Ever since I started my journey into natural farming, my awareness about influential species around us that have huge impact on the environment we live, about keystone species like Elephants, kept growing.
For a while I romanticised the idea that an elephant creates a forest wherever it goes (by felling trees thereby clearing space for young ones to grow, eating fruits and spreading seeds through its droppings) but the recent rise in man animal conflicts in the western Ghats made me revisit my romantic notion and ponder with this important question 'we the humans are slowly and steadily screwing up all and sundry around us; who are we in the scheme of this keystone thing? and how exactly we influence our world/ecology?'.
One thing let to another and soon I came across a name that gave me the answer, a name that is very influential in the field of Ecology...Bob Paine (aka Robert T. Paine), who coined the term 'keystone species' way back in the 1960s. You can google to find more about him but this post is about a new term he gave us, about us, just before he died...
Hyper Keystone Species - the influencer of Influencers (the parasites of all parasites if you want a darker definition!)
Go on, make a cup of Coffee or whatever and settle down to read this very interesting article about him and his new term that 'fixes' us in the scheme of things squarely. Do spend some time thinking about how our ecology would be without us, without all the chaos that we let loose on it (roads, technology, plastics, chemicals, endless list!). This will make your Sunday Hyper!
Do post your comments!
It is a new name for our human species by an observant human: we also observe such cause and effects but only an analytic mind delves deeper and tries it's best to pin it down to a system in existence through out the world we live in. It would be a great service to humanity if we could leave this world at least in the way we first saw it, in our teens, even if we could not improve it!
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