Conclusions - Freshwater Ecology: Concepts and Environmental Applications - page 474

23 Conclusions
We have passed the point at which we can continue to take
unabatedly without casting back some comprehensive understanding
and wise use in return. Nature is remarkably resilient to human
insults. Yet, humans must learn what are nature's dynamic capacities
because excessive violation without harmony will only unleash her
intolerable vengeance. The very survival of humankind depends on
our understanding of our finite freshwater resources.
—Robert Wetzel (2001)
Aquatic ecology is a tremendously rich and detailed field of study. I
have covered only the most basic aspects of it in this text. My hope is that
students will have gained some useful insight that can be applied in the
making of informed decisions regarding how our aquatic resources are
used or studied. Hopefully, some of these students will be inspired to fur-
ther academic study and careers in aquatic ecology. Regardless, I have tried
to make the concepts and applications understandable and interesting to a
wide variety of students. Details were presented in some cases to illustrate
complexity of real systems. Comments from students and instructors that
would improve the text are welcome.
Those of us in developed countries who are able to read (and write)
this topic live in a golden age. It is an incredible luxury and privilege to
pursue academic interests. As the world's population increases and our
appetite for resource use grows, the existence of unspoiled aquatic habi-
tats will become increasingly rare. An ever-increasing number and pro-
portion of the world's human population is malnourished and impover-
ished. The minority of the people who hold the majority of the economic
and political power do so, in part, at the expense of the environment. Nei-
ther the rich nor the poor have shown much inclination to conserve
our aquatic resources in the past, and it is unlikely that they will do so
in the future. The depressing consequence is that biodiversity in, and qual-
ity and quantity of, freshwaters will decrease drastically in our lifetimes.
As competition for limited aquatic resources increases, aquatic ecolo-
gists will have fewer “natural” habitats to study and to use as baselines
against which to compare impacted ecosystems. Thus, we need to study
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