What is the "native ecosystem" of central Africa? Is it the forests grazed and trampled to destruction by overpopulations of elephants? Is it the bush around villages or towns that have been in place for eons? Is it the imagined plant and animal mix before Arab slave traders or conquerors from far off massacred and enslaved "native" populations? What about our UN "partners" in forcing Asians and South Americans to "preserve" "their native ecosystems?" Is Germanys' "native ecosystem" dated before the Nazis? Before the Romans? Before the Cro-Magnons? Is England's "native ecosystem" dated before the Battle of Hastings? Before the Roman occupation? Before the druids? Why are any of these dates or any particular mix of plants and animals worthy of note?

The answer lies in the perfectly sound biological interest in determining what plants and animals came, survived and disappeared over time in a particular area. It is useful to understand how and why our environment changes both naturally and as a result of human activities. Aside from the pursuit of knowledge for knowledge's sake, our ability to predict the impact of our actions and to understand the environmental changes around us is one of many such human abilities that distinguish us from all life around us. Our cities and suburbs and rural areas, indeed our oceans and unpopulated corners of the earth are and will continue to reflect our "life and human society."

Plants and animals have been invading new (and often for some of them, old) habitats since time began. Plants and animals have been disappearing from habitats for almost as long. Weather, rainfall, snowfall, fire, predators, elimination of a food source, opportunity in the form of a floating log or a windstorm, and other reasons too long to mention account for these changes. In recent (geologically) times, human activities such as farming, hunting, migration, villages, ships, trade, roads, fire, domestications, and another list too long to mention introduced and diminished untold plant and animal communities. North America's environmental changes over the past 20,000 years are spectacular and some of the most extreme known, because when the prodigious changes of the past 500 years occurred, advanced European science and record-keeping ably recorded the changes.

Until recently we used this knowledge to construct productive domestic areas around settlements and to use wild areas as best we could. As mistakes were made, we learned. Today there is no inconsistency or conflict between energy development or plant and animal use and preserving the richest environment both biologically and regards human societies. All that is needed is thoughtful and continuous application of what we know and have yet to learn. Running from this is like the parable in the New Testament where one of the servants took the masters money and buried it to "preserve" it.