The Danger of Humans
Humans can be some of the best and the worst things for an environment, and that is shown by the area encompassed by our park. People have been a negative influence on our environment mostly because of the expansion of the size of human settlement. The growing human population calls for more space and will expand into untapped land in order to do so. When this has occurred, people have cleared land that was often filled with tropical rain forest. By destroying and clearing land, this destroys the habitat that many animals call home. Also, this can drastically disrupt the interactions between species and between species and the environment. For example, the keystone species of our ecosystem is the jaguar and it holds a very important role over the rest of the organisms in our ecosystem. When the relatively small population of jaguars is threatened, it can spell chaos is the form of great population number changes within our ecosystem. This decreases biodiversity within the environment and causes great harm to the overall health of the ecosystem. (37)
Humans have affected the tropical rain forest in many negative ways, including the destruction or pollution of land. These actions directly affect biochemical cycles within our ecosystem. Biogeochemical cycles are pathways in which materials and nutrients important to life move through an ecosystem in a specific way. These cycles include the water cycle, the nitrogen cycle, and the carbon cycle, as well as several others. One of the most devastating effects people have on the tropical rain forest directly affects the carbon cycle. The carbon cycle is the movement of carbon in a multitude of different molecules through an ecosystem while cycling through different states of matter as well. The effect that people have on the carbon cycle usually comes with the destruction of plants, especially trees, in the ecosystem. According to the biogeochemistry expert Dr. Kostka ([email protected]) , the destruction of these trees will release the carbon stored within trees into the atmosphere as carbon dioxide. Carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas that directly leads to global warming, causing a great deal of damage to the ecosystem as well as many others. Also, the destruction of plants means that there are less organisms to take this carbon dioxide back out of the atmosphere and into storage. The drastic effect of carbon in the atmosphere is shown by the fact that, without carbon, the Earth's temperature would be -24 degrees celsius instead of 10 degrees celsius. Overall, the expansionist behavior of humans can create long lasting, devastating damage to our ecosystem through the interruption of the natural carbon cycle. (39) (40) (52)
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