Niles Eldredge on what agricultural development has done to ecosystems

    Niles Eldredge nails it:

Humans do not live with nature but outside it. Homo sapiens became the first species to stop living inside local ecosystems. All other species, including our ancestral hominid ancestors, all pre-agricultural humans, and remnant hunter-gatherer societies still extant exist as semi-isolated populations playing specific roles (i.e., have “niches”) in local ecosystems. This is not so with post-agricultural revolution humans, who in effect have stepped outside local ecosystems. Indeed, to develop agriculture is essentially to declare war on ecosystems.

    Quoted from Niles Eldredge’s ActionBioscience.org article, "The Sixth Extinction," published in 2001; to read it, click here.
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