Be careful of how you allow your own perceptions to be swayed by others.
The species that has created the most change of all environments is Homo Sapiens.
Who else has stopped the flow of rivers, coated the land with asphalt and concrete, polluted most of the fresh and salt waters of the planet, and on and on and on?
Truth is hard to swallow most of the time. Certainly other species go through periods of effecting their environment, but no other species has come close to the changes man has created. Put the "documentary" into the proper perspective.
I seriously doubt that wolves dug a new river bed, what they did was change the movements of prey animals which helped Earth Mother change the environment.
Many forces are always at play which are not always completely shown by people looking to put forth their point of view and sway others to their way of seeing.
What is happening in Yellowstone with the wolf population coming back to as it was before the European invasion is what you
should see in that documentary.
The conclusion of any re-habitation by any species is that it comes back to a sustainable population after what seems like a population explosion.
Any environment will only sustain a finite population of any singular species.
The effects of any predator population will certainly create changes of movement in other, prey, species, these changes in movement would be necessary for the survival of the prey. This is a natural order of things issue not a "look what the Wolves did" issue.
What happens is; a predator species is removed from an environment leading to a boom of the former prey animals, the lack of predators means the prey can move more freely and with out fear.
The prey have more survive which then puts a decimating pressure upon the food groups of that now thriving population.
This leads to an eventual die off of the no longer controlled population of former prey animals.
Re-introduction of the predator that went missing has a boon period for the predator species since there is an overabundance of prey.
Once the prey population is reduced to sustainable it appears that there are too many of the predator species.
However this predator population will start to decrease because of starvation and thus the natural balance will return to the point where there are just
enough of each, predator and prey to sustain both populations.
Homo Sapiens on the other hand, thinks that prey should far out number predators which includes humans. In fact, prey does have to out number predators, otherwise the whole balance falls apart and populations become lop sided.
Mankind wants to hunt more deer and kill more than enough deer, wolves like to hunt deer, this is why Wolves are seen as a threat, when in fact they are not the problem, it is the humans wanting to kill more deer that is the problem.
Scientist seem to follow the general "thinking of humans" by documenting nature and then applying human stupidity in order to reach an erroneous conclusion which they then tout as fact.
When it is most likely they slanted the outcome because of their own perceptions of what should be, instead of just seeing what is.
The old adage "believe only half of what you read" should also include one quarter of what is put on television or reported by any "journalist or presented as scientific facts or observations." These two groups are responsible for many of the miss conceptions currently though of as fact.
This can be extrapolated into the "we must feed the world" mentality. Earth Mother can and will only support a finite number of any species in any environment.
When the natural order of things is skewed by humans, that is when the balance is disrupted. By humans overpopulating their environment, the balance is upset and by human action it continues until we see the situation we call extinction occur to the effected species.
Currently, most of the food for humans being produced is nutrient poor and a lot of it may even contain carcinogens because of the "modern methodology" used to produce it.
This is bringing forth a population more prone to sickness than ever seen before. This series of events could even bring the end of the species simply because the body can not get the nutrition it needs.
What must happen, for mankind is a return to local productivity of food. A point where each population produces all the food it consumes, which can lead to a return to truly nourishing food.
What we have in grocery stores at this time is the equivalent of McDonalds, filling foods that have little of what our bodies need to thrive.
