Learning About Food Webs and Energy Pyramids Summary

          Food webs represent the complex entanglement of the species within an environment. It shows how different species sustain each other and is essential to understanding the environment itself. Different species can be divided into trophic levels such as producer, primary consumer, secondary consumer, tertiary consumer, scavenger and decomposer. These trophic levels determines where an organism would fit on a food chain based on what it eats and its predators. For example, in a forest an owl would be a tertiary consumer because it eats rodents and small birds, and has no predators. A producer creates its own food through photosynthesis, a consumer eats producers as well as other consumers lower on the food chain, a scavenger does not hunt other organisms, it only eats dead plant or animal material and a decomposer breaks down other organisms. Energy pyramids show the flow of energy that occurs within an ecosystem. When energy is transferred between trophic levels, it is transformed into a less useful form because 90% of that energy is lost in the form of heat. By the time the energy consumed from a producer reaches a tertiary consumer, there will be a very small percentage left, which means that the secondary and tertiary consumers must hunt more to gain the same amount of energy that a primary consumer can get straight from a producer or a producer can get through photosynthesis.

Ecological Footprint

An ecological footprint measures the amount of biologically productive land and water that is required to absorb the waste of and produce the resources for a person or network of people, or more simply stated, the pressure that an individual, business, nation etc. puts on the environment. The Global Hectare measures the biocapacity of our planet and judging by the amount of waste that humans produce and resources we exploit, it currently takes our planet a year and a half to compensate for the environmental damage we cause in a year. The biggest problem is that as the human population increases, so will our environmental footprint until we completely destroy the planet's resources. because of the unsustainable way we utilize resources, our planet's biocapacity is shrinking while demand on our planet grows, which is a dangerous path for humankind to take.

Eventually the sun will run out of helium, expand into a red giant and then settle into a dwarf star, obliterating our earth in the process, but we have an estimated six billion years until that happens and its our responsibility to make sure that we don't deplete our planet before then. Everything has to end, but we shouldn't be the cause of it. Earth's vast ecosystems have cycles that work extremely efficiently without human intervention, but as humans we feel a sense of entitlement towards the world around us, causing degradation for the sake of exploiting resources for profit. It could help if local governments privatized open resources to protect them from exploitation.

If the prices for environmentally taxing products were increased and the extra money be put towards a more sustainable use of that resource, it would put a new value on these products, forcing people to be more sustainable for their own sake. For example, if someone wanted to buy plywood for a construction project, they would have to pay a higher price for it and the money from the cost increase would be put towards replanting the trees cut down to create the product. This will raise the value of the plywood, while more sustainable alternatives such as bamboo retains its value, finally making the eco-friendly option the cheaper option as well.