It's an admittedly utilitarian view of species - what is their environmental function rather than their origin? - and that does not sit well with many lovers of nature. Over the last few years, there has been a radical shift away from traditional natural science that emphasized the role of evolution in understanding the diversity of life on Earth to trying to understand what role such a diversity of species play in environmental processes. What new idea or innovation is having the most significant impact on the sustainability of our world? Really interesting conversations always follow. So now I say I'm a professor knowing that will peg me as an academic and that immediately leads to the follow up question of, 'so what is it you study?' It's then that I say I study what happens to nature when it is dismantled.

I used to say I'm an ecologist, which is in fact accurate, but I noticed that people immediately assumed I was either an anti commerce tree-hugging pantheist liberal who would have us return to loin cloths and feed off insects and berries or a passionate lover of animals who would risk frostbite or death to radio collar a snow leopard in the Himalayas. What do you say when people ask you, 'What do you do?' Here, Naeem discusses what it would be like if, all of a sudden, breathable air, potable water, equitable climate, fertile soil, pollination, and other products and services we've grown accustomed to were considered part of our economies the radical shift away from traditional natural science that emphasized the role of evolution in understanding the diversity of life on Earth and why we desperately need to finally get away from the same primitive carbon-based energy system used by cavemen. Conserving biodiversity is not just a goal in and of itself, but a valuable way for solving environmental problems - save the whales not just because we love them, but because they make our marine ecosystems more productive and more stable which, in turn, makes our lives better. But what if saving species is actually a way to stop erosion, clean up air and water, stabilize the climate, and much more? Naeem is one of the founders of a more modern view of biodiversity as the engine of our environment, not merely collateral damage of an increasingly unstable and unsustainable environment. Conservation biologists therefore focus primarily on finding ways to help out and protect these millions of species that are at risk of going extinct as the environment changes.

Usually, plants and animals are seen as innocent bystanders suffering in the face of global change, an unfortunate but necessary outcome of economic growth. Shahid Naeem is a scientist, however, who feels that environmental solutions can be found by conserving biological diversity a different view of why conservation matters. The economic debt our children will inherit that garners so much attention is rather mundane by comparison. The world we are leaving our children and their children is not the one we inherited climate is changing, new diseases are emerging, exotic species are spreading, soil is eroding, pollution is occurring at global scales, and food, energy, and water security are plummeting.

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