Your Personal Ecosystem

Your personal ecosystem is made up of you and your environment, jointly. That means you and everything with which you interact — you and the sunshine that warms the Earth, the air you breathe, the water you drink, the food you eat, and the millions of other species with which you share the Biosphere.

You and your environment are inseparable. One cannot exist without the other. When you die the matter that makes up your body will be recycled, but your personal ecosystem will go on living in people's minds.

Child of the Universe

If everything truly is connected as scientists believe, then it follows that you are a child of the Universe. You not only have a right to be here, you have an obligation in self-interest to protect the planetary heritage left by our kin.

By planetary heritage, I mean the living and life-supporting system that we call the Biosphere. By kin, I mean I mean the innumerable forms of life that at one time or another have lived on Earth. The message of the evolutionary tree of life, now amply documented by DNA, is that all organisms are kin — distant kin for the most part, but nevertheless kin.

They have left us ten precious gifts, legacies, endowments, or whatever you might like to call them. Without them you and I wouldn't be here. They are:

1. oxygen in the air we breathe;
   
   
2. the food we eat;
   
   
3. the water we drink and bathe in;
   
   
4. reproductive cells that magically transform fertilized eggs into adult organisms, and the back to fertilized eggs;
   
   
5. the microbes in our guts, without which we could not live;
   
   
6. natural gas, petroleum and coal to run our cars and warm our homes;
   
   
7. other species that, like miners' canaries, warn us the dangers to which we are exposing ourselves,
   
   
8. wood to build our homes;
   
   
9. the beauty of nature that brings peace to our minds; and
   
   
10. the continuity of the Biosphere which, over billions of years, has enabled our species to flower on the evolutionary tree of life.