Skip to content

DA8. Ecology

Statement

Describe how an ecological system, such as a coastal wetland or a rain forest, demonstrates environmental sustainability. What occurs when human activities impact it, and how can sustainability be restored?

Solution

An ecological system is a community of living organisms and their interactions with the environment. The environment includes both the physical environment (e.g., soil, water, air) and the biological environment (e.g., plants, animals, other organisms) (Rye et al., 2016).

Sustainability usually refers to preserve the environment, ecosystems, and natural resources for future generations, thus, leaving the current environment as close as possible to what it was passed to us from previous generations (ULCA, n.d).

To maintain sustainability within an ecological system, a balance must be maintained between living and non-living components of such system. Usually, Nature takes care of this balance as this is balance is restored even after major disturbances like hurricanes, floods, or other natural disasters. However, human activities may disturb this balance in an irreversible way that Nature cannot restore in a reasonable time.

The number of species in an ecosystems defines the richness of that ecosystem. Divert systems are rich in species and are more stable were a species can find many alternatives to survive (California Academy of Sciences, 2014). Some species (especially large ones, like wales) are more important than others in maintaining the balance of the ecosystem, thus hunting those species may have a huge impact on the ecosystem.

Human activities like pollution, overfishing, overhanging, and deforestation damages ecosystems and disturbs reproduction cycles. are all disturbs the balance of ecosystems and threatens sustainability.

The time that an ecosystem requires to restore its balance depends on the system properties and scale of the disturbance. For example, restoring after major floods will take -maybe- a few months or years, but restoring consumed fossil fuels will take millions of years, while restoring a species that went extinct is not possible.

To restore a damaged ecosystem due to human behavior, it is important to stop the behavior as soon as possible and give the system a chance to restore itself. If the damage is beyond the system’s ability to restore, a human intervention to oppose the damage is required. For example, if a species is about to go extinct, humans must intervene by protecting the remaining individuals and artificially reproducing them until the population is restored.

To conclude, human activities damages ecosystems and thus a more global and enforced approach must be applied; also the human population, lifestyle, and energy consumption must be controlled to reduce the damage to the environment.

References