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Humanity’s Behavior Models The Ebola Virus Essay

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During the twentieth century the human population has grown by nearly 400% from 1.6 billion in 1900 to over 6 billion in the year 2000 (Haugen, sec.2). This expediential population growth has left humanity little time to equalize with nature, a fact which is starting to take a toll on the environment. Humanity continues to encroach and destroy the very thing that is keeping it alive, and has failed to yield at any of the clear signs that we are damaging the ecosystem. This models the behavior of viruses which are designated biosafety level 4, the highest level; these are viruses such as Smallpox, Ebola, Marburg, and Black Typhus. These viruses, behaving like humanity, have a 90% mortality rate (Bardi, sec.3). These …show more content…

Everyday our population grows and we eat away more of the Earth’s resources; However, we are doing more than just eating up resources we are actively polluting the elements which we survive on; such as water, and oxygen. This behavior is very similar to
Ebola; it kills the cells that are necessary to it survival, putting itself at risk by failing to leave enough resources for it survival, or enough time to acquire a new host. We are slowly killing our host; we have already caused irreversible damage to the environment. If we do not change this trend now we will have to face the reality that we are killing humanity’s ability to survive.

Humanity has already caused irreparable damage to the environment; we can see the effect of this all around us. In our quest to build bigger and better, we ignore the effect our actions will have down the road. For example during the expansion of Miami in the 1950s, 1,400 miles of canal, 150 spillways, and 16 pumping stations were constructed directly in the
Everglades to direct water towards the cities, and away from the Everglades. This effectively destroyed 50% of the Everglades and caused a massive depopulation of birds within the Glades
(Everglades, par.3). This damage is irreparable much of the peat and many of the trees that were destroyed takes centuries to grow back. But this

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