Life

There are few, if any, places in the world without life of some kind. Even in Antarctica, with its bitter cold, there are penguins, mosses and lichens, and insects.

The distribution of living organisms affects human activities. A person's diet, for example, depends largely on the plants and animals easily raised in the area in which he or she lives. Often humans interfere with the natural distribution. For instance, on the vast, grassy plains of the central and western United States great herds of domestic cattle now graze where once the wild buffalo (bison) roamed. The relationship of living things to each other and to their environment is discussed in the article Ecology.