Connecting Ecological Decline and Eco-justice

Abstract

Ecological decline is an important contemporary issue on several different levels of analysis. In the biology and ecology literatures, ecological decline has extraordinary importance when it comes to ecosystem health. The more ecosystems are stressed, the less capable those systems become of supporting themselves and other forms of life. Moreover, as ecosystem stress increases, the ecosystem changes and natural resource adequacy issues emerge. As a result, various species begin to experience the effects of ecological decline on their health and well-being. This can, as scientific studies have illustrated, lead to increasing rates of species extinction as the rapid pace of ecological decline causes a larger and larger number of species to experience a disjunction between their existence requirements and the material structure of local ecosystem changes (see Chap. 5). Animal and plant species cannot easily adapt to the various ecological changes occurring in the world due to their lack of geographic mobility, which may be one of the factors contributing to the accelerated rates of species extinction scientists have discovered in the modern era (e.g., Zalasiewicz et al. 2010; Steffen et al. 2007; Steffen et al. 2011; Stork 2010). These accelerated rates of extinction demonstrate that ecological changes produced by human activity (e.g., anthropogenic climate change) are changing the world so dramatically and quickly that species do not have the necessary time to develop adaptive coping mechanisms that might normally occur if such changes occurred slowly and allowed species to evolve in “normal” ways over long periods of time.