Is this all humans are? Diminutive monsters of death and destruction?

[GliderGuider]

For me, this is one of the best pieces Monbiot has written - despite the hopium cop-out of the very last paragraph.

Is this all humans are? Diminutive monsters of death and destruction?

Before Homo erectus, perhaps our first recognisably human ancestor, emerged in Africa, the continent abounded with monsters. There were several species of elephants. There were sabretooths and false sabretooths, giant hyenas and creatures like those released in The Hunger Games: amphicyonids, or bear dogs, vast predators with an enormous bite.

Homo erectus possessed several traits that appear to have made it invincible: intelligence, co-operation, an ability to switch to almost any food when times were tough, and a throwing arm that allowed it to do something no other species has ever managed – to fight from a distance (the increasing distance from which we fight is both a benchmark and a determinant of human history). It could have driven giant predators off their prey and harried monstrous herbivores to exhaustion and death.

In Australia, where no hominim had set foot before modern humans arrived, the collapse was almost instant. The rhinoceros-sized wombat, the ten-foot kangaroo, the marsupial lion, the monitor lizard larger than a Nile crocodile, the giant marsupial tapir, the horned tortoise as big as a car – all went, in ecological terms, overnight.

And still we have not stopped. Poaching has reduced the population of African forest elephants by 60% since 2000. The range of the Asian elephant – which once lived from Turkey to the coast of China – has contracted by 97%; the ranges of the Asian rhinos by over 99%. Elephants distribute the seeds of hundreds of rainforest tree species; without them these trees are functionally extinct.

[Jgarrick]

1. Humans were the most efficient predators on Earth 30,000 years ago.

Today....even more so.

[GliderGuider]

2. That's our story, and we're sticking to it! nt

[NoOneMan]

3. We're the creature that invents such human constructs such as "monsters"

Without us, there would still be "destruction" and "killing" by animals. Eventually, one might evolve to both exacerbate their ferocity in the resource fight and recognize their monstrous nature at the same time.

[Jgarrick]

4. Exactly. One creature causing another to die is what Nature *does*.

We're just better at it.

[defacto7]

5. The difference is

that man has learned to kill just for the sake of killing, destroy for greed and power and we give nothing back to relace what we destroy. Humans are more closely defined as a virus than part of an Eco system. Animals take what they need and give back when it's their turn to give. Humans take and take and finally they kill their host and die. That's a virus.