Biotic Resources

Ecosystem Functions

All complex life requires the life support functions of healthy ecosystems.  Ecosystems are composed of particular configurations of living and non-living elements. Powered by solar energy[1], they regulate global climate, the balance of atmospheric gasses, nutrient cycling, soil formation, and innumerable other processes on which life depends. Just as a human cell cannot survive independent from a human body, and an individual human cannot survive independent of human society, human society cannot survive independent of the complex ecosystems of which we are simply one component.  Ecosystems create the conditions required for their own reproduction and the reproduction of all the species of which they are composed, including the plants and animals humans convert into economic products.  Many of the raw material inputs into the economic process alternatively serve as the structural building blocks of ecosystems. When we remove ecosystem structure and spew back waste, we degrade the capacity of ecosystems to generate these vital functions.  The two essential roles nature plays in the human economy are inseparably linked.  

Ecosystem Services

In the context of the ecozoic, ecosystem services are not defined as nature’s benefits to people, but rather as nature’s benefits to the community of life and people’s benefits to nature. They are services in the Georgescu-Roegen sense: ecosystems provide a flux of benefits at a rate over time and are not physically transformed into the benefits they provide. Like public services, they are largely incompatible with market provision.

[1] Some ecosystems are powered by thermal or chemical energy, but these account for only a tiny fraction of all ecosystems.