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Nature does a wonderful job, if left alone, at achieving population equilibrium between prey and predator.

Complete crap, sold by the likes of the sierra club idiots to help agenda 21 along.

Despite being discredited among ecologists, the theory is widely held to be true by the general public, with one authority calling it an "enduring myth".

It is the “balance of nature,” a concept pretty much everyone accepts — with the notable exception of ecologists. The natural environment, as it is currently understood by science, is in a constant state of flux. Upheaval, not balance, is the norm. That we believe otherwise has proven problematic for the teaching of basic ecological literacy, according to a just-published paper by psychologist Corinne Zimmerman of Illinois State University and ecologist Kim Cuddington of Ohio University. Their study of students at two major Midwestern universities found the discredited “balance of nature” idea is widely held among both science majors and the general student population. What’s more, it is extremely difficult to dislodge. “They’re almost unable to reason logically about environmental problems because they keep bumping into this cultural concept,” Cuddington said. “It’s influencing their thought processes.”

"The staying power of this idea became clear when she asked students in her introduction to ecology course, “Do you think a predator could ever drive a prey species to extinction?” “They uniformly answer no — even though it does happen all the time,” she said.

It's almost funny.

Academics tend not to see humans as special creations of God. We're just animals. Not special.
And we're bad, because we hunted the Passenger Pigeon into extinction.
And the Dodo.
And the great auk.
etc.

But people still think a predator cannot cause prey to become extinct? Look in the mirror.