When we look at the animals in the world around us, its hard see the ways animals use to survive has any bearing on the humans.

We think of how we adapt to a changing world as an intellectual process. If something changes we reason out a method of dealing with it. If it gets cold we find a way to generate heat, if there is a hurricane or drought we move somewhere else.

Other animal species don’t have the ability to adapt by reasoning their way through a problem. They survive because they were born that way. They were born with traits that allow the species to adapt as conditions changed.

Within a species, individuals are born with different traits such as more hair, taller, shorter, more muscle, faster, better vision or bearing their young earlier or later than the majority, to name a very few. These varied traits all give a species the ability to adapt to changing conditions and survive.

In the Amazon rain forest, with its four stories of plant life, there are millions of ways a species can evolve and some in ways so specialized that even the smallest of changes in their environment can be cause for extinction. With a planet-altering event, say … such as a meteor the size of Rhode Island hitting the earth, most existing species lack the traits needed to adapt to the centuries of low light, year round cold and the sparse plant life that this event would bring.

Dinosaurs couldn’t adapt to this and the only “punishment” that nature has for failure of any type, is.

Humans at the beginning of civilization were very adaptable generalists. We ate every plant that didn’t poison us and fed on any other species we ran across. As we became more technologically advanced we became more specialized, we became metal smiths, farmers, traders, sailors and politicians.

By doing so we lost, however unintentionally, some of our individual ability to adapt while gaining at the species level. As our abilities have diversified so too our focus on specialization has increased with its concomitant individual loss of adaptability.

Which of us can fix their own car or start a fire without matches, feed the family without a grocery store or live without AC? Like the dinosaurs, specialization has its price by making the individual more vulnerable to the effects of change. Whatever that change may be.

As individuals we can adapt to changing situations in our lives and planet by not only learning to master the technology we use everyday but understanding that sometimes it is best not to do somethings even though we can.

Think Global – Act Local!

Dr. “Skip” Lazauski’s television show “Eco-Bites”, can now be seen on youtube.com. To reach Dr. Lazauski for questions and comments, send e-mails to IchiOrca@yahoo.com. For more information, see his Web site, www.drskiponline.com.