“[W]hat we call the natural environment of India is the result of an uneasy balance between agriculturists and forest-dwellers over millennia. Therefore, some of the credit for the clean air, pure water, the pollinators and carbon sequestration should be attributed to humans as well. How this credit is passed on, to whom, and in what manner then becomes a very messy question in the implementation of the ecosystem services concept.” (Photo courtesy McKay Savage, 2007, Bangalore, India.)Here’s a nice essay on the concept of ecosystem services and some of the problems it presents by Joy Merwin Monteiro, a PhD student at the Centre for Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences at the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore, India. The essay is published in Dimensions, the magazine of the International Human Dimensions Programme on Global Environmental Change.
(P.S. Monteiro mentions that his pastimes “tend to revolve around music, sport and sleeping.” Maybe we should all start listing sleep as a pastime? :))
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