When Worlds Collide - Essay Example

A Precis on “When Worlds Collide” by Douglas Fox In the findings of Douglas Fox through his article “When Worlds Collide”, Fox managed to arrive on claiming that “climate change will shuffle the deck of plants, animals, and ecosystems in ways we’ve only begun to imagine”. As exemplified in the author’s work, a 0.6°C-rise in temperature caused hundreds of species to move poleward the previous century from which could be predicted how species transport might behave this time toward a 2-6°C temperature increase in the next 100 years.

To cope with global warming, apparently, plant and animal species all over the world shift their range from lower to higher grounds and latitudes. Humans, however, could not help intervene in the course of nature and hence, assist in migration just as when the so-called Torreya Guardians plant Torreya seeds in spots of cooler region from North Carolina to New York. Contemplating upon the impact of climate change, Fox expressed how observations become inclined to thoughts of extinctions and die-offs so that ‘transplantation’ by men, being the remedy accounted for, occurs to be a significant challenge among ecologists.

While for ecologist Mark Schwartz, it appears inevitable to rescue some species by assisting their migration, other ecologists realize certain potential threats in this approach. Plant ecologist Richard Primack was bound to conclude that “our efforts to introduce species will fail” on the basis of Minot Pratt’s gardening with 60 plant species out of which merely 2 new arrivals survived. On the other hand, ecologist Guy Midgley studied 6,000 endemic species where he discovered that protea, a flowering plant, readily interbreed then brought a great deal of critical thinking about the bothersome evolution of new hybrid species which bear the likelihood of eliminating the parent species being saved.

Considering, nevertheless, that climate change is allowed to have sole control of rearranging our ecosystems, it would be like as Charles Darwin imagined to be an ‘orderly affair’ between the movement of species and the change in climate it responds to. When this takes place, according to Fox, no-analog communities or species living in odd combinations develop – a proven situation from analysis of species originating from the last glacial retreat in the past 10,000 to 17,000 years. At this stage, Fox figured that “it is one thing to move a few charismatic species but quite another to move every anonymous species” that human-assisted migration ought to be customized to meet such concern thus.

Director Bill Stanley at The Nature Conservancy (TNC) and others address the matter by designing nature reserves conducive for the natural movement of species in response to climatic alteration and this effort is found to exhibit advantage for protecting temperate mountain forests as well as securing upslope grassland areas. (Hi, just fixing the last few sentences of the last paragraph. Hang on please, thank you.)