What Has Nature Ever Done For Us? by Tony Juniper – review

It is pretty much official now that the world is going to hell in a handcart. Just in case we might have forgotten about the relentlessly draining impact of 7 billion humans on the Earth's life‑support system, this impassioned book reminds us of the key elements in that dismal story.

Juniper documents with ferocious pace and articulacy how the stock practices of hi-tech farming, such as deep ploughing and the ceaseless application of chemicals, have degraded about a third of the world's soils. In our efforts to boost farm production for ever-burgeoning populations we have in less than 30 years used half of all the synthetic nitrogen fertilisers that have been applied in our entire agricultural history.

In the oceans about a third of the world's fish stocks have been exploited beyond the limits of their endurance (some authorities suggest that over-harvesting affects four-fifths of all fisheries). Yet the story Juniper tells that I found even more hypnotically disturbing was that of the discarded flotsam now bobbing in the oceans.

Our mindless dumping of plastic has built up in sea areas with little current into a slow-swirling gyre of oil‑based particles; one of the contributors to the book likens the problem to an "unflushable toilet". Every square kilometre of the affected maritime zone contains 50,000 indestructible items and, although they reduce in size, they never diminish in volume. A UN report in 2006 estimated that this toxic soup chokes to death or poisons a million seabirds and 100,000 sea mammals every year. Who knows how many countless fishes are also consuming it, but when we eat fish we are, in effect, ingesting our own plastic effluent.

Juniper frames his arguments impressively. Like many environmentalists he understands the typical response to these horror stories – either because the induced sense of hopelessness is so unbearable or because the challenge of triple-dip recession seems so much more important, we find a way to bypass the news of ecological catastrophe.

Whatever the reason, and Juniper has convincing explanations for our balefully short attention span, we cannot quite submit to the idea that every mouthful we eat, all our wealth, everything we have from our Cox's orange pippins to our Apple Macs, comes out of the Earth or is given to us by the sun. After 10 generations of industrial society, and with most people in the west removed from a world of soil and sweat, we are so oblivious to the ways of nature that we cannot bring ourselves properly to absorb its vital importance.

Juniper's answer is not to hit us in our chests, but where it really matters: in our pockets. The thrust of the book is now orthodox environmental thinking. All the multitudinous donations that the Earth makes free of charge to human society are known as "ecosystem services". In a whistle-stop tour of these many kindnesses, which involve almost every aspect of life on the planet, Juniper presents a detailed breakdown of how they work and what they would cost if we actually had to pay for them.

At times the relentless repetition of telephone-number cash sums is overwhelming, but the overarching point is well made: we are in serious debt to the Earth. Juniper has a storyteller's gift for moving from the cold statistic to the affecting tale. Consider vultures – unattractive and seemingly disconnected from us. It turns out that these reptilian-headed scavengers are invaluable: in India they were running a refuse-disposal network that spared that nation from 12 million tonnes of rotting flesh every year.

Indians have learned the hard way about the generosity of vultures, because in the 1990s they started unwittingly to kill off 40 million of them with a veterinarian's painkiller called diclofenac (given to working animals to reduce joint pain so as to make them work longer). Juniper details the chain of unforeseen consequences. Not only did the loss of the birds' sanitary service give rise to a mountain of cattle carcasses, it also triggered a vast increase in the dog population which, in turn, caused 40 million more dog bites and 47,000 additional deaths from rabies. The total bill for losing the nation's spiralling flock of avian scavengers has been calculated at $34 billion.

This is small beer when you compare it with a universal service such as the Earth's provision of drinking water. We load our rivers with an unwanted cargo of nitrate fertiliser and plastic rubbish, even though it is these freshwater sources that quench our collective thirst.

Perhaps even more impressive than Juniper's research on the price of such services is an ability to remain upbeat in the face of so much bad news. In every chapter there are leavening examples of intelligent government planning or commercial best practice so that the book is as full of hope as it is despair. In New York, instead of creating a sediment-stripping plant at massive cost, the authorities worked with landowners who control the city's watershed to safeguard habitat and water quality in order to provide the largest unfiltered supply system in the US.

What is good for nature turns out to be what is best for us. Disconnected or alienated we may be from the planet's circulatory systems, but we are utterly dependent on them. Whenever we manage to preserve nature intact, we are healthier – and wealthier too.

Mark Cocker's Crow Country is published by Vintage.