Ecosystem engineers

ecosystem_engineers is a text document by Anthony Castor stored in the GRODNA_EXT-2 terminal.

Contents

Ecosystem Engineers

Cutting down swathes of trees for their building projects, thoughtlessly causing radical changes to large environments and forcing local species to adapt to their artificial habitats; these are the traits of a species of intelligent, industrious, and extremely impactful ecosystem engineers.

Humans? No, I'm talking about beavers.

Like us, beavers transform their environments via building, and their actions have real consequences, creating vast wetlands that some species thrive in - while others die. Human activity is very similar: we too are ecosystem engineers, and we too benefit some species while harming others. Everything about this is completely natural, including the damage to other species. After all, that's what competition and evolution is all about.

Those species that adapt to the ecosystems we create will, over the coming millennia, become the core of a new biodiversity. And so evolution runs its course. If we don't like the result, if we think some species should be preserved despite being outcompeted... well, that's anything but natural. It is, however, very human.

Comments

Miranda It's fascinating how so much of what we do is common in animals, but furthered enormously by our intelligence and our ability to remember. Through us, the universe strives to a greater level of complexity.

(failed to load profile) But does the universe have the capacity to strive for anything? We must be careful to avoid projecting human values onto them.

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