The Biodiversity Paradigm: Building Resilience for Human and Environmental Health
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The Biodiversity Paradigm: Building Resilience for Human and Environmental Health Ruchi Shroff1 · Carla Ramos Cortés1
© Society for International Development 2020
Abstract It is a well-established fact that biodiversity is pivotal to human and planetary health, completely entwining biodiverse natural systems into a continuum, through our food systems, into human health. This means there is an intimate connection between the biodiversity of the soil, the biodiversity and interrelationships of cultivated and wild plants and animals. This article looks through an ecological sciences perspective at the interconnections and interrelations between human health and Earth’s health. But regardless of the wide recognition of the benefits of biodiversity, we are seeing a political and economic landscape which actively runs contrary to and further erodes diversity in favor of the globalized industrial food system, seed uniformity and further centralization through false tech solutions. A food system which is responsible for both setting the preconditions for the severity of the global COVID-19 pandemic by weakening human and animal health through an explosion of non-communicable diseases. The way forward is instead shown by small farmers, local communities and gardeners who are already implementing biodiversity-based organic agroecology, which both preserves and rejuvenates the health continuum between the soil, plants, animals, food and humans. Acting as a holistic paradigm shift where diversity in all areas is cultivated for ecological resilience. Keywords Biodiversity · Health · Food systems transformations · Industrial agriculture · Agroecology It is now a well-established fact that biodiversity is pivotal to both human and planetary health, completely entwining biodiverse natural systems into a continuum, through our food systems, into human health. This means there is an intimate connection between the biodiversity of greater ecosystems, soil—founded on microbial biodiversity—and the biodiversity and interrelationships of cultivated and wild plants and animals, which has given rise to diverse cultures and knowledge systems, including seed and crop diversity, and diets. In no moment has the importance of these interconnections become more apparent than during the COVID-19 pandemic, which has exposed the extant and interconnected precarities of our global systems. It has shown how the health emergency we are facing globally is deeply connected to the health emergency the Earth is facing in terms of steady environmental degradation, the extinction and disappearance of species and the climate emergency.
* Ruchi Shroff [email protected] 1
Navdanya International, Rome, Italy
These are all factors which have been largely caused by our current globalized, industrial agricultural system, as its entire model runs contrary to the cultivation of diversity for human and ecological health. This system provides nutritionally dead and toxic food, creating the modern explosion of noncommunicable diseases. It has been p
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