Colombian squirrel monkeys (titi o fraile; Saimiri cassiquiarensis albigena)

Black-capped capuchins (mono maicero; Sapajus apella fatuellus)

This week we celebrated Earth Day on April 22nd, around the world people use this special date to remember the importance of our planet and reflect on how we are treating the only planet we have. Earth day should be every day, not only because is our home, but because we are part of that home.

With this special celebration, we will like to share some of our thoughts about what this special day means not only for us and this project, for my own work, but also share some of the things we all can do to celebrate and taking care of our planet every single day.

We share this planet with a wide and highly diverse arrangement of living things, all of them with a function inside of the planet. Some of these functions can look to us as unnecessary as the presence of so many species of mosquitos, bugs, mites, and other living things that make us feel uncomfortable but that are important for the control of many populations of animals from which they feed.

Although some people can be seen as not related to the planet, this project work focuses on the understanding of the relationships and population dynamics of monkeys in a human transformed landscape. As well as my work, by training students and every time I share the results and findings of this project with local people, landowners, and the scientific community, are both parts of the work of many people (mostly scientist), who grow up with an increasing curiosity to understand how this planet and its inhabitants live and relate between them.

Over the last decade’s many studies had found that human activities had produced a series of effects on the habitats and organisms that live on those habitats, sometimes good effects for some and other times, unfortunately, most of the time, bad effects on those habitats. However, there is still possible to change the course of most of those bad effects on our planet.

It is through small actions that every one of us can do in our daily lives that we can change the course of the bad effects we are causing to our planet. So what we can do:

1. Plant a tree or if you have a land let a part of that land to regenerate naturally. This not only increases the capture of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere but also in human-dominated areas vegetation increase the well-being of people living nearby, increase the presence of other plant and animal species, increasing the services that nature gives to humans (ecosystem services).
2. Buy responsible, use your right to buy a product to shape the market responses for more environmentally friendly products, not only for food products by other goods and services that we use in our lives.
3. Recycle, reuse, and reduce the amount of garbage that you as individual produce and consume (here there are some ideas).
4. Implement a simple compost system to reuse the vegetable waste you produce in your home (here is there is one way to do it).
5. Support any local, regional, or international campaign to protect and reinforce the protection of natural areas. As citizens, we have the right and responsibility to protect and make that our governments protect our natural environments.
6. Use more the bicycle, walking, public transport, or sharing your car instead of using the car for only one person.
7. Teach your kids and younger people around you about al these small actions you can do every day to take care of our planet

As you see, there are many small actions we can do in our daily lives that reduce the impact our activities have on the planet we all share. As Jane Goodall usually said “What you do makes a difference and you have to decide what kind of difference you want to make”

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