Ecocide
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Ecocide is the killing of an ecosystem, which includes consuming it and using it to feed some other process or system - ecophagy. There are however ways to render an ecosystem not viable that do not require consuming or crushing all of its parts. It is thus a serious mistake to assume that measures to prevent ecophagy or conversion of the living matter to non-living matter, necessarily will prevent ecocide.
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[edit] Criteria for life
A difficult question is whether an ecosystem is alive in the sense of a single living organism. Any form of life has a form of homeostasis which keeps it at maximum entropy, that is, shedding heat. Meanwhile, its internal life processes are negentropic, increasing the degree of order of matter in the body. This, along with the ability to reproduce, are usually cited as the two most important attributes of any life form.
[edit] Reproduction
An ecosystem typically has a homeorhetic equilibrium rather than a full homeostasis. However, a virus or prion or molecular assembler or perhaps a clanking replicator also lacks their own reproduction, homeostasis, and thus full status as a life form, but it would not be difficult to identify when they had been "killed", i.e. lost their integrity or "died", unable to perform their normal functions any more.
[edit] Resource
From a strictly human point of view, the most reasonable way to assess the life or lack of life of any ecosystem is whether it is capable of an ecological yield of fresh air, clean water, and other nature's services, on which our own lives depend. Aside from being an aesthetic or ethical issue, it is a matter of sheer survival for those who depend on the endangered ecosystem in any way.
[edit] Depletion
From this point of view, there are many known cases of utter disabling of nature's services due to pollution, erosion, loss of topsoil due to strip mining or overintensive agriculture - perhaps leaving a minimal ecosystem such as a desert not capable of performing the same services or life forms as prior to the ecocide, flooding, salt intrusion - such as due to shrimp farming, and (most commonly) deforestation.
[edit] Examples
Some well known examples are the drying up of the Aral Sea, the advancing of the Sahara Desert into what were the grain-producing regions of the Roman Empire, the erasure and poisoning of farm lands along the Western Front during World War I (see Technology during World War I for details re: mud) and the total loss of all trees from Easter Island, which today is simply grassland, incapable of supporting a large population.
[edit] Use of Agent Orange during the Vietnam War
During the Vietnam War, the U.S army used a powerful herbicide and defoliant called Agent Orange in order to destroy the forests, where their enemies were hidden. Forty years later, we know that this herbicide is still responsible for the birth of abnormal children, sometimes without limbs. It has also destroyed 20,000 km² of forests and 5,000 km² of mangroves, representing 20% of all South-Vietnamese forests, according to a report of UNESCO.
(En) http://www.stopusa.be/scripts/texte.php?section=CL&langue=3&id=24471
(Fr) http://www.monde-solidaire.org/spip/article.php3?id_article=2295
This succinct text is the content of the conference by Andre Bouny for launching of International Support Committee in aid of Agent Orange Vietnamese victims bringing an action in New York at the Centre d'Accueil de la Presse Etrangere (CAPE) House of Radio France, on Wednesday, the 9th March at 2 pm.
[edit] Related concepts
The related concept of dieoff in population biology refers to the precipitous drop in any population once it has overgrazed its environment to the point where it is simply no longer viable as a population. This usually occurs far before a full-spectrum ecocide, however, as few organisms consume a wide range of foods, nor directly transform (or "terraform") ecoregions simply to serve their own purposes. Thus total extinction of all life seems unlikely.