We humans have an emotional connection with the species that we share Earth with and with the environments that they comprise.  This connection comes from our human and pre-human ancestry, in which it was advantageous to have an attachment with the place where we lived, where we made our living, and to which we were best adapted and most likely to survive.  This emotional connection is part of our evolutionary heritage and is integral to us. 

For those humans that live in the simplest technologic and economic societies, such as the remaining hunter gatherers who live most closely to the way humanity has lived for most of its existence, this connection is bound into their day-to-day lives and their culture.  For many humans that live in the most complex technological and economic societies and who don’t have a day-to-day connection to the environment that sustains them, that emotional connection influences their lives in other ways.  That connection may bring them to make their life-purpose protecting other species and environments, or use the economic gains that they get from their society to travel widely in order to experience the best of Earth's remaining and most spectacular wildernesses, such as Antarctica, Africa, and Australia's Great Barrier Reef.

For many people this emotional connection with their environment is unconscious, but still surfaces in such things as:

• an emotional uplift at nice weather after a long period of inclement weather
• a preference for driving a four-wheel-drive vehicle or an off-road motorbike through a pristine environment rather than through an already degraded or man-made environment
• a fisher proclaiming that they don't care if they don't catch fish because they just like being on or near the sea.  

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biodiversity loss

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