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Human Communities, Natural Communities

What Is a Human Community?

What image leaps to mind when you hear the word "community?" A suburban neighbourhood lined with houses and trees? A big city filled with highrise apartment buildings and office towers? A small fishing village? A loose cluster of farms? A remote northern settlement? Actually, there are many types of communities. But they all have one thing in common: they're places where people interact in some way.

Communities also interact with one another. Think of them as links in a chain. Each one can stand alone, but when two or more are linked together, they become part of a larger community. For example, your classroom is a small community within many larger ones -- your school, your neighbourhood, your town or city, your region, your province or territory, Canada, North America, and the world! But wait a minute. Aren't we forgetting something? We've only talked about human communities so far.

What Is a Natural Community?

It's an association of living things -- plant and animal -- inhabiting a common environment and interacting with one another. The place where an animal or plant lives is called its habitat. Each plant or animal has four basic habitat needs: food, water, shelter, and space, all arranged in just the right way. You can think of a natural community as all the plants and animals in a particular habitat that are bound together by food webs and other interactions.

What Is Interdependency?

All communities -- human or natural are interdependent. For example, residents of Canada's North rely on shipments of food from other parts of the country. Likewise, wild orchids depend on particular insects to pollinate them. Just as humans live and co-operate or compete with one another, so does wildlife.

What Is the Link Between Human and Natural Communities?

They're interdependent! Just as our survival depends on the contributions of other members of our human community, it also depends on the contributions of countless species in our natural community. Some of the important things wild things do for us include creating the oxygen we breathe, pollinating the crops we eat, and recycling the waste we produce.

So, you see, there's a lot more to communities than just people interacting with each other. They're also about our relationships with the wild creatures with whom we share space. Whether we live in a hinterland or a huge metropolis, wild things are as much a part of our world as we are. And we're as much a part of nature as they are. Our lives are inseparable.

What Does It All Mean to You?

Too often, we forget that human beings and wild things live together, that by harming wildlife and habitat we're harming ourselves. As we go about our busy lives, we frequently damage, destroy, or contaminate whole habitats, like rain forests, wetlands, grasslands, and shorelines. The good news is that, instead of harming, we can help wildlife.

That's where you come in. You can inform yourself about threats facing wildlife in your community. Once you've learned all you can about this serious subject, you can tackle projects to create and conserve healthy habitats, providing the food, water, shelter, and space that wild things need to grow and thrive.