Biodiversity is not just an environmental value. It is a foundation for human wellbeing, food security, and resilience. Ecovillages that protect and restore biodiversity are investing in their own future.
When most people think about biodiversity, they think about conservation, about protecting rare species and preserving wild places. That is important, but biodiversity is also deeply practical. The ecological services provided by diverse, healthy ecosystems, from clean water and pollination to pest control and climate regulation, underpin human wellbeing in ways that are easy to overlook until they are gone.
Pollinators, predominantly bees, butterflies, and other insects, are responsible for fertilising a large proportion of the food plants that humans depend on. Without healthy pollinator populations, food production would become dramatically more difficult and expensive. Pollinators depend on diverse, pesticide-free habitats with a year-round supply of flowers.
Predatory insects, birds, and other animals provide natural pest control in healthy ecosystems. When these populations are healthy and diverse, pest species rarely reach damaging levels. When they are depleted, pest populations can explode, creating the conditions that drive heavy pesticide use, further eroding biodiversity in a destructive cycle.
Healthy riparian zones, the vegetation along waterways, filter nutrients and sediments from water before they reach rivers and streams. They also provide corridors for wildlife movement between larger habitat patches. Protecting and restoring riparian vegetation is one of the highest-value biodiversity investments a land manager can make.
The Northern Rivers bioregion of New South Wales is globally recognised for its biodiversity. It sits at the meeting point of subtropical and temperate climates and contains a remarkable diversity of plant and animal communities, including many species found nowhere else in the world.
For Afterlee, biodiversity is not a nice extra added to the design as an afterthought. It is woven through every aspect of how the land is managed, from the plant species chosen for the food forest and the management of waterway vegetation to the maintenance of habitat features like hollow logs and native flowering plants.