We Are All Recycled

In spite of information accepted as facts for thousands of years, we have recently received a few updates. The news is essential to our understanding of how life works:

Recently, we learned that every species, including ours, is limited by the availability of sunlight, food and water – plus the physical environment that supports us. (We learned this as recently as the second grade, at least.)

We learned that life in the sea begins with one-celled organisms fueled by the sun. And that they, in turn, are fuel for shrimplike creatures, that are fuel for small fish, that are fuel for – etc., etc. – all the way up the food chain. (Personally, I enjoy blackened tilapia … it reminds me of Friday nights and fish-frys at the farm … but, I digress.)

In similar fashion, add all the other plants and animals, and the recycling of nutrients – as we are all recycled – and we have an ecosystem that seems to work pretty well. There are even members of different species that work well together. (It was probably fourth grade when we learned about bees and flowers; pollen spreading and such. They left out really interesting stuff about the birds and bees until Sr. High.)

Competition is an important aspect of evolution. The winners live. The losers die, and sometimes die out. The predator-prey relationship acts as a population stabilizer. This all works to the benefit of continued plant and animal life on the planet. Climate, naturally, also plays a part.

It all worked very well for literally a couple of billion years – until we arrived, the human animal that developed the capacity for logical thought. We eliminate the forces of natural selection; we produce our own ecosystems of domestic plants and animals; we keep everything as un-natural as possible. Tragically, we have not given nature enough time to cope with our craziness, or to develop solutions to the problems we create.

We try. We invented chemical pesticides, insect poisons that are not metabolized as rapidly as they are consumed. They are stored in animal tissues and passed along to other members of the food chain, including the inventors.

Overpopulation may be the end of our problems, quite literally! More people mean more houses, more roads, more air pollution, less pure oxygen for plants and animals, less green land. If we overplant or overgraze, the land becomes barren. When we pollute the air and water, we cause sickness and death. When we kill masses of insects, we destroy the natural pollinators of plants, and indirectly kill birds and animals that are natural predators of the insects.

Controlling the human population is probably the key to solving most of the ecological problems that face us.

Source: L. Howton and J. Victoria, San Diego Natural History Museum