The NY Times had a piece in Saturday morning's edition on the cost of alien invasive species, highlighting a report on African agriculture. The results are sobering even given the acknowledged limitations on the available data.
Deep in the report was a short section on the impact on ecosystem services: clean water, soil quality, wildlife, etc. Despite the widespread use of the term "ecosystem services," I tend to agree with Robinson (Braiding Sweetgrass) that using the word 'services' does us a disservice. It reduces our interaction with the natural world to a unidirectional transaction. What should be reciprocal, care-giving, or at least cyclical, is instead a thing that we simply use.
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