I was glued to the television, watching a King penguin clumsily come ashore on the Possession island, about 1400 miles off Northern Antarctica, to find a mate and produce a crop of puffins. The scene then cuts to a wide shot to suddenly show an entire beach teeming with the impressive birds with their distinctive orange detail on their head, beak, upper breast and neck have been surviving on earth for the past 40 million years. In that moment of heartbreaking beauty of nature I promised myself that one day I would spend an entire month near the penguins. Rest of the program showed how organized and intelligent these birds were and the cinematography was utterly spell bounding and the program ended with the narrator mentioning that anthropogenic climate change threatened to make these magnificent beauties in 100-150 years, even though today they are considered ‘least threatened’ species. These impressive birds have been surviving on earth for the past 40 million years. The birds are at the top of the food chain and their population numbers are in a few million and growing. And 150 years is all that it’ll take to erase 40million years of history.

I was reminded of a quote by Jonas Salk, "If all the insects on earth disappeared, within fifty years all life on Earth would disappear. If all humans disappeared, within fifty years life on Earth would flourish as never before." A sharp pang of shame for my species hit me without warning. What is the contribution of humans to earth or any other living creature? Does any living thing benefit from our existence? How did we get here that an entire planet is in jeopardy?

Every species on earth is a part of a food web in an ecosystem whose stability depends on the interaction between the organisms present. We humans have transcended all limitations of an ecosystem by the virtue of our immensely devepoed brain. We have exploited all biotic and abiotic factors first for the purpose of our survival and replication, and today for our comforts and whims. You don't see lions killing zebras because they are bored do you?

I think we've reached where we are today because, 'We don't kill what we eat or only eat what we kill'.

To clarify, we do not spend majority of our time trying to figure out where the next meal comes from. In a primal sense we only need food, shelter and a defense against predators. While these are the focuses of the rest of the living world, we've already solved these problems perfectly. And we now have time on our hands to think, to want things we don't need and do things to achieve them.

I'll give you an example that supports my claim. Jared Diamond, the author of 'Guns, Germs and Steel', spent major part of his adult life researching birds of New Guinea. New Guinea is one of the world's most backward regions. Until the westerners started arriving there in 1800's the people of this island were some of the most 'backward' tribes in the entire world. Jared wondered about why had New Guinea not developed at all while Europe was so advanced. The answer lied in the crops of New Guinea.

New Guinea didn't have a single native food crop like rice, wheat or corn that are the most efficient ways of food production. So New Guineans spent most of their day looking for food from other plants and animals, none of which could be mass produced. And because they all had to look for their own food, there weren't many sections of the population that could focus on developing skills like metal working or construction. While in the parts of the world where wheat, corn or rice was native, only few people had to work on gathering food. The rest could simply do something else. So basically somebody else kills what we eat.

And because we had so much time on our hands, we ended up exploiting the earth like never before seen in history. So this exploitation began in Eurasia and then spread to the rest of the world because of trade and travel.

You ask why didn't tigers or horses figure out how to cultivate mass produce cattle or wheat? Its because humans have a more complex brain.