friends, is what's
called a cascade effect. In this case, caused by deforestation, one of the most obvious of
observable human impacts. In addition to causing more flooding and changes in water quality, deforestation on a larger scale
can lead to another impact, desertification, where the spread of dry, unproductive landscapes. But cutting down trees
doesn't automatically turn a forest into a desert. Desertification is driven
along by additional factors, like overgrazing by cattle
and over-irrigation. So how can overwatering something make it turn into a desert? Well, when we use groundwater
to irrigate crops, the natural salts in the
groundwater build up in the soil, eventually making it so salty that nothing wants to live there. Over time, fertile land near desert ecosystems become overtaxed and the desert spreads, and this is exactly what has happened in China
over the past century where overgrazing and the
city's unquenchable thirst for water have caused the Gobi Desert to grow by 3600 square
kilometers every year. Now, these two impacts by themselves clearly
limit the biodiversity of otherwise lush ecosystems, but because they also
result in fewer trees that provide the all-important
services of releasing oxygen and absorbing the CO2, you know what domino's gonna fall next, the climate, carbon dioxide,
the principal greenhouse gas. It insulates the earth, so it stands to reason
that the more CO2 there is in the atmosphere, the
warmer the earth will be, and the thing is, we're
reducing the size of forests at the same time as we're
unleashing all kinds of greenhouse gases by
burning fossil fuels. This double whammy is much of
what's driving global warming. As a result, we are seeing
decreases in the levels of polar sea ice, which means
less habitat for polar bears, seals, and sea birds. More temperate animals are moving closer to the poles and the hotter, dryer conditions are causing more grass fires and forest fires. And while the climate has
changed many times in the past, those changes usually
took place over centuries or even millennia, giving
organisms time to adapt or move. These changes are taking
place within our lifetimes and it's kind of a huge deal and it's complicated and
it'd take me at least like 10 minutes 52 seconds
to explain it all in detail, which is why I did that in another video. By now, hopefully you can see
how one human impact can lead to another, and how even indirectly, they can end up reducing biodiversity, but it's hard to overlook
the more immediate impacts we can have on ecosystems. One of the most in-your-face
ways we affect biodiversity is by introducing non-native species, either intentionally or unintentionally. Again, there are so many examples of this that you can learn more
about in another video I did, but suffice to say, whether
it's kudzu with North America or cane toads in Australia, invasive species have a
knack for outcompeting or outright eating native
species to the point that it rocks the world
of an entire ecosystem, and finally, probably
the most direct impact we have on biodiversity is simply overharvesting
certain organisms. We're overfishing the oceans to meet growing demand for
popular fish species like tuna, while on land, we're
exterminating important predators like wolves to protect livestock. Those cows again, and the less
diverse those ecosystems are, the more vulnerable they
become to disturbances, including those other four
impacts I just mentioned. And the fact is, there is a bunch more where those came from, because
there's a whole separate set of effects that humanity
has on the biosphere that stem simply from us
putting the wrong amounts of certain stuff in the wrong
place at the wrong time.