Your health is impacted by the cleanliness of the environment around you and across the globe.

BIODIVERSITY AND HUMAN HEALTH

The fate of the human species is inextricably interwoven with the collective fates of threatened wild spaces — and the plants and animals that live in them — around the globe.

Your individual health, comfort, and prosperity depends heavily on the actions you take at home, as well as the actions of your elected representatives and the businesses in your community. But did you know it is also heavily impacted by actions taken more than half a world away? On an ever-shrinking planet, tightly linked by global communications systems, jet travel, and the international exchange of products and services, the conditions of peoples around the globe are intimately connected with the conditions of the adjoining wild spaces and natural habitats. For example, recent studies have demonstrated that pollution constricts blood vessels, increasing the incidence of heart disease and related disorders in heavily polluted areas.

Tropical deforestation is taking a heavy toll on global biodiversity.

Science is rapidly proving beyond any doubt that if we are to preserve our own personal health, we must protect the natural systems that make all life on this planet possible... and that means protecting the health of ecosystems and individual species around the globe. From the tropical forest trees that produce the oxygen we breathe, to the temperate mountain forests that filter our drinking water and regulate the levels of our aquifers, we are intimately dependent on the ecosystem services provided by healthy, intact natural systems.

We also know that biodiversity is one of the best defenses against the threats of bioterrorism. Nature has spent countless eons in a pharmacological tug-of-war... for every toxin produced by an animal or plant to protect itself, there is likely to be an antidote in a nearby creature or plant that feeds on or grows next to the first one.

As the pages in this Website outline, human health problems as disparate as asthma, Lyme disease, skin cancer, and hantavirus are all attributable (at least in large measure, if not entirely) to unmoderated human alteration of the natural landscape, undertaken without knowledge of (or with willfull disregard to) the potential longterm health impacts of such changes to our planet's natural systems of checks and balances.

The actions you take at home — driving habits, purchasing decisions, even what you plant in your yard — may ultimately influence your life far more than you imagine. You can make a difference... in your own life and in the lives of others.

Getting Started

This site is intended as a non-technical means of sharing information about the relationship between biodiversity and human health. Physicians and other care givers will find this a useful starting point for informing themselves and their patients about the daily benefits we all derive from maintaining healthy ecosystems. Visit the Site Map for an overview of this site's structure.

• Physicians and other care givers can:
  • request copies of the Biodiversity and Human Health brochure for distribution in your office or clinic. A recent clinical survey (Temte and McCall 2001) demonstrates that patients want their physicians to give them more information about environmental health topics.
  • use this site as a source of information and ideas to help direct patient interviews and discussions about lifestyle choices. Visit the For Physicians page.
  • direct patients to this website for further reading.
• Teachers and students can use this site as the basis of lesson plans and class discussions about a wide array of topics, including:
  • biodiversity maintenance and resource management.
  • conservation programs and sustainable development.
  • wellness care and preventitive medicine vs. managed for-profit care.
  • human population control vs. emerging infectious diseases.

Choose a topic from the menu buttons to the left or visit our Ecology Library for other ideas and the Ecology Dictionary.

Check the League of Conservation Voters' record of how your elected representatives hold up on environmental voting issues!

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