RESILIENCE IN THE ANTHROPOCENE - Rethinking Invasion Ecologies from the Environmental Humanities - page 54

indefinitely on the basis of fossil fuel economies. The Apollo missions of the late
1960s had raised consciousness of the singularity of the Earth with photographs
from outer space looking back on the planet. The Club of Rome published Limits
to Growth in 1972 and the United Nations conference on the environment was held
in Stockholm the same year. The first oil shocks in 1973 underscored the limits to
growth, and turned thinking toward new paradigms for the relations between
humanity and nature. Scientific and social questions cast long shadows on each
other, and created an atmosphere of support for an integrative imagination.
Holling was a mathematically-literate biologist asking broadly theoretical
questions in different ways. He, like many others, was grappling with fitting
biological world-views into the modelling paradigm of the IBP. Whereas the
physical paradigm that underpinned the futures modelling was based on a universal
world-view, ecological knowledge applicable to specific ecosystems and their
feedback loops depended on the particularities of place. Holling (1973: 1) asked:
Can we imagine a new world-view that 'concentrates not so much on presence or
absence as upon the numbers of organisms and the degree of constancy of their
numbers'? His predator-prey work had suggested considering not the survival of
individuals but rather the survival of populations. Population biology and human
ecology had trended in this direction since the 1920s. The idea of looking at species
as whole societies was promoted by E. O. Wilson, for example, in his work on
ants. Wilson focused on superorganisms, whole colonies, rather than the behaviour
and survival of individuals (Wilson, 1971). In the same era, Richard Dawkins
proposed the 'selfish gene' as the driver of evolutionary biology: he was also turning
away from a focus on individual success, to the success of the gene pool as a whole
(Dawkins, 1976).
Breaking the fascination with 'the balance of nature'
The idea of the balance of nature had driven the descriptions of natural history
since antiquity. Balance has such intrinsic appeal that it often goes unquestioned.
Linnaeus attempted a definition of it in the eighteenth century but it is more often
implicit than explicit, as historian of biology Frank Egerton has explored (Egerton,
1973: 324). A. J. Nicholson and Carrington Williams had offered definitions of
the balance of nature (in the twentieth century), but Egerton regarded these as
exceptions , rather than the norm.
In ecology, Frederic Clements defined the stable or climax formation as balance
in nature: climax is the last stage in ecological succession, 'when populations of all
organisms are in balance with each other and with existing abiotic factors'. The
'climax formation' was the fully developed or adult version of an organic entity or
community, a 'complex organism' (in Egerton, 1973: 344). Distinguishing between
pure nature and nature tainted by human intervention made little sense in long-
farmed environments like Arthur Tansley's Britain. The British ecologist developed
a definition of an ecosystem to replace Clements's anthropomorphic notion of
community (Tansley, 1935). Tansley's ecosystem replaced a theory of biological