The brush-tailed bettong & affecting change

Eee so cute!! Especially because it appears that he has wet himself out of nervousness.

Anyway, that little guy is a brush-tailed bettong. In addition to being really freakin' cute, he (or she!) does a lot to help the eucalypt forests of Australia out. Because eucalyptus trees secrete an oil which makes it hard for the forest floor to absorb water, this little guy comes in quite handy because he digs for truffles, thus penetrating the oily surface and allowing water to infiltrate it as well. This is useful for another reason: organic matter from the litter layer also falls down into this hole, to be decomposed and incorporated into the soil, thus making it healthier. A single bettong ♥ ♥ will effectively turn over at least six tons of soil every year. Without it, the soil would be hydrophobic & compacted, cutting down on plant diversity.

Well some asshole had the idea to introduce foxes to Australia for sport hunting. While the fox adapted to life there just fine, it did so at the expense of animal species in the 'critical-weight-range,' causing not only a marked delcine in their population size & distribution, but also an extinction rate much higher than normal. While once the cute little brush-tailed bettong was widespread in the forests of Australia, the species now occupies one percent of its original range. The forests survive, but a human life is much too short to see what damage will actually become of this, as every year the soil gets more and more dry, and more compacted, squeezing out all kinds of life that once lived there & helped the ecosystem to function--insects, spiders, fungus, bacteria.

Now...it always baffles me when people say that humans are 'too small' to affect the planet. People opposed to the idea of global warming often trot this one out, but I've also heard my friends say it. I think it's a problem of scope; humans, for the most part, live in cities and are unconnected to the world which supports them. They hear about deforestation and forest fires cumulatively destroying thousands of square miles of land, but because their quality of life doesn't immediately diminish, they think it's no big deal. Humans are horrible at thinking about long term implications, and moreso in areas we don't understand. I have textbooks on plant biology and have read up on our forests, and I've learned enough to know that even if I learn for the rest of my life about it, I will never understand a forest completely. No one ever will. It is just too big, beyond the scope of human understanding. And so we erroneously think that because it's too big for us to comprehend, nothing we do can hurt it.

It confuses me and makes me a little mad when people start saying that humans are 'too small' to affect the planet. Really? Are we? When a single teaspoon of oil can contaminate the entire water supply of an aircraft carrier, and the United States alone uses so much oil DAILY that if we were to put it into one gallon containers & lined them all up, it would wrap around the earth's equator six times...we can't affect change to the planet? What the fuck is that about?

Really I just wanted to show you all how cute those little bettongs are...