Thinking Like a Mountain Response

      Mountains understand things in ways people can't, at least according to Aldo Leopold.  He was a hunter who, like most, viewed wolves as villains that kill livestock and wild deer.  He believed that "... fewer wolves meant more deer and that no wolves would mean hunter's paradise."  That opinion changed the day he actually killed a wolf, and he realized how necessary wolves are to a healthy environment.
    In this story the narrator relates a story from when he was "... young and full of trigger itch."  Since, he believed that fewer wolves meant more deer, so he, like many others, never passed up a chance to kill a wolf.  According to the story, a friend  and he fire repetitively into a pack of wolves.  They kill a she-wolf and injure one of her pups while the rest flee. They are able to get close to the she-wolf in time to see "... a fierce green fire dying in her eyes."  Then the narrator realized that, unlike people, the the wolves and mountain did not believe all wolves should die.  As the years passed, he saw many states kill off their wolves, and as the wolves were removed he saw deer multiply and destroy the environment; "I have seen every edible tree defoliated to the height of a saddle-horn." He realized unlike many others that wolves were needed to keep the environment stable and saw that diversity equals stability.
    I agree with the author's view although my way of thinking did not change.  Wolves may kill deer, but while this seems bad in the moment, it is actually good in the larger scale of things.  The wolves are able to keep deer populations down thus making what deer survive stronger and lets the environment remain strong enough to support the deer and other animals.  Wolves are as necessary to this environment as the base producers and the sun itself. Where there are no wolves, the deer overrun the ecosystem and eat themselves and others out of house and home.  Each animal has its place in the environment.

How does one protect the world from flooding and disease, and even restore damaged habitats?
 To protect the world from these issues, one must simply protect the plants.  Plants naturally help with the above issues along with keeping the soil healthy as well.  Plants are a very big part of life on Earth. The food, the books we read, and many other items all depend on plants.  However, plants and their biodiversity are under threat from climate change, people, and invasive species and need some human protection.

To save the plants, people need to save the seeds, and that is what the Millenium Seed Bank is for.  Twenty-four thousand species are already safely stored within this organization.  These seeds are believed to be able to stay that way for thousands of years, protecting a biodiverse Earth for generations to come.  However, the job is far from done as these three-billion seeds only account for 10% of all the plant species on the Earth.  More seeds need to be gathered to project the world from floods and disease from now and into the distant future.