Band 8.5–9.0 model essay
316 wordsIt is a natural process for animal species such as dinosaurs to become extinct, and some argue that humans have no obligation to prevent this from happening. In my view, this holds true only for extinctions driven by natural causes, whereas humans bear direct responsibility when their own activities are the cause.
To begin, extinction has always been an intrinsic feature of the natural world, occurring long before humans existed. To clarify, species such as dinosaurs disappeared as a result of catastrophic natural events, including asteroid impacts and volcanic activity, processes entirely beyond any species' control. Since ecosystems have continuously evolved through cycles of extinction and adaptation for billions of years, attempting to prevent every natural disappearance would be both scientifically futile and unnecessary, as new species inevitably emerge to occupy the ecological niches left behind, restoring balance without any need for human interference.
However, a fundamentally different situation arises when extinction results directly from human activity rather than natural causes. This is attributable to the fact that practices such as poaching, deforestation, and industrial pollution accelerate the disappearance of species at a rate far exceeding anything nature alone would produce. For instance, when a forest is cleared for agriculture, countless species dependent on that habitat can vanish within a single generation, a timescale incomparable to the millions of years natural extinction typically requires and one that leaves ecosystems no real opportunity to adapt. Since humans caused this acceleration, they bear a moral responsibility to mitigate it, whether through habitat protection, anti-poaching legislation, or captive breeding programmes for critically endangered species, none of which would be necessary had the underlying decline occurred through purely natural means.
To conclude, while I agree that people need not intervene in extinctions caused by natural processes, I disagree that this principle should extend to species being driven to extinction by human activity, for which intervention is both justified and necessary.
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