Orchestrating the ecological and technological components of human society's life support system.

A definite shift is underway from an environmental protection regulatory stance to a view of natural systems as essential components of human society's life support system. In addition, before the agricultural and industrial revolutions, arguably, human society's entire life support system was ecological. With increased human population size and the redistribution of people to urban areas, human society became dependent on a technological life support system for energy, shelter, distribution of food and other resources, and disposal of wastes (to mention a few illustrative examples). The ecological component of the life support system maintained atmospheric gas balance, transformed waste, and provided a number of other services ofvalue to human society (1,). The inevitable question in this era of space-age technology is whether human society can shift entirely to a technologically-based life support system. Avise (3) calculated the cost of Biosphere 2, which only partially regulated the life support systems for eight humans over a 2-year period with an electricity subsidy from outside the sphere, at approximately $9 million per person, per year. As Hammer (4) notes, natural systems are replacing chemical technology for waste treatment and they also complement energy-using technologies in local climate modification; for example, planting trees may save 200 billion kilowatt-hr annually in the United States by reducing the need for air conditioning (5). Most important , there is no robust evidence that we are sufficiently knowledgeable about ecological systems to replicate their services with technological systems even if this were economically feasible. Because our technological systems are threatening the ecological components of our life support systems, some balance is essential for deriving maximum benefit from each. It will be necessary to determine both the quality and quantity of ecosystem services necessary for human society at different population levels and degrees of affluence. Ecosystem services may be defined as those ecological functions deemed useful to human society. This being said, it is clear that even those well-identified services, such as maintenance of atmospheric gas balance, are not sufficiently well understood to determine whether continual loss of old growth forests and other natural systems poses an immediate or distant threat to the ecological services upon which human society depends. Further complicating policy development is the strong probability that there are, undoubtedly, many ecosystem services that are recognized as such only after the service is disrupted. For example, in Lake Malawi, snails carrying schistosomiasis have been kept under control …