This article was an interesting read because I was sort of able to see the psychological aspect that plays into how humans are causing the downfall of the Earth. For some reason, a lot of humans find it hard to wrap their head around the fact that all these other animals are living things as well. Even though they don’t have complex thinking and don’t develop relationships like humans do, that doesn’t make them any less alive. Just like humans, they have to have food to survive and they need a habitat to live in. I think that the main reason for this disconnection between the environment and humans is because of the way that kids are brought up nowadays. Before the rise of urban cities, families used to live on farms and in suburban areas where they’d have access to nature on a daily basis. When they had this access, they would get to understand animals and take note of how they live. However, now a lot of the world is living in urban areas and all of these suburban areas (which are homes to a lot of animals) are being turned into cities. Children don’t get a chance to interact with different animals in cities because there aren’t many around anyway nor do parents make a conscious effort to introduce their kids to animals.
Ever since I was a little child, my mom would make me feed the birds outside of our house. By feeding these birds over the years, they’ve developed an understanding that they’d get food in front of our house so they come and sit on the fence at the same exact time everyday. The fact that these birds do that makes me wonder what kind of concept they run on. We don’t really regard other animals to have a high level of intellectual thought but they have the ability to think to a certain extent. I feel that this should be enough for us to understand that we shouldn’t ruin homes of other animals in order to create big corporate cities for ourselves. In addition to this, these corporate cities end up hurting the environment even more through all the pollution and the usage of natural resources. It was really interesting the way that the author made us go in an Ivory-Billed Woodpecker’s shoes. I know that I would not like it at all if every other human died and I had no home to go to. So what right does it give us to destroy homes of other animals?
