Endangered Species

by judge sixkiller


What makes a species become endangered? Is it mostly due to one factor, or is it a combination of more than one? Are endangered or extinct species themselves at fault for their own predicament or demise? Surely not, at least when it comes to species other than humans.

It's been said that 95% of all species of living things in the history of life on Earth are extinct. It has also been said that the Earth is losing between 20 and 150 species every single day. Comforting, no? Well, maybe not all that uncomfortable for most of us, considering that, after all, it's not humans dropping like flies all over the planet. At least not yet.

What brings a species to the precipice of doom can vary from group to group and with different environments or habitats. Lack of food and water, dramatic temperature change, invasive species, disease, and destruction of habitat get the blame most of the time. On rare occasions, freak catastrophic events (like meteor strikes, earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, etc.) cause massive damage to large areas and the various living things that inhabit them. Some chalk it up to "natural selection", which is really just an all-inclusive title for a combination of events unforeseen by - and out of the control of - the affected species. Here, however, we come to the underlying difference between human beings and all other species of life that has ever lived: conscious awareness, unforeseen events, and the extent of influence and control of "endangering" factors.

The rainforests are the source of the widest array of species of plants, animals, and insects on the planet. Every day, the most highly developed of the three - the animals - forage or hunt for food, search for water, fight over and control territories, find mates, and raise their young, continuing the cycle and the lessons learned from their parents that has been passed from one generation to the next over the course of hundreds, even thousands years.

None of these animals, however, are consciously aware of the danger they are in from deforestation and human encroachment. On some basic level, they are aware that humans pose a threat, and so they avoid humans and teach their young to do the same. But they are not capable of understanding why, nor do they have the power to prevent humans from destroying the well-being of their kind or environments. They merely go on as they always have, focusing on the immediate, never able to contemplate what it all means, or if it will continue as it has for as long as they have been around.

Ah, but humans...

Humans are remarkable in the fact that despite being far advanced of plants, insects, and animals, great numbers of them choose, either consciously or subconsciously, to behave as the lower forms do. Humans focus on the immediate, on the convenience of what serves their wishes, hungers, and pleasures at a given moment. Humans do as they were taught, because that's how things are done, and because that's the way it has to be. Humans go to the store, to work, to school, to church, to games, bars, court, the gas station, the bank, the movie store, because, well, that's what they were taught, it's what they see other humans doing, so that's what they are supposed to do. What humans don't do for pleasure, they do for "necessity", regardless of whether or not they would find the same things "necessary" or even "pleasurable" if left to their own devices, out of the influence of money and modern society. They merely go on foraging (for food, shiny things, and little pieces of paper), making nests, and playing, hardly ever noticing that the environment in which they live and on which they depend is being transformed, even destroyed, by dangers that are not in the form of typical physical threats, like storms or hungry predators. Humans distance themselves from the thought that doing what everyone else does and doing what they have been taught does not guarantee the same way of life, or even the survival of their species.

Oddly enough, humans themselves are the cause of their own endangerment. War, pollution, nuclear and bio-weapons, theft, rape, and murder on an immensely grand scale threaten everything that they know. Surrounded by danger and enemies, humans seem desperate to belong to a system that would sooner bulldoze them into oblivion for profit than to lend a helping hand or fulfill any promises of protection. They have surrendered the gift of power over their own destinies in exchange for servitude and promises that they will be taken care of, with the condition that they do not question those and that which they serve. What does the future hold for human kind? Unless they elevate their consciousness above that of life forms that have no choice, then it is inevitably extinction.