"We cannot cheat on DNA. We cannot get round photosynthesis. We cannot say I am not going to give a damn about phytoplankton. All these tiny mechanisms provide the preconditions of our planetary life. To say we don't care is to say in the most literal sense that 'I choose death.'" ~Barbara Ward.
There's one thing mutual between the preventive measures assigned for various environmental issues that is Afforestation. This leads us to the direct question of why this is so...
Plants are the pioneers of life on earth, and that cannot be contested. The early atmosphere was reducing, and the existence of plants made oxidizing, which in turn paved the way for other life forms to make their entry into the earth.
For starters, if we consider the ecosystem, in all of its phenomena, plants are the protagonists.
Accounting to the 10% law, plants occupy the first trophic level in food chains and thereby are the source of the energy flow to all the successive trophic levels. So it's crystal clear that without plants, there wouldn't be an equation at all. All the food chains that make up food webs begin with plant life, and in a food web, every organism is interlinked with one another. They are co-dependent as usual plants form the base. The absence of one could completely throw off the whole system.
Plants act as oxygen facilitators, and that is of paramount importance to every creature on earth. We consider food, shelter, and cloth as the necessities of life, and three of them are provided by plants abundantly. Some species depend on specific plant parts for their food requirement. Examples could be Monarch butterflies, Koalas, etc. Microbes, animals, birds, and parasites seek habitation from plants. Forest dwellers, as the name suggests, sustain on forest resources solely. Robert Costanza, an ecological economist, put a price tag on ecosystem services, which was about US $ 33 trillion a year.
Apart from that, the plants are climate regulators, and air and water purifiers. They are responsible for rainfall on earth, maintaining water tables, reducing carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere, and thereby acting as the only saviors against many anthropogenic catastrophes like climate change, global warming, the El Nino effect, and pollution. According to a source, one tree produces nearly 260 pounds of oxygen each year. One acre of trees removes up to 2.6 tons of carbon dioxide each year.
There is an enormous part that plants play as a community in the universe, the sustenance of life being one. In a parallel world of imagination, poetry, and aesthetics, we all find supreme healing energy in the laps of nature.
Awareness deficit is an issue, of course, but the ignorance and foolishness of the literate is what fails the whole race. There has been a clarion call towards nature's protection since time immemorial, but a mass response awaits.
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