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Chapter 16 A Balanced Relationship between Man, Animals and the Environment
PEDRO N. ACHA
The history of human development is marked by man's continuous and sometimes arrogant incursion into territory that he has appropriated for his own use often against difficult odds. Occasionally he has even excluded other natural animal inhabitants. In recent decades, the rate of such human penetration has increased into marginally productive lands as well as into the finely balanced ecologies of desert and polar regions, which have now begun to succumb to this final assault. It is even within realm of possibility that the sub-continental shelf, the ocean floor itself, and outer space will not escape this human invasion.
In his conquest of nature, man's weapons have been varied and many. Some of them are extremely harmful to the delicate matrix of biological tissue, and man has often been indiscriminate in deploying such weapons. Wearing the mantle of technology and wielding its tools, he has proved to be the unyielding non-adaptive animal in an uneven fight against iridigenous ecosystems. The natural sequence of events set in motion by such a contest demands a great price, often paid with human suffering, ill-health, and even death. Those mainly affected are the poor-the people who are least well equipped technologically to defend themselves.
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