go forth and fill every niche

The following sentence is taken from the article “10 Ideas That Are Changing the World: #1. Common Wealth” by Jeffrey D. Sachs which appeared in the 24 March 2008 edition of Time, also found online:

“Human beings fill every ecological niche on the planet, from the icy tundra to the tropical rain forests to the deserts.”

The article is supposedly taken from Common Wealth: Economics for a Crowded Planet by the same author to be published by Penguin Press. So it’s part of a book, not just an article in a periodical.

I really hate it when writers use words they don’t understand (or worse still, choose to misuse words) for the purposes of dramatic effect. The offending word here is “niche”. I’m no ecologist but I know well enough that the only way we humans can fill every niche is if we were the only species left on the planet and managed to evolve to the extent that we no longer depended on any other species to survive, being able to produce energy on our own through photosynthesis or some other parallel process and recycle our nutrients without the aid of other organisms. I can’t imagine how this is ever possible.

Perhaps, the word the author was thinking of was “habitat” or “ecosystem” instead of “ecological niche”, but even then, we humans do not fill every habitat or ecosystem. “Human beings inhabit almost every terrestrial ecosystem” is definitely a less exciting clause but….

Exercising artistic liberty is fine but not when it distorts facts in a piece that purports to convey factual information from a policy maker. Science is not art.