EDITORIAL The ecology of ecosystem services: introduction to the special issue Throughout history, humankind has enjoyed a love-hate relationship with Nature, praising its bounty, fearing catastrophe, or challenging and conquering wilderness and sea. Regardless of our sense of distance from Nature, humans are nonetheless one species out of millions of others on Earth, one with an exceptional ability to harness a vast spectrum of energy sources, materials, and organisms for our welfare. As we exit the second millennium, we enter a world in which our impacts on the environment no longer can be ignored on global scales. In the coming century, our species, numbering roughly 10 -12 billion, will be squeezing many natural resources to and in excess of their limits. We will also continue to affect profoundly biogeochemical and hydrological processes that occur at scales ranging from microbial to global-atmospheric. How did we get here? By doing what all organisms do: we use resources to survive and we reproduce successfully. As highly social creatures, we have been effective at organizing and developing infrastructure and mores that sequester resources and protect us from the environmental adversities of weather, disease, starvation, etc. The development of civilization and culture has blinded many to the fact that humans are irrevocably tied to the natural world, a blindness exacerbated during the fossil-fuel era. Many societies have become philosophically and mentally 'disembedded' from the biophysical milieu (see Borgströ m-Hansson and Wackernagel, this issue), despite the fact that socio-economic development ultimately depends on the dynamic capacity of ecosystems to support it. Although ecologists and other environmental scientists have long understood the strong coupling between humans and the rest of Nature, many choose to ignore this relationship and instead derive knowledge about the natural world by studying 'pristine' situations. Today, increasing numbers of these scientists are re-examining the Man-Nature links and attempting to make these clear to the public as well as to their colleagues. For example, Wilson (1992) drew attention to the importance of biodiversity, and to the emerging crisis of massive species extinction due to human alterations of ecosystems. Today, few people question the human dominance of the plane
