Overview: Perspectives on Ecosystem Health

Abstract

Ecosystem health is about a lot of things. It is about the state of a community of organisms (including humans as part of that community) that interact with their environment, sometimes in ways that compromise ecological functions, and in the process compromise the health of the entire ecosystem and its components. It is about questions of the relationship between the health of ecosystems and their integrity, i.e., how far they may diverge from a pristine state. It is also about human health — a topic that is receiving increased attention as issues of climate change, ozone depletion, food safety, exotic pathogens, and drinking water come to the fore. And at root it is about sustainability — that is, about the conditions necessary to sustain the functions of the ecosystem, the human community, and the other species that are totally dependent on those functions. The trend continues for more of the world’s population to be concentrated in urban areas (more than half the world’s population now lives in urban ecosystems, and in developed countries the percentage is substantially higher). Therefore, it is about the health of those systems and their interrelations with other ecosystems (forests, lakes, rivers, grasslands, etc.). Section I.2 provides a kaleidoscope of many of the philosophical, ethical, and practical issues that are part and parcel of the ecosystem health perspective. The chapter by Laura Westra examines the conceptual, historical, ethical, and philosophical dimensions of ecosystem health. Her chapter provides guidance in making a useful distinction between ecological integrity, which is oriented toward the preservation of unfettered nature, and ecosystem health, which is oriented toward preserving the functions of ecosystems, even though the system may be considerably altered as a result of human domination. The ethics of integrity (and ecosystem health) can be boiled down to this: if integrity (or, one might argue, ecosystem health) is basic for life, then the duty “to respect/protect life must come before all other obligations we might have, as no other good and no other right may be present, if life is absent.” Westra’s chapter goes on to explore the implications of this ethic, as well as to explore the relative strengths and the interface of ecosystem integrity and health. Both ecological integrity and ecosystem health are gaining in popularity as policy goals for environmental management.