I saw a book description

Context
I was looking over the new children's nonfiction books at my library when I found Moonbird: a year on the wind with the great survivor B95 by Phillip Hoose. If you go to this link and click on A Look Inside, you'll see that the book describes the survival of an individual migrating shorebird in the face of myriad threats to his existence, including environmental changes wrought by human beings.

Commentary
Yes, once again I'm blogging about a book description, rather than the book itself. I'm a librarian; I read a lot of book descriptions. And movie descriptions. And CD descriptions. I also seem to be on an environmental kick as well, so forgive me if I grow repetitive.

I've been reading little bits of Charles Darwin's The Origin of Species and feeling dismayed that some people hold it in such contempt. Far from being a dry scientific treatise tasked with disproving God's existence, it's actually page after page of Darwin describing the wonders he sees in nature and offering his best explanation as to why they happen. Perhaps I'm perverse, but to me it reads much more like a celebration of creation than a debunking of it.

Anyway, one of the things Darwin is particularly taken with is adaptation, and he devotes most of a chapter to talking about how human beings create (if I can use that word) adaptations in domesticated plants and animals. I agree that it's an amazing process, but not really a surprising one. As people, we're all about making things fit what we want and/or need.

Think about it. Most species reside in places that are suited to their physical makeup: tropical plants in Brazil, penguins in Antarctica. People move to places that are not suited to their physiology at all and then change their physiology! Well, they either put on some clothes or some sunscreen. Or they just change the place itself, by building air-conditioned condos in the middle of the desert.

I'm starting to think this is why we are so hard on the ecology of our planet. We figure we'll always be able to adapt to whatever nature throws at us. And we may be right about that, but we fail to take into account that other species do not adapt that quickly. When we change the environment to suit ourselves, we frequently make it lethally inhospitable to the other inhabitants of the planet. You might say we do this unintentionally, but that doesn't really excuse us. We're supposed to be the ones with the big brains, not to mention the caretakers of all creation. We ought to be able to both adapt and accommodate, not just carelessly wreck everything in our path.

What did you see today?