Post
by Genevieve » Tue Apr 13, 2010 10:28 am
You cannot comment on this thread (nor create it) if you have no grasp on the history of the planet and the role people play on Earth.
Yes, we're making the planet 'different'. We're the dominant clade of animals on this planet which obviously means that we're having some sort of impact on the flora and fauna and obviously, some animals thrive in that. Makes perfect sense. And obviously, some don't, also makes perfect sense. But if history has taught us anything is that lifeforms will find ways to co-exist with this new environment and they already are. Some more successfully than others. To quote, out of all movies, Jurassic Park; "Life will find a way".
But, who cares? Now I am not promoting the dumping of toxic waste into the tropical rain forest and god knows what else. But human dominance has created habitats as much as it has destroyed them. Not just for humans but for other animals as well.
Basically, we're just a clade of animals doing their thing, like other animals have done before them. Many animals have "destroyed" the environment around them before, out of this a new environment grew that other animals and lifeforms learned to co-exist with it. Human presence has created many habitats for coral (and all the foodchains involving coral reefs), various birds (there are even seaguls hundreds of miles removed from the ocean because they've found new resources, due to human presence, far away from the sea), rats are everywhere and cockroaches, a tropical species, have learned to live in an environment far from their natural geographic range, all because of humans. Then there all the animals we have domesticated and plants we're breeding. Now if you were to judge the success of a lifeform based on biomass, a lot of life has actually profited from human interference. Especially when you consider that the goal of a species is to get its genes into the next generation. Human interference has helped a lot of animals greatly when it comes to that.
We're not doing anything that other animals haven't done in the past. The mere presence of bees and butterflies itself has changed the way the environment looked and interacted with animals. The emergence of leafy trees and flowers meant the demise of some animals and likewise meant the thriving and emergence of others. Does this mean that bees and butterflies destroyed the environment because it was different before?
To make a point, the Earth's atmosphere has been far more toxic in the past (while animals and plants thrived and made great leaps in evolution) milllllions of years before humans even evolved.
And to conclude philosophically rather than scientifically: a world with no human life would be a world without the appreciation of life itself. Which itself makes the whole point of this thread moot seeing as the basis of this thread is, funnily enough, very anthropocentric thinking and a very subjective point of view.
The only thing that sets humans apart from other lifeforms is the pretense of our minds. We make a big deal out of everything. Animals are purely instinctive when it comes to survival and caring, whereas humans are too, our additional brainmass processes those instincts until they are something more (not 'better', just more than just instincts). This in some cases makes people believe that there is some sort of 'benefit' to life, but there isn't. If there was no such thing as life on Earth, the universe would be pretty much the same. And if there was no such thing as Homo sapiens, there would be nothing to worry about the existence life. Seeing the circular reasoning of this thread yet?
namsayin
:'0
