Leopold explores the importance of the biological food chain and the cycle of life, by using the example of deer and wolves (or any sort of animal population) on a mountain.
| Thinking Like a Mountain |
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Leopold explores the importance of the biological food chain and the cycle of life, by using the example of deer and wolves (or any sort of animal population) on a mountain. |
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| A diagram of a rain-shadow impact, an example of an ecological restraint on vegetation and grazers. | ||
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The cause and effect of predators. The predator's habits and food sources reveal the importance of the presence of what we call top level carnivores. The top level predator in the story are the wolves within the ecosystem of the mountain where their prey–the deer–are overpopulated. This story almost parallels the conditions of humans and nature in our world today, but it does represent the loss of predators as a means of controlling the prey population. | |
| By killing off the mass population of wolves on the mountain, the hunters assume that it will only mean more deer to hunt rather than thinking of the effects it would have on the entire ecosystem. In short, the more deer there are on the mountain, the less vegetation there will be. | ||
Basically the deer are destroying the mountain, much like humans are destroying the world they exist in by overpopulating the land.
Mount Greylock, the Bershire Mountains, western Massachusetts.
The mountain symbolizes and thus stands for?
