RESILIENCE IN THE ANTHROPOCENE - Rethinking Invasion Ecologies from the Environmental Humanities - page 55

destiny determined by climate with a model of interrelatedness in nature that
included biological and abiotic elements (including nutrient cycling and energy
flows). The ecosystem became a key organising principle in ecology. It has robust
explanatory power at local, regional and planetary scales - whether the subject is a
pond, a prairie or Earth itself, so has proved much more versatile than Clements's
'vegetation community' (Worster, 1991: 278).
Nonetheless, ecological definitions of species abundance have continued to be
described in terms of the dynamics of local communities, even though the
boundaries of communities are not well-defined units. Particularly in animal
ecology, the traditions established by Charles Elton persist. A community makes
sense as a concept where local species compositions and population size are
internally regulated within the niche. If, however, individual species in an
assemblage respond individually to physical habitat factors (such as soil or altitude)
- this is sometimes called Gleasonian dynamics - then the notion of an ecological
community makes no sense at all (Sterelny, 2001: 438).
Holling grappled with a language to describe the fluctuations of populations.
He did not want to describe them as settling into a balanced or climax ecosystem,
because he wanted to take into account factors external to the immediate niche,
including abiotic factors. Elton had famously asserted that 'the balance of nature
does not exist, and perhaps never has existed' (Elton, [1927] 1966: 17). But despite
Elton, Frederic Clements's climax theory continued to have strong appeal in plant
ecology for much of the twentieth century although the strong climax theory had
become muted, if not denied, by Clements himself by the 1940s (Egerton, 1973:
344; Cuddington, 2001; Kingsland, 2005).
Holling was keen to see if there were mathematically simple rules that did not
need to assume the stability of an ecosystem. As he put it much later: simple but
'just sufficient'. He wanted a model that would allow ecosystems to adapt, to learn
to deal with environmental change, including anthropogenic change. Since stability
did not create the preconditions for adaptation, he excluded it from the model.
'High variability not low variability [is] necessary to maintain existence and
learning' (Holling, 2006: 5-6; see Gunderson and Holling, 2002). This insight is
critical to management, for it actually argues against the notion of corporate
efficiency where duplication is treated as waste (Walker and Salt, 2006).
Arid zone science: post-war initiatives in ecology and
management
Integrating knowledge across national boundaries was important to the politics of
the post-war era, and was a priority of UNESCO (Robin and Steffen, 2007). One
of the UNESCO initiatives was an Advisory Council on Arid Zone Research, an
initiative of the newly independent India (UNESCO, 1953: 7). In Australia, C.S.
Christian of the CSIRO was appointed Arid Zone Research Liaison Officer (in
1954) to co-ordinate the fragmented efforts of the states and Commonwealth in
arid zone science. Although CSIRO Chairman, Ian Clunies Ross noted that: