Mother Nature is awesome. If you ask me, we should be busy worshiping her for giving us life and sustaining us throughout the ages. But, we will leave that what-to-worship issue for another post! Today, I’m gonna spare you the usual environmentalist hippie-ranting and speak in economical terms.
We tend to think that the economy and the environment are at war, with corporations cutting down trees, burning fossil fuels and raping baby dolphins in the oceans. Unfortunately, this leftist-anarchist fodder is somewhat right and business often interferes with Mother Nature.
In reality though, Mother Nature is the biggest investor in every major market and industry. It is the main driving force of the world’s economies, regardless of the policies they are governed by. This is because Nature provides essential goods and services for life itself to survive, much less businesses and the economy. If that doesn’t really sink in, perhaps you should consider how much it would cost us to do the following three things.
1- Air Filtration and Conditioning
All the arguileh smoke, car fumes and of course natural gases we all emit (I was talking about exhaling CO2 you pervs) are taken up by plants and other photosynthetic organisms, which we call autotrophs. Photosynthetic means they make their own food via light (photo-synthesis) and a few other ingredients like water and carbon dioxide.
Of course, too much CO2 kills us animals because we need Oxygen to stay alive. Here’s where “one man’s trash is another man’s treasure” metaphor works perfectly. What we throw out (CO2), autotrophs take in. And what autotrophs throw out (O2), we take in! Apart from that, many airborne toxins get trapped inside the plant. So, we’re not just recycling our CO2 emissions into O2, we’re also filtering out all the nasty stuff from it.
Imagine if Nature didn’t filter and recycle our air. Imagine we had to convert CO2 into O2, moisten our air and filter it from toxins… It would be like living in the International Space Station after it crash-landed into the Sahara desert. Apart from that being extremely annoying, it took the entire world’s space programs decades and hundreds of billions to build a craft that can accommodate a handful of astronauts crammed like sardines for only a few days. Imagine the entire human race living like that.
ACs won’t solve it, cause ACs dont convert CO2 to O2, so all you people living in the Gulf can stop feeling comfortable now.
2- Water Filtration
Again, I will give the Gulf as an example here. Much of the GCC countries’ potable water comes from desalination plants. They extract seawater, remove the salt (desalination). This is of course, super-expensive and inefficient compared to natural spring water and river sources. Of course, the GCC people are forced to do this because they have no other alternative. Most other nations though depend on water which becomes potable through the water cycle. The animation says it all, so I won’t add anything.
Imagine the whole world had to desalinate their water… Most countries can’t even afford to reroute their river water to homes. How can we expect them to build state-of-the-art, high-maintenance desalination plants with the capacity to let everyone drink, bathe and irrigate their crops.
3- Pollination
The first two were obvious. This issue though, is just as integral to our survival.
Plants don’t have sex directly. The poor souls don’t enjoy the process at all. Instead, they enlist animals like you and me to help them mate. However, I’m sure you dont run around in fields of flowers all day. That’s why, the world’s most important pollinators are insects, and more specifically, bees.
You’ve probably seen the mass-deaths of bees in places like Australia. Although the reasons are yet unclear, and scientists haven’t pinpointed the exact cause, it probably is our fault. If it isn’t, it still serves as a reminder to us that we shouldn’t only not kill these insects, but should make sure they survive and thrive!
Pollination is when an animal or wind or water, scoops up pollen (plant sperm) from a male plant (or male part of a plant) and inadvertently transfers it to the female part of another plant. This is how fruits and crops are made, the result of the pollination is the apple for example.
And since all our food ultimately comes from plants: no bees = no plants = no yumyums.
Imagine having to pollinate each and every flower, manually. How much time, money and effort would be spent…
Conclusion
These services would cost us trillions of dollars every year if we want to reproduce them ourselves. It takes a few million to help preserve nature’s built-in mechanisms and machinery.
In other words, with no eco-friendliness, we’d just hav a Nomy with no Eco.
