Garland Eger
April 2009
These types of calamities have already happened in
history and caused mass havoc.
People must also work to restore
environments and ecosystem to their original states to prevent mass
calamity.
Basic environmental science shows us that for any ecosystem to be
healthy, certain animal and other living organism populations must be at
certain levels. Animals fill certain “niches” which keep the ecosystem
going. Some perfect examples are bees carrying the pollen of plants and
squirrels burying the nuts of certain trees. When these processes are
negatively affected by human expansion and industrialization, the entire
ecosystem feels the impact. Also, certain animals survive excessively well
in other environments, which causes overpopulation, thus throwing the
ecosystem out of whack. Such examples include grey squirrels in north
America, rabbits in Australia, and Japanese bamboo in north America.
These unconscious and ignorant blunders by mankind can certainly have some
scary impact on the future. Let's look at the honeybee for example.
Honeybees pollinate plants and create honey, which is also a food source for
other animals such as bears. Honeybee populations are decreasing at an
alarming rate, due to the introduction of the red mite, a parasite which can
wipe out an entire honeybee hive in several weeks. If honeybees are absent
from our future, the pollination of plants will certainly be less, which
will lead to enormous food shortages. These types of calamities have already
happened in history and caused mass havoc. One example of such phenomenon is
the black death. The black death also known as bubonic plague was
responsible for the deaths of more than one third of Europe. Bubonic plague
was caused by a bacteria in the belly of the rat flea and began somewhere in
the Gobi desert. Because people had rats on ships and sailed from one
continent to another the plague spread as well.
The conclusion to this article is that people must be careful about what
they do to animals and plants as well as where they bring them due to the
nature of the effects. People must also work to restore environments and
ecosystem to their original states to prevent mass calamity. However,
we do not have to kill any animals in the process.
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