Biodiversity Crisis: 7 Reasons Why Losing Wildlife Is Also Losing Ourselves

This article examines the biodiversity crisis through seven interconnected dimensions that link wildlife loss directly to human health, food security, economic stability, and civilisational wellbeing. Drawing on the WWF Living Planet Report 2024 (73% average decline in monitored wildlife populations between 1970 and 2020, based on nearly 35,000 population trends across 5,495 species), the WHO Biodiversity Fact Sheet (2025), the IPBES 2019 Global Assessment (one million species threatened with extinction) and December 2024 landmark reports, the article establishes what biodiversity is — across genetic, species, and ecosystem dimensions — and why its loss constitutes a structural crisis for human civilisation rather than a peripheral environmental concern. Seven reasons why losing wildlife is losing ourselves are documented: loss of food security (75% of food crops depend on animal pollinators contributing $235-577 billion annually); loss of medicine (50% of modern medicines from natural sources); loss of clean water and climate regulation (forests absorb 2.6 billion tonnes of CO2 annually; 35% of wetlands lost since 1970); increased pandemic risk (75% of new infectious diseases are zoonotic; biodiversity loss increases spillover); loss of soil fertility and agricultural resilience; and the psychological and spiritual impoverishment of living in a world emptied of its biological community. India's four biodiversity hotspots (Western Ghats, Eastern Himalayas, Indo-Burma, Sundaland) are examined alongside the country's updated National Biodiversity Strategy and Action Plan (2024). The Vedic frameworks of Vasudhaiva Kutumbakam, the Panchamahabhuta, the Prithvi Sukta's declaration of kinship with the Earth, and the practice of sacred groves are presented as the ancient Indian ecological philosophy that anticipated the interconnectedness that modern biodiversity science now quantifies.