Page:Niger Delta Ecosystems- the ERA Handbook, 1998.djvu/109

People and Resource Use Conflicts

Animals exploit resources for their survival by diverting them through their own systems. For instance, elephants obtain the elements which they need by breathing, by eating plants, by licking the minerals from dry lakes and riverbeds, and by drinking. Subsequently, for example, they return carbon and oxygen (as carbon dioxide molecules) with every breath, but the calcium in their bones is not returned until they die and their bones decay.

People are just another animal and Natural Human Society is not very different from elephants in their relationship to ecosystems. However, as Viable Society, our use of resources becomes more sophisticated. For instance, forest is cleared and the soil resource is used for agriculture; trees are cut and used as timber. But these uses, while they alter the resource cycles, do not break them: the food grown on the soil is eaten and the elements returned to the ecosystem as human faeces; a tree cut and used to build a house eventually returns to the local ecosystem when it has served its purpose and decays.

It is Modern Society's exploitation of resources which tends to break resource cycles. For short periods Modern Society can manipulate an ecosystem to produce resources at a level which is not sustainable, so that eventually the resource disappears. A simple example is hunting: a specific animal can be hunted in small numbers indefinitely (assuming that its habitat is not damaged) but once a certain number is 107