The escalating loss of Earth’s biodiversity is of great concern for many reasons:
Humans depend on thousands of species and their ecosystems for ecosystem goods and services. As you learned in Key Concept 57.5, species and ecosystems provide humans with important goods (e.g., food, timber, and fiber) and services (e.g., regulating and supporting services such as coastal protection, water and air quality, soil formation, and carbon sequestration).
Humans derive enormous psychological benefits, including aesthetic pleasure, from interacting with other organisms. These aesthetic benefits are the reason we surround ourselves with parks and recreate in the wilderness.
Living in ways that cause the extinction of other species raises ethical issues. Loss of biodiversity is of concern to anyone who believes humans have an ethical obligation to the natural world.
Extinctions deprive the public and scientific community of opportunities to study and understand ecological relationships among organisms. The more species that are lost, the more difficult it will be to understand the biosphere as it exists today.
Recognizing the importance of biodiversity propels us to develop strategies for protecting and managing it and has spawned the development of conservation biology—an integrative scientific discipline that relies on principles of ecology, economics, social science, and policy to protect and manage Earth’s biodiversity. As you will see, we will refer to many ecological concepts from other chapters to establish, first, how and why biodiversity is being lost and, second, the role of conservation biology in protecting against and managing its further loss.