Nikoli Romo
Article 1 1.) How do animals eventually go extinct? Wouldn’t they be able to keep reproducing? 2.) How do wetlands produce these natural filters that clean the water? 3.) If one quarter of a million people join the planet everyday, how many leave it? 4.) I did not know that vultures played such a big role in our everyday lives, what other animals play a big role? What do they do for us? 5.) How could you get involved in helping out or ecosystem?

I read the article “Conservation for the people”, written by Peter Kareiva and Michelle Marvier. It was a very interesting article about how we could maintain our ecosystem and save some of the animals that are going extinct. It touches on a lot of key points and facts that I didn’t even know were real! Did you know, that vultures play a key role in our lives? When an animal dies, vultures usually come down from the sky to eat the animal. Well while it’s eating the animal it also eats all the bacteria and viruses that come with the deceased animal. If vultures went extinct then the animals would either decay or get eaten by some other animal. The animal they were looking at was the dog. Since vultures started to become endangered, the feral dog population has skyrocketed! Why is this bad? Well it comes with a threat of rabies! “Saving the vulture from extinction would protect people from dangerous disease.” (P.K, M.M 13) What are we doing to help prevent this? Well in 1988 a student from The University of Oxford named Norman Meyers came up with an idea called a “Hot Spot.” The basic idea was to identify areas with a high number of plant diversity and to protect them from the expanding civilization. By doing this they were hoping that this would protect animals because were keeping there food sources protected. Another reason to doing this was because it’s easier to catalogue plants than animals. To this day there are 25 different hot spots all over the world. However, there is a downside to these “hot spots.” People argue that just because there is a lot of plants does not mean there is a lot of animals living near those plants. It’s also a problem to the locals living around those hot spots because they are being cut off from important resources that they need to stay alive. And finally the final problem to these hot spots is that not a lot of people know about them. “One recent survey shoed that only 30 percent of Americans have heard of the term “Biodiversity”.” (P.K, M.M 14,15) However, some people hate the fact that we have to help save the animals. Hunters and Farmers that live in Asia and some parts of Africa are extremely unhappy about all the national parks that are saving the animals because its taking away from there diet and earnings. And in America, farmers and loggers are furious about losing their water privileges because its taking away there jobs. The reason they are losing their water privileges is because of the endangerment to the spotted owls. But not only do we have to protect the wildlife. We also have to protect the environment. Maintaining the Environment could help alleviate 750 million of the worlds poverty. Poverty affects the world because it is a very un-healthy lifestyle and has to be looked at more by people. “Almost two million people die every year because of inadequate or unclean water supplies.” (P.K., M.M 16) that’s a very high number that needs to be dropped. A way we can stop it is by conserving wetlands and forests. Did you know that wetlands provide a natural filter that helps clean water? And on the other hand a forest locks up sediment that normally finds a way into our water system and makes it muddy. Protecting the economy and the ecosystem is huge in our everyday lives. The bad thing is that not a lot of people care so we must be the ones that make a change and hope that more and more people begin to follow.

Works Cited
(Peter Karieva, Michelle Marvier, Oct. 2007, Conservation for the people, Scientific American, V6, pg. 13-20)