Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
sumed in the old ecology. They are much more open and individualistic and much less collectivist, much
more Gleason than Clements. “Wherever we seek to find constancy, we discover change,” says arch-
individualist Botkin. “Nature undisturbed is not constant in form, structure or proportion, but changes
at every scale of time and space.” The idea of nature in balance, in a steady state, or even gravitating
toward such a state through a process of succession is false, he says. So too is the idea that change in
nature is somehow bad. Environmentalists raise money, legislators pass laws, and scientists spend ca-
reers trying to freeze nature in a state that is, says Rosindell, “neither practical nor desirable.” If nature
is always in flux, then trying to stop that flux is anti-nature—and dangerous, because it builds up prob-
lems, says Botkin. Just as the 2008 financial crisis resulted from an “unwarranted faith” in computer
models and the reassuringly trouble-free economic forecasts that they produced, so “the same problem
plagues ecology and environmental sciences.” 29 Trying to maintain stability creates instability.
Among many ecologists, there is a move to embrace this new thinking. “Like most ecologists, I used
to assume that alien species were bad,” says Jay Stachowicz, a marine biologist at UC Davis. For much
of his career, he tells me, ecological investigations focused on negative interactions between species,
like competition and predation. “Positive interactions have been ignored. I am trying to correct that im-
balance, to look at how species coexist and what happens when invaders show up. We have found that
all ecosystems are fairly dynamic and open. By introducing new species we are basically opening up
the pool of species for natural selection. And basically species regarded as native and alien are just the
same. If you didn't tell me they were outsiders I wouldn't know.”
Many of his fellow ecologists, he says, continue to talk about coevolution and how native species
have grown to naturally “be” somewhere. “But these are just-so stories. More and more research shows
that species will just fit together. Of course, I can see aliens sometimes do bad things, but natives some-
times do bad things too. It's generally the change we don't like. I don't now believe that alien species
are bad per se.”
Amid this radical rethinking of old nostrums, some ecologists are willing even to question whether
the idea of ecosystems serves any scientific function. An e-mail from one research ecologist brought me
up short. “I don't believe in ecosystems,” wrote John Anderson of the College of the Atlantic, a liberal
arts college in Maine. He explained: “People talk about the Gulf of Maine ecosystem as if it were a real
thing, a machine with every part inextricably linked to a common purpose. But I ask: where does this
ecosystem begin and end? Who are its members?” Arctic terns, he said, spend maybe six or eight weeks
in the Gulf of Maine and the rest of the time cruising the South Atlantic. “Herring gulls go south to Flor-
ida. Eels spend most of their lives in the Sargasso Sea before migrating back here. On the other hand, a
clam or a mudworm will probably spend its entire life in a single bay within the Gulf. Things that really
matter to each species, and each individual within that species, are only tangentially related to anything
we would call the Gulf of Maine ecosystem.”
It is, Anderson says, fanciful to think that losing one species will do harm to the system as a whole.
“What matters to a creature is restricted to the interactions it has with a handful of other species.” These
interactions “are very intense and usually very local.” Ecologists may find the idea of ecosystems to
be a convenient way of thinking about nature, but “the word doesn't tell us anything about how nature
works,” he says. “A great deal of the environment movement's time during the second half of the 20th
century was wasted on a wrong-headed 'ecosystem approach' to conservation.”
Ouch. If academic thinking is moving on from an outdated old ecology, where does this leave con-
servationists? If conservation is predicated on preserving a balanced natural system from being destabil-
ized by humans, how should it deal with the discovery that nature is not in balance but constantly chan-
Search WWH ::




Custom Search