Earth's Biggest Problem... Man.

It's no new topic that man as the apex predator has had a disastrous effect on the great planet which houses it.
It has been a topic used in numerous books and movies whereby the antagonist wants to destroy mankind to save the earth.
Not that I believe in such huge actions of mass genocide, but at least what we can all agree on is the fact that the 'villain' in those stories and movies are not wrong.
In fact, their methods, despite being morally wrong are the most logically sound.

Man, as the apex living creature on earth has been finding and is consistently still finding new ways to use Earth's resources to make his life better.
With his great skill and ability to learn, remember and implement what has been learnt throughout the years, he has perfected numerous ways to alter his surroundings for his overall comfort.

The alterations in itself may be something small, in the grand scale of things probably something insignificant. Yet when one man does it, then another, and another, since men are so numerous, these alterations tends to permanently effect the ecosystem and effect the earth.
It is a bad thing, but it would have been better if we were in the earth alone because of our ability to adapt.
Yet we're not alone in the changing ecosystems and some animals simply cannot adapt.

This is a term which I'm most afraid of. The total demise of an entire species is something that seems straight from the horror books. Yet it's something that's has been happening to animals throughout the years and more than 80% of the time, it's all our fault.

As we're the Apex predators, every other animal is fair game, and we tend to eat and hunt based on how easy it is to catch such game.
Yet there is one other reason why we would go after another animal, it's the simple emotion of greed.
Man's servitude to greed comes at a great cost to wildlife and the environment as a whole.
The continuous toiling of a soil and cutting down of trees without rest causes the lands nutrient to be diminished and leaves the earth barren. While this is done simply because the produce from the soil is good and the wood of the trees are great.

Yet without replanting of the trees and leaving the land to rest the ecosystem on that area is bound to get damaged, leaving the trees extinct and the land dead.

Extinction is even more drastic when we look into animals.
So many species are already long gone and so much more are on the verge of running extinct.
The reasons being either because man hunts them for their produce, (skin, tusks, claws, fur, meat, etc) or man takes away their habitat because of its produce, leaving them out of their homes and then dying because of the inability to adapt to whatever new environment their forced to adapt to.

These two instances are common for so many animals, as it took away the dodo birds, Nigerian Elephant, Passenger Pigeon, Bubal Hartebeest,..., and left so many others in the brink of extinction.

In my country personally, Nigeria was once a place teeming with wildlife and now it's just so sad in seeing how things have depreciated.
So many animals gone and so many more that are forced to be in Wildlife Preservatories.
The Cross-River Gorilla was once a species of primates with numbers to boast off, terrorizing the jungles in the border of Nigeria and Cameroon.
Now they are almost gone with no more than 300 individuals left in the wild.
The Nigerian Lion's story is even sadder, an animal that was widespread in the northern region is now only found in two places in the country; Yankari Game Reserve and Kainji Lake National Park.
Its natural habitats now extinct due to widespread farming and building of settlements.

Well now there are moves that are made to help raise awareness about extinction and try to save some animals from dying out.
Yet there are still cases of illegal hunting, deforestation and farming going on in different part of the world, all these so they could get a fee more pieces of crocodile skim bags, shoes and belts.
It's just a standard valid reason that humans are indeed Earth's problem.

_{To read up on extinct and near extinct animals}
_{🦒 https://www.wwf.org.uk/learn/wildlife/endangered-animals}
_{🦏 https://www.google.com/amp/s/news.mongabay.com/2023/07/protecting-nigerias-gorillas-other-endangered-species-qa-with-wcs-andrew-dunn/amp/}