It was two in the morning, and a koala was caught on a fence. A phone rang in the home of Ken, who was a volunteer devoted to rescuing wild koalas in Queensland. When he arrived on the scene, Ken put on heavy gloves. If koalas feel threatened, they bite. He then threw a blanket over the animal for more protection from being bitten. He then firmly grasped the koala through the blanket, and dropped it in a cage.

Normally, if the koala is healthy, it is released where it is found. Koalas tend to eat from the same eucalyptus trees (桉树) over and over. But, the problem was that there were no eucalyptus trees left for this koala. Ken had to take it to a small park nearby. Food is one of the reasons why koalas are at risk.

For 15 years, Ken has also been working on ways to make suburban areas more koala-friendly. He believes that koalas and humans can live together if certain changes are made. He recommends reducing speed limits in streets, creating more green areas for koalas to live in. What’s even more important is the need to preserve eucalyptus trees.

Even if these changes are made, koalas still have another problem. “Disease is a huge issue,” explains Ken. He says that almost half of Queensland’s female koalas are affected by a strange disease. “Without treatment, the koalas are unable to have babies. Koalas are becoming extinct,” says Ken.

Later that day, Ken visited a forest near Queensland to catch Tea, a wild female koala. Ken had been following Tea for over a year. Using special equipment, Ken walked and listened for a signal from the koala’s radio collar. He eventually found Tea sitting on a tree branch. Ken climbed up a ladder and caught Tea. After some medical check-ups, Ken found she had a baby. “As long as there are healthy babies,” he said, “there’s still hope.”

In the film The Matrix, Agent Smith, a super-computer in human shape, says, “You move to an area, and you multiply, and multiply, until every natural resource is consumed. The only way you can survive is to spread to another area. There is another organism on this planet that follows the same pattern: a virus. Human beings are a disease, a cancer of this planet. ”

Yes, relatively speaking, we are just a large virus. While most species live in balance with their ecosystems, we fail to do so. We are taking more from nature than it has to give. We wipe out animals and plants as a virus might invade and kill a host. We are destroying our host, the earth.

Our brain has been our most successful tool for survival. The funny thing is that our mind has developed to such a degree that we have thought up solutions to more survival problems. We are for the first time in earth's history changing nature to suit our comfort and desires. Being a human, I do like the advancement of technology and medicine as we nave the chance to survive longer and sometimes feel less pain. After all, nature is cruel and we can soften its blow through these inventions. However, people surviving genetic faults or illness, could they be actually making the gene pool more “dirty” and could even more people in the future suffer due to an increase in faulty DNA? It seems that even though we deal with a short-term problem we could be causing more. Are we being kind to be cruel?

We are lucky enough to own a brain complex enough to think and create. But we fail to realize the only way to really survive is through respect of our host, the earth, and working with it as the only way a living thing can benefit is by benefiting its host as it depends on it to survive.

Rainforests, it turns out, are not created equal. Take the Amazon rainforest, an area that covers about 7 million square kilometers. But within that huge expanse are all kinds of ecological zones, and some of these zones, says Greg Asner, are a lot more crowded than others.

“Some forests have many species of trees,” he said, “others have few. Many forests are unique from others in terms of their overall species composition…” And all of these different small areas of forest exist within the giant space that is the Amazon Rainforest.

So Asner, using the signature technique called airborne laser-guided imaging spectroscopy, began to map these different zones from the air. “By mapping the traits of tropical forests from above,” he explains, “we are, for the first time, able to understand how forest composition varies geographically.”

The results show up in multicolored maps, with each color representing different kinds of species, different kinds of trees, the different kinds of chemical they are producing and using, and even the amount of biodiversity, the animal and plant species that live within each zone.

Armed with this information, Asner says decision-makers now have “a first-time way to decide whether any given forest geography is protected well enough or not. If not, then new protections can be put in place to save a given forest from destruction.”

Asner says the information is a great way for decision-makers to develop a “cost-benefit ratio type analysis.”   Conservation efforts can be expensive, so armed with this information, government leaders can ensure they are making the most of their conservation dollars by focusing on areas that are the most biologically diverse or unique.

The next step, Asner says, is to take his project global, and to put his eyes even higher in the sky, on orbital satellites. “The technique we developed and applied to map Peru is ready to go global.” Asner said. “We want to put the required instrumentation on an Earth-orbiting satellite, to map the planet every month, which will give the best possible view of how the world’s biodiversity is changing, and where to put much needed protections.