Veterinarian in Society

ROLE OF CITIZENS

The role of citizens in maintaining socio- ecological interactions

• There is no question that people are an important sustainable natural resource! When looking at population dynamics biologists and ecologists work with two theories
  1. self-sustaining populations and
  2. carrying capacity in which numbers of individuals in any biological community are controlled by health and disease, food and water supply, and / or the availability of adequate shelter from these elements.
• Population sizes are governed by four factors - births, deaths and movement of individuals into and out of geographic area. When food, water and shelter are plentiful, population numbers increase, and when food, water and shelter are inadequate or unhealthy, individuals starve or die from disease or exposure to the elements.
• These theories for decades have been applied to plants and animals, are fully applicable to us, homo-sapiens, the human species. To us, sustaining populations are a world in which everyone has fresh water to drink, nutritious food to eat a home to live in, a job that helps support a family, happy kids in good schools with well-trained teachers, adequate health care for everyone in the family, and a great outdoor environment in which we can play and ponder the spiritual side of our lives.