Andrew Mannle's articles

The news that international leaders in Italy were not able to commit to strong, binding climate change agreements probably doesn't surprise anybody.

"It is no small task for 17 leaders to bridge their differences on an issue like climate change," President Obama said.

But tackling an issue of this urgency, complexity and enormity may have an upside.

Right now, leaders of so-called 'developed' and 'developing' countries are at a standoff with good reason: Developed countries have polluted more in the past, but developing countries are rapidly outpacing them. Countries like the United States have much higher emissions per capita, while poorer nations argue that they are simply trying to provide basic services for their people.

"Developed countries like my own have a historic responsibility to take the lead," Obama said.

But without the help of developing nations like China and India, our best efforts will not stop global warming. As the president put it, "The threat of climate change can't be contained by borders on a map."

Clearly, this impasse will not be resolved using the current paradigm of 'developed' and 'developing' nations. Leaders of the so-called 'First World' and 'Third World' are confronting the reality that we live on one world; that the atmosphere has no borders.

As the debate about how to revive our economy while sustaining our environment heats up, it's important to remember that the economic driver truly "too big to fail" is Mother Nature herself.

It's been calculated that nature's "Ecosystem Services" are worth over $33 trillion dollars a year – nearly double the size of the global economy. And while that figure is important for putting a value on Nature's contributions to the economy, it belies the fact that without nature we could not survive at all.

So the true value of natural services? Priceless.

In their seminal work "Sustaining Life: How Human Health Depends on BioDiversity," Harvard M.D.'s teamed up with Oxford University Press, the U.N. Environment Program, and famed biologist E.O. Wilson to compile a comprehensive picture of how diverse species and ecosystems provide "materials, conditions, and processes that sustain all life on this planet, including human life."

Here's a look at the Top 10 things Mother Nature does for us for free, year after year, that we couldn't even begin to do ourselves without her: