Embedded in nature: human health and biodiversity.

A loss of global biodiversity, namely a reduction in the variety of life on Earth, is rarely given much attention by physicians or environmental scientists. Like most people, they do not spend much time thinking about their relationship to other life forms, and they generally act, unknowingly, as if human beings were separate from the rest of nature—as if we could change the composition of the atmosphere and degrade the land and the oceans without these alterations having much effect on us. It is this disconnect that is at the core of the global environmental crisis—that policy makers and the public by and large do not understand that their health and lives are ultimately dependent on other species and on the integrity of the planet’s ecosystems, and, as a result, they do not appreciate the urgent need to protect the natural world.