Connecting People with Nature
By: Oxford Academic
Tags: Oxford University Press, Ecology, Nature, Grassroots Stewardship, Biology

In this extract from Grassroots Stewardship, author F Stuart Chapin, III explores the benefits of nature on people, and how to connect the two.

Wangari Maathai, the daughter of a Kenyan sharecropper, collected water for her mother from springs protected by the roots of trees. Her grandmother taught her that the fig tree near her home was sacred and should not be disturbed. Although it was unusual for girls to attend school, her brother suggested it, her parents agreed, and she graduated near the top of her class. She was the first woman in eastern and central Africa to receive a PhD. In the 1970s, when she was in her mid-30s, she became aware of Kenya’s ecological decline and its link to rural poverty. Watersheds were drying up as native forests were cleared for farms or plantations of fast-growing, water-demanding exotic trees. “I was hearing many rural women complain that they didn’t have firewood, that they didn’t have enough water. So why not plant trees, I asked the women.” She thought that planting native trees, especially fruit trees, might replenish soils, provide fuel wood, and improve nutrition in rural communities.

Maathai began by raising tree seedlings in tin cans in her backyard and engaging rural women in planting them. Government foresters initially resisted the idea because they didn’t believe uneducated rural women could plant and tend trees. Little by little, the idea took root and blossomed into the Green Belt Movement. Maathai showed women how they could use their existing knowledge to gather seeds from the forest, plant them, and tend the seedlings. Eventually, with help from Kenyan and United Nations groups for the support of women, she was able to pay women 10 cents for each tree that survived and grew. This gave the women a sense of independence and empowerment. The Green Belt Movement spread across East Africa, and the 51 million trees planted by these women have significantly reduced land degradation in the region.

When Maathai accepted the Nobel Peace Prize in 2004, she said that the purpose of her program was to help people “make the connections between their own personal actions and the problems they witness in their environment and society. . . .With this knowledge, they wake up — like looking in a new mirror — and can move beyond fear or inertia to action.” Clearly, even people with minimal material wealth and security can work together to do amazing things that simultaneously improve their lives and the environment.

As Wangari Maathai showed, neither ecosystem health nor human well- being is sustainable by itself because each depends on the other. People shape nature through exploitation, impacts, and stewardship; and nature shapes people through its benefits to society (ecosystem services). Analogous to the social and commercial services provided by government and business, ecosystem services include the following:

• Provisioning services: the products that are directly harvested from ecosystems (such as food, fiber, and water)

• Regulating services: the capacity of ecosystems to buffer disturbance and shape interactions among ecosystems (regulating the climate, cleaning our drinking water, reducing disease risk, and dampening storm waves and flooding)

• Cultural services: nonmaterial benefits (cultural identity, spiritual connections, aesthetics, recreation, and ecotourism opportunities)

Many of these services are essential for short-term human survival, and they all enhance people’s quality of life.

As people seek to meet their needs and desires, they do things that affect ecosystems. These actions range from exploitation and impacts, such as pollution, which reduce the capacity of ecosystems to provide services to society, to stewardship, which sustains or enhances these capacities. If people degrade nature to meet their short-term desires, ecosystem services decline. This erodes society’s capacity to meet its needs. On the other hand, if human well- being is severely compromised, people have no choice but to meet their immediate needs by taking whatever they can get from nature. In either case, both nature and people suffer. How do the positive and negative effects of people on ecosystems balance out at the global scale?

As people seek to meet their needs and desires, they do things that affect ecosystems. These actions range from exploitation and impacts, such as pollution, which reduce the capacity of ecosystems to provide services to society, to stewardship, which sustains or enhances these capacities.

In 2005, 1,300 ecologists from around the world completed a 5-year global assessment of the impacts of ecosystem changes on human well-being. The resulting Millennium Ecosystem Assessment (MEA) concluded that two-thirds of Earth’s ecosystem services were being degraded or used unsustainably in the global aggregate. One-fifth of ecosystem services had not been systematically altered. Only three (13%) actively managed services (crops, livestock, and aquaculture) were increasing. A 2019 update of this synthesis shows that 75% of ecosystem services are now being used unsustainably. These statistics clearly show that the services provided by most ecosystems are declining in their capacity to meet human needs.

Most of the declines in ecosystem services result from human impacts on ecosystems. Pollinators that are essential for fruit production are declining because of insecticides and pollution. Human introductions of invasive species have reduced the capacity of many grazing lands to support cattle. Drainage of wetlands for agriculture and development has reduced their capacity to remove pollutants from agricultural runoff and to buffer the impacts of heavy rains on downstream flooding.

By identifying the major causes of change in each ecosystem service, the MEA provides clear guidance about ways to foster their recovery — simply reduce the pressures that cause their declines. This approach is generally a safe starting point for reducing environmental degradation because it addresses the root causes of problems. The necessary steps are generally well known by resource and restoration managers — reducing rates of forest and wetland loss and restoring or replacing those forests and wetlands that were previously eliminated. Reducing the declines in ecosystem services is therefore not conceptually complex. The difficulties arise largely from trade-offs — when gains in some ecosystem services, such as agricultural production, come at the expense of losses of other services, such as climate regulation by forests.