We live in a time of unprecedented human impact on Earth's natural systems.  As our human population nears 8 billion, the demand for natural resources continues to grow.  Technology can help us manage tasks more efficiently, but it also gives us the power to exploit natural resources more intensively.  Earth's environmental systems and the humans that depend on them are in jeopardy. 

 

Ecosystem services are functions of the natural world that benefit humans such as  filtration of water, removal of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, pollination, and renewal of soil fertility.  These processes have largely been overlooked by economists when calculating the true cost of the degradation of natural environments.  As a result of externalizing these costs, we don't actually pay to repair the true environmental cost of goods.

 

Climate change is the result of a positive feedback loop that magnifies the impact of human destruction.  Burning fossil fuels to obtain energy adds greenhouse gases to the atmosphere.  At the same time, forests and grasslands that naturally remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere are being destroyed by human activities.  These two actions together have accelerated the buildup of greenhouse gases and the rate of global warming.  

 

It is under these circumstances that conservation and restoration efforts are of critical importance.  Conservation science is a field of study that examines the impacts of human activity on natural ecosystems and provides strategies for protecting and restoring nature.   It is highly interdisciplinary—to solve today’s conservation problems requires work not only by biologists, but also by people knowledgeable in economics, ethics, law, and many other areas.  Environmental problem-solving also must involve the local people in the communities affected by conservation decisions.  Ecological restoration attempts to repair degraded, damaged or destroyed ecosystems.  Although much progress can be made, it is important to realize that scientists lack the knowledge to completely “restore” ecosystems—we can’t replace all the plants, animals, and ecosystem functions of a prairie, wetland, or any other ecosystem.  As a consequence, we should never destroy  remnant ecosystems with the idea that we can easily “build a new one.” 

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Here in Kansas, it makes sense to focus on the tallgrass prairie.  Tallgrass prairie once extended across 170 million acres of North America, including much of eastern Kansas.  The rich prairie soil attracted farmers who plowed the sod and planted crops.  Towns and cities grew from the bountiful harvests and, as a result, less than 4% of the tallgrass prairie remains intact today.  Notably 2/3 of the remaining tallgrass prairie can be found in Kansas and Oklahoma.  Two of the largest remnant prairies in Kansas are the Konza Biological Field Station and the Tallgrass Prairie Preserve.  Conservation and restoration work on prairies are often tightly integrated.  By protecting and managing the few remaining areas of undisturbed tallgrass prairie, we gain crucial data and raw materials for restoration work (such as seed from prairie plants).