A few years back, I was living in a small town with a wooded area just a few minutes from my home, which itself was surrounded by greenery and a garden that provided all the vegetables I needed from spring to autumn.
Fig: A canal at the biosphere reserve Spreewald, Brandenburg (Photo courtesy Hoang Minh Thao Mai on Wikimedia Commons, shared under CC BY-SA 4.0)1
A walk through the woods, a welcome note from a robin, and I would immediately disconnect from work stress, from social media, from all the noise, and even from that part of me that kept me permanently on my toes. An occasional human and his best friend might cross my path, a bunch of squirrels released from their winter house arrest, blue tits, a common blackbird hopping around and figuring out its nesting areas, and the occasional white-tailed eagle monitoring all the activities below. There would be lambs birthing around spring and corn starting its journey, tender and small, if I crossed into the nearby farmlands. There was so much to see, smell, and absorb that I would start feeling human, real, and alive again.
Having moved to greener pastures (away from actual ones and into a big, crowded city) in search of a lucrative livelihood (which is, frankly, getting a little ulcerative), I miss those walks and runs. I miss the person I become when I am with them.
What those woods offered wasn't just the apparent stress relief and the mental health benefits. They were, and still are for those lucky enough to live nearby, something called an ecosystem service.
What is an ecosystem service, you ask? The Convention on Biological Diversity (1992) defines an ecosystem as "a complex of living organisms and the abiotic environment with which they interact in a specified location." An ecosystem service, then, is the direct and indirect benefit we humans derive from those ecosystems. The idea was first popularised by the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment of 2005.
But why do we need to name it and define it? Because we humans love a cost-benefit analysis. If we want to keep a tree, we need to be able to say what benefit it brings. If we want to do something about climate change, we need to be able to point to what we stand to gain. That is precisely where the concept of ecosystem services comes in. It gives the few who already feel the value of the natural world a language to convince the majority for whom economics drives everything.
To ease yourself into the idea, watch this lovely two-minute video, Single Tree, by Carolin Winter and Florian Schnabel:
In future posts we will explore ecosystem services further, and how you can promote and benefit from them in your very own backyard. Until then, for those lucky few with an accessible green space nearby, go be human again. The robin's already waiting.
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1 This image, taken by Hoang Minh Thao Mai, was shared under CC BY-SA 4.0