Parasites?

Have you ever wondered whether our presence here is justified? The Earth is beautiful, but when you look at it everything mankind does seems to destroy a part of it. Build a house, cut down trees, destroy animal homes, not to mention the kind of pollution you're producing getting materials to the site.

We build, move, leave empty houses behind, mine metal and stone from the earth, drill for oil. Because we've become so used to the idea of living in luxury, we've forgotten our responsibility to the world. Even for those of you who say that global warming would happen anyway, we can't get away from the fact that other species are dying because of our presence.

In the animal kingdom the population fluctuates. Rabbits thrive when plants thrive, foxes thrive when rabbits do. If the rabbits eat all of the plants, they have nothing to live on so their population dwindles to a sustainable level, if rabbits are dying foxes do too. It's a circle of nature, the natural order. But humans aren't like that; we seem to be building everywhere, we take advantage of land, we take advantage of nature, we farm fish and animals and crops. But you have to wonder whether this is actually sustainable.

Sooner or later cutting down trees is going to make us pay a price. As is pollution. Scientists think that we're still seeing effects from the industrial revolution, and with many other developing countries about to reach that stage of technological development, the world looks a little bit doomed.

If one more degree is added to the temperature of the ocean, the population of plankton is in severe danger. This is significant because plankton is thought to be the base of the entire food chain. We can farm crops, it's true, but down the line they'll need something to pollinate them, or something to fertilise them with.

There is no guarantee that something will happen, but many people believe it will. There is also no guarantee that we'll be here in the next hundred years.

I wonder sometimes whether we are just a parasite on this beautiful Earth. I mean how many of us really look at it and think that it's beautiful in the first place? We certainly don't appreciate it at all. We don't respect the environment.

Perhaps this is where we are going wrong. Perhaps all those natural disasters are to try and control us? Nature's way of trying to reduce our numbers because, let's face it, we don't exactly have predators. Our population is overrunning the Earth, and I'm sure we're not a healthy parasite to have. If you were the Earth you'd have used some shampoo or body-wash to get rid of us humans.

So what should the Earth do?