>In what way?
Because we are all completely dependent on ecosystem services provided by those species, such as erosion control (without which your country erodes away to desert), rainwater buffering (without which you experience catastrophic flooding), and transpiration (without which you lose almost all inland rainfall[1]).
Loss of individual species is just the symptom. The real problem—and what this article discusses—is wholesale destruction of wilderness.
Don't imagine that just a handful of species can provide these services either. Since ecosystems are complex adaptive systems, a particular species' role is almost always subtle and interconnected. See: the services provided by wolves in Yellowstone, which were never fully understood until they were removed and then re-introduced[2].
So why is wilderness important? Fundamentally, wilderness is arranged (and so, it functions) in completely different ways than human-tended landscapes. Now it's obvious that a suburb is different from a forest, but what's less obvious is that the way wilderness works is much more efficient. It's not dependent on a constant stream of material extracted from "somewhere else", but on average it produces far more economic value when ecosystem services are accurately accounted for.
Surprise, surprise: economics seems to suggest that those living on a spaceship shouldn't take a sledgehammer to the life support system…
(of course, the ultimate trick would be to design human landscapes that also function like wilderness ecosystems)
[1] http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v496/n7445/abs/nature11...
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ysa5OBhXz-Q
Because we are all completely dependent on ecosystem services provided by those species, such as erosion control (without which your country erodes away to desert), rainwater buffering (without which you experience catastrophic flooding), and transpiration (without which you lose almost all inland rainfall[1]).
Loss of individual species is just the symptom. The real problem—and what this article discusses—is wholesale destruction of wilderness.
Don't imagine that just a handful of species can provide these services either. Since ecosystems are complex adaptive systems, a particular species' role is almost always subtle and interconnected. See: the services provided by wolves in Yellowstone, which were never fully understood until they were removed and then re-introduced[2].
So why is wilderness important? Fundamentally, wilderness is arranged (and so, it functions) in completely different ways than human-tended landscapes. Now it's obvious that a suburb is different from a forest, but what's less obvious is that the way wilderness works is much more efficient. It's not dependent on a constant stream of material extracted from "somewhere else", but on average it produces far more economic value when ecosystem services are accurately accounted for.
Surprise, surprise: economics seems to suggest that those living on a spaceship shouldn't take a sledgehammer to the life support system…
(of course, the ultimate trick would be to design human landscapes that also function like wilderness ecosystems)
[1] http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v496/n7445/abs/nature11...
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ysa5OBhXz-Q