"mommy, i want a snake," the little boy says. and if the little boy asks, the little boy gets. so mommy goes to the pet store and buys a python for her precious little boy. three years later, the python (named Robby), is six feet long and just too big for the perfect American family. but no one wants to kill their pet, so they let it go...let it be free. they release the not-so-little python into the 'wild', and they assume they've done a good deed.
a year goes by, and the not-so-little six foot python is now fifteen feet and eating crocodile and white-tailed deer in the Floridian everglades. don't worry, the poor snake isn't lonely, since females can have up to 300 eggs
today there are estimated to be hundreds and thousands of burmese pythons living in the everglades of Florida. they do not belong there, they belong in southeast asia. but, we, as humans, felt the need to screw with the environment and import foreign entities to places they don't belong. as a result, the ecosystem of the everglades will probably never be balanced, it is ruined.
it's happened before, when the Army Corps Engineers brought a plant species known as kudzu out from it's native habitat (japan) and into the Southern United States. the goal was to stabilize and prevent erosion, and it worked. it also completely became an epidemic, and has spread to dominate entire forests. millions of dollars are spent every year by farmers and livestock owners cutting away the kudzu, trying to keep their animals and crops alive. kudzu has no natural predators in the US, and none of our trees or other plants can compete with it. the only animal known to eat it: goats.
we don't realize the detrimental effects we have on this planet. if you've ever driven to california, you'll notice they have ecological tollbooths at the entrance, and they ask you if you have any fresh produce. why? california grows 2/3 of the nation's fresh produce, and if a foreign bacteria or anything comes into contact with the growing crops, it could potentially wipe out most of our fruit and vegetable food supply. but hey, no one thinks that if they smuggle in a few apples, that anything bad will happen.
coral is dying. carbon dioxide dissolves in water, and becomes carbonic acid, which kills and heats up the oceans. coral is turning white and becoming stony, but man doesn't it look pretty?
so yeah, go ahead and laugh at the 'tree huggers'. go ahead and act like planting trees and reducing a carbon footprint is some huge extremist idea. go ahead and say that "global warming" isn't real, even though 2015 was the hottest year worldwide on record. go ahead and look the other way when forests and natural habitats are being completely destroyed every single day. go ahead and shrug your shoulders when poachers kill endangered species. after all, who really cares that the white rhino, the ivory-billed woodpecker, the amur leopard, the south china tiger, the little dodo birds, the mountain gorillas, the vaquitas, the hawaiian crow, and the javan rhinos are most likely to go extinct this year. who cares?
