Mohammed Konneh
BIO 171-B
Ralph Spagnolo
March 29, 2016

Midterm Essays
Anti-environmentalists argue that “people have always polluted the earth” not knowing the reason we should care about the pollutions is in that quote itself. Humans have been polluting this planet since the dawn of mankind and at some point in time we have to understand that these pollutions would start to have an impact on the way we’re used to living. At first people ignorantly polluted the earth and depleted resources that are to be shared with the other species that are in our ecosystem but when rivers started to dry and animals began to mysteriously migrate, people started to take notice and the study of organisms and their interaction with their non-living surroundings. It is true that people have always polluted the earth but the majority won’t understand the fuss over ecology and the effects pollution have on ecology because modernization blinds us from the species in our ecosystem and what they’re going through as we progress with modernization. Like the ripples that appears when rock hits the water, our ecosystem too have ripple effects when an area is polluted. Take for example when the toxic emissions that comes out of cars, the birds in the sky aren’t used to the toxins in the emissions and when some of them breathe it in they die limiting the population of the birds in the ecosystem. Since there are less birds in the ecosystem, snakes and other predators that depend on the bird for energy have to find another means for food which sometimes means fighting with other predators for their food supply. The struggle between the snake and other predators for food will cause decrease in the population of the prey of those predators go after which will change the food web in its own type of way depending on what the snakes and other predators that eats birds go after. This trickle-down effect will reduce the overall population of the ecosystem and cause a change in the trophic levels. Little omnivores who prefers meat rather than plants would have to change their diet because they can’t compete with the stronger predators and this too can also reduce the population of a species. Because of the change in trophic levels, the plants would become more of a source for food and soon enough there won’t be enough resources to feed all the species in the ecosystem and it would become overpopulated. Some of those animals would have to migrate to other places where they’re not used to and encounter bigger predators that could decrease the population even more and this will eventually lead to extinction if there isn’t an intervention done to stop the cycle.
Humans are ambitious species and when they see an opportunity to gain they take it and once it’s a competition we would stop at nothing to be the best. This concept is part of the reason why the world is so polluted today. Big corporations and business try to get ahead of each other by taking whatever actions that would lead them to better profits and in the modern era most of those actions requires big machines to do their dirty work. Take the Tragedy of the Commons theory for example, it states that in a shared ecosystem independent users of the ecosystem will selfishly act in their best interest to gain as much as they can while ignoring the common good to share the ecosystem’s resources which will eventually lead to depletion in the ecosystem’s resources. One early modern example of how pollution effects our ecosystem and why we should be cautious was first The Lorax animation. In the animation, a businessman stumbles upon a forest of trees which can be used for numerous things for society and began to hack them down and used them for supplies. While it was good that he found that could be helpful to humanity, he abused in the almost the exact ways our big multi-national corporations do when they come upon something that could be used to improve their profits.