The Ripple Effect- Chapter 10

Chapter 10 of Protecting New Jersey’s Environment, called the Biotic Mosaic talked a great deal about the struggle with animal endangerment and loss of habitat. In particular on animal they talked about was the Bald Eagles. I kind of shocked me to learn that we even had bald eagles living in New Jersey to begin with because I always thought they lived some where less populated. I think its because I imagined them as such wild an amazing animals that I didn’t think they would live in New Jersey. It shocked me even more to learn about how there according to data from 2008 there were 264 bald eagles living in New Jersey. However, the population wasn’t always this high, in 1980 there was only one active nest in the whole state because of eggshell thinning and loss of habitat. It took around 8 years just for another nest to appear! However, the nest numbers continued to grow after that because of protection that was put into place. Now, according to Belton there are over 69+ nests in New Jersey.

In particular there was one quote from page 179 that really caught my attention that I really agreed with. It said “the effects of human behavior often have widespread, unintended consequences that reverberate across the animal kingdom for generations, like the ripple effect in a pond that started out as one small disturbance” (Belton 179). I reason that this quote stuck out to me so much was because completely accurate in terms of how our actions effect the world around us. I think that more often then not people don’t think about how the things they are doing are harming the world around them. We build houses after knocking down trees on the land and then humans complain about how animals are on their property. However, do those people realize that the animals were there first? Every little thing we do builds up to something bigger and I think that people often forget that. People in society today have an out of sight out of mind mentality, which leads to many long term problems. I think that many of the environmental problems that were talked about in this book could have been prevented (or at least lessened) if people thought about how their actions impacted the future.