Top 10 Reasons Mother Nature is 'Too Big to Fail'

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:

1. Net Primary Production (NPP)

While economists fret over the GDP, many are unaware of the NPP, which is the total amount of plant material produced during a year through photosynthesis. This organic matter is not only the base of the entire food chain, but also the foundation for all other ecosystem services.

So how big is the NPP? Land ecosystems on the planet produce an estimated 132 billion tons, and the NPP of the oceans is similar.

The problem? Humans are consuming and degrading nearly 40% of terrestrial NPP, and the oceans aren’t faring much better.

The real problem? When ecosystems collapse, there is no way to bail them out.

2. Plant and Animal Products

For thousands of years people have relied on nature to provide our food, clothing, shelter, tools, fuel and medicine.

The annual catch from the world's fisheries alone is valued at $100 billion a year, besides being the primary source of protein for millions of people in Africa and Asia. The world's grasslands support the animals that give us meat, milk, wool, and leather, while forests give us timber for shelter, furniture, and paper.

Organic material from plants and trees also supply 15% of the world's fuel – 40% in the developing world. In addition, the world's medicines are all derived from the work of nature's invisible bio-chemists; as are hundreds of other industrial products including resins, dyes, and insecticides.

We're talking trillions of dollars here, folks.

3. Pollination

We know we need plants to survive, but we often forget that plants need pollinators to reproduce. Bees alone pollinate a third of the nation's food supply, and are vital to major economic drivers like California's billion dollar agriculture business.

The onset of Colony Collapse Disorder among the nation’s overworked, pesticide-laden bees has brought attention to this issue.

Less known is the economic impact of having forests and the wild pollinators they support near to our fields and farms.

In Costa Rica, WWF researchers found that preserving forest fragments near coffee plantations nearly doubled pollination rates which increased yields by 20%, raising average incomes $62,000 a year.