Troll experience - Wellington, New Zealand

Eric, Kathryn, and Charles at the Weta Cave in Wellington, New Zealand

We are, of course, the dominant species here on Earth.  Everything bows to our whims.  The land is moved, water bodies are filled in or created, and all the plants and animals throughout the biosphere are impacted by us in one way or another.  It is our brains which have given us this supremacy; that and a pair of opposable thumbs.  Together, in ever increasing numbers, we have conquered the planet.  People, Homo sapiens to be specific, have been at the controls for a very long time.  

Go back far enough and it would have been different organisms at the top of the food chain; not just one globally the way man has done.  Nature tends to provide a few organisms to fill the top trophic level, but they are different creatures depending on the ecosystem they are in.  Polar bears, for example, are the lords over the Artic (that is, until we came along).  Tigers used to rule the Asian Jungles and lions the Savannah.  We have become too smart and too resourceful for our own good.  We control everything.

Now, all this would be fine if we were wise benefactors to the environment.  However, evidence abounds which convicts us of gross stupidity in the extreme.  Attempts are made to mitigate the damage we have done and continue to do, but it is not and will never be enough.  The driving force for our eco-disastrous behaviour is money and power.  Yes, we can blame the politicians, but who elects them?  When leaders put the good of the environment over that of the economy, people complain.  They vote for change.  Gas, electricity, and water prices are too high or there is not enough of it.  The more we as a populous grow, the more pressure Mother Nature is under.

Imagine, if you will, that a day came when we were no longer the apex.  Trolls or some other abomination were spit forth from the deep, and they behaved as we have.  Not interested in preserving humans as their own needs presided, we became the carpet upon which their feet were wiped.  "Oh, sorry, did we just decimate a city of yours to put in a recreation area?"  Or maybe, "We just had to cut down those sky scrapers; they were restricting our view of something."  

Maybe we should see ourselves as the creatures of the wild do - alien invaders who put their own needs and whims ahead of all else regardless of the devastation it causes.  How would we feel to be replaced by trolls - I think that is the position Mother Nature finds herself in.