Biodiversity is Mother Nature’s formula for success. When left to its own devices, biodiversity keeps the Earth and her creatures living and thriving with plentiful resources for everybody.

Each ecosystem is home to exactly the right number, combination, and diversity of plants and animals to create beautiful interdependent relationships that allow it to flourish. As their habitats nurture them, the creatures that are endemic to those habitats nurture their ecosystems in return through seed dispersal, pollination, stimulating plant growth, controlling populations through the food chain, and more. The animals that live in those ecosystems are designed with physical adaptations that specifically suit the development and growth of those ecosystems ensuring that they thrive and perpetuate.

Even when natural disasters occur, ecosystems are designed to recover over time. However, as habitats are unnaturally fragmented and destroyed, endemic animals lose the resources necessary for their survival.

Without endemic animals to provide the crucial activities that they are built for, like enriching and fertilizing the soil through the course of their daily activities, environmental balance is disrupted. When any one species is at risk, a domino effect of biological imbalance occurs putting the health of the entire ecosystem at risk. Every plant and animal with whom they share their habitat is then potentially at risk. Therefore, protecting one species saves many. 

When habitats are overly exploited, slashed, burned, fragmented, and otherwise destroyed, native animals lose their food sources, their hiding places, and their homes. Depletion of forests affects air quality globally. Fewer trees produce less oxygen, putting all oxygen-dependent organisms—including us—at risk. Less oxygen results in more carbon, which warms the Earth’s atmosphere and impacts global climate.

Biological imbalance ultimately affects the entire world, not just one region! It’s all connected.