Unlike modern people’s view, animals were highly revered and regarded as sacred creatures in most Native American civilizations in the past. The Iroquois, like most Native American peoples, emphasize the importance of living in harmony with the natural world through the creation myth "The World on a Turtle 's Back" which expresses the relations toward all living things. However, in modern society, people take both the world and the animals for granted and start to neglect the importance of harmony in nature.
Many examples of harmony in nature were presented in the myth "The World on a Turtle 's Back" such as animals’ assistance toward humans, equilibrium of the animal kingdom, and well-managed daytime and nighttime. First of all, when the
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However, in society today, people seem not to be friendly to the environment and not to value harmony in nature much. As humans do not have their natural predators, the population of humans continues to grow, which leads to an unbalanced world. Humans spend their money like playing duck and drake to purchase anything they want to own or eat regardlessly of other creatures. As the result, many animals suffer and many species even go extinct. For example, people’s desire to taste shark fin soup has tormented many sharks by having them living without fins and finally die in pain. Also, the vast release of carbon dioxide from people’s factories, uses of the air conditioner and cars has resulted in global warming, which afflicts polar bears to near extinction. Similarly, deforestation excessively annihilates habitats of many forest animals, resulting in an immense decrease in their population. All of these do not represent harmony in nature at all. If humans continue to ruin the shelters of animals, no wonder humans will die eventually because of the unbalanced population of each species and the destruction of the world. To sum up, humans seriously have to stop their affliction of other animals and the earth and start to contemplate on the significance of harmony in nature because humans can only survive under harmonious relationship between nature in the