I heard about What Has Nature Ever Done For Us by Tony Juniper on The Guardian Science Weekly podcast, or at least I believe I did. In any case, Juniper has written many articles for The Guardian over the years on the topic of sustainability and environment. I haven’t read them, but I assume the key ideas are the same as in the book.

In the UK the visible water we use that comes from our taps, showers and toilet flushes totals around 150 litres per day. On top of this is the water used to grow the food we eat, generate the power we use and make the consumer goods we buy. It is rather more than what we use directly – according to one estimate, about 4,650 litres per day. Making up this total are some everyday goods that in water terms are rather big-ticket items. A kilogramme of coffee typically needs about 20,000 litres of water to produce. The tea that grows in the Kenyan hills needs about 2,200 litres per kilogramme; 1 kilo of grain-fed beef, about 16,000 litres. Meat generally has a bigger water footprint than vegetables, not least because water is needed at each stage in the food chain, so the higher you go, the more water is needed.

Tony Juniper: What Has Nature Ever Done For Us

Tony Juniper covers the many negative effects human neglect has on the environment: degradation of soils, desertification, disruption of chemical cycles, die out of pollinators, pollution of rivers and oceans and many others. He strives to show examples of actions which can be taken to mitigate and reverse the damage caused; it is only by those rays of light that you can read the book and gain a little bit of optimism, because otherwise the book is just a sad epitaph of the human civilization rushing to an ultimate doom. On one hand, there’s nothing the human civilization deserves more for the way it treats the planet, but since I am a part of that civilization, I need the positive outlook — there are actions which can be taken to postpone the apocalypse, hopefully indefinitely.

Simply put, when there are more potential targets for a vector like a mosquito, and when some of the hosts they might bite do not make particularly good hosts for the microbes that cause the disease it is carrying, then the spread of the disease among humans can be hampered by diluting its chances of reaching a human host. This appears to be the case in relation to Lyme disease. Research into the spread of this tick-borne condition suggests that it is less likely to reach people where there is a higher diversity of small mammals. The mice, deer, foxes and all the rest of the woodland creatures that inhabit the same ecosystems as the ticks seem to ‘absorb’ more of the potential infections, meaning that there are fewer encounters with humans. … The message seems quite straightforward: more diverse wildlife provides us with a buffer that can sometimes curb the spread of disease, and the value of that service is considerable.

Tony Juniper: What Has Nature Ever Done For Us

Bioshpere 2, an incredible experiment of a closed biosphere inhabited by a group of researches for two years, is described in the prologue and used throughout the book to illustrate both the complexity and the vulnerability of the environment. The subsequent chapters each focus on one topic (e.g. soil, water, sun, corals), how human civilization affects and destroys them and what is the research saying about prospect for their improvement.

In cities, trees can make a big difference: one UK calculation suggests that a 10 per cent increase in tree cover would reduce the surface temperature of Manchester and London during heatwaves by 3–4°C. Trees planted around buildings can reduce the need for energy-hungry air conditioning by a third.

Tony Juniper: What Has Nature Ever Done For Us

Each chapter is packed with interesting information, examples of dependencies and cause-and-effect loops, how this aspect of nature has deteriorated over the years and what can possibly be done to improve it. A key concept running through the whole book and explicitly addressed in one of the final chapters is that natural services need to be valued and accounted for in the same way other services are. Our money oriented economies won’t change, but they can and should include the environment, thus internalizing externalities of all business activities. This is of course no small goal but the only chance to make people take the nature seriously. The whole book is peppered with things which everyone can do on a personal level to reduce or offset their impact on the environment, but getting natural services to be an integral part of any (business) decision is the key to our survival.

Another found that exercise in a green environment can create an immediate improvement in self-esteem. Several researchers have demonstrated how office workers experience lower job stress, higher job satisfaction and fewer illnesses if they have views of natural areas than if they did not.

Tony Juniper: What Has Nature Ever Done For Us

What Has Nature Ever Done For Us is a must read for everyone except for nihilists. It illustrates that our well-being is completely dependent of nature and we can’t afford to ignore it.