Jodi Zhang's Bio Blog: Invasive Species. Destructive Species. Useless Species. Human Impact on the Earth is utterly Negative.

Topic: Many scientists consider humans as the most invasive species, as humans can greatly change an environment and impact living things that reside there. Are we being stewards of the world? Take a look at an issue in which human intervention has positively or negatively affected the biodiversity of our ecosystems.

Humans are stewards of the world meaning we were given the responsibility to care for the Earth with all of its inhabitants. Stewardship refers to our duty to care for our natural resources but humans are considered to be the most invasive and destructive species, because we are only concerned for our own well beings and do whatever we please. The Earth has provided us with its resources and animals so that we may use these riches for our daily needs and in return we were to respect the environment. Instead of helping to restore what we have taken, humans continued to attain from the earth leaving us in our current situation, ‘climate change.'

The Earth does not deserve this kind of treatment.

Can you believe that the climate on our Mother Planet has changed so much that even polar bears are struggling for survival in the Arctic? This is the fault of human intervention. We may be aware of the horrific situation that the environment is in, but we may not know that even the little things that we do contribute to this disaster. A normal daily activity such as using your car which releases carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and using hair spray or aerosol products affect the ozone layer and contributes to climate change.

We should honestly make an attempt to put an end to this tragedy.

There are many factors that negatively affect the biodiversity of our ecosystems.

But first of all, what is an ecosystem?

The ‘Ecosystem’ is the combined physical and biological components of an environment, from which ‘food chains’ are formed. A food chain shows how each living organism obtains its own food and it is usually a cycle starting from the producers (plants) to the top consumers (humans). If this cycle was interrupted in any way, such as the overpopulation or decrease in population of any species in the food chain, every single organism will be affected, because they are all linked together. The problem with us humans is that we always strive for perfection, when we should appreciate what we already have. As you have noticed, technology consistently advances as years pass by; this is a terrific example of how humans hunger for new information. I believe that life is much easier living this way, with the food processed and packaged, ready and available, unlike in the past where you’d have to hunt and kill in order to obtain food. Although this is certainly beneficial to us, we are moderately depleting the earth from its natural resources. Fishing for example; fishes should be the most abundant in the world seeing as how they multiply in such a rapid manner, but because of greedy humans, even fishes are diminishing.

Human activities such as Genetic Engineering contribute to the destruction of the ecosystem. ‘Genetic Engineering’ is the alteration of ‘DNA’ in a living organism. It consists of the collection of genes from one species and inserting them into another in hopes of creating a new and advanced organism that contains useful DNA from both species. The manipulation of genetic information is still very unstable and advanced in the medical field, including the manipulation of food. Many biologists tend to fool with DNA structures as an attempt to improve the food that we currently consume. Examples of such actions are the genetic manipulation of a tomato to prolong its growing season. Tomatoes cannot survive during winter which is why the genetic information that allows Arctic fishes to survive in the cold is extracted and then inserted to the gene of a tomato. Although this seems to be an amazing achievement, the effect on the environment was not considered. Threats from genetic engineering are:

- Genetic Pollution: because these genetic manipulated plants contain and hybrid genes, it may come from viruses or bacteria which can be transferred into other organisms resulting in genetic contamination.

Are we satisfied with the results of human impact on the environment? Are we done?

I never understood the reason as to why environmental associations urge people to reduce human activities and consumption until I made an attempt to understand what is really going on with our planet. We are killing the home that we live on, leaving a tangle of troubles for our future generations to restore. We are killing the innocent lives of animals with our idiocy and also failing our jobs as stewards of the earth. Although this seems like I’m just ranting like every other environmental person you meet, I honestly want you to know and care about this dilemma. We cause this, we must fix this.