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Sunday, Nov 8, 2009
Look to the Taoists...
I think this is a case of bad definition. "Balance" can mean many things to many people, and in the context of ecology, it can mean stasis, which is probably what the academics are trying to fight off - the perception that a balanced ecology is a static ecology.
I would replace the idea of "balance" with that of "harmony." Life is in a state of harmony on Earth - living things act and react, cooperate and compete, predate and prey each other. Man's use of resources, our migrations, our herding and agriculture, all of that, adds to the music of the biosphere.
In Tai Qi, one may lose their balance, but still remain in harmony with their opponent.
"Evolution needs no creator, for the creative act is built into the system, which applies natural selection to random genetic mutation."
On the contrary - if there were no Creator, then whence that which is acted upon by evolution?
Your article illustrates pretty neatly why professional ecologists are so annoyed by the "balance of nature" fantasy. That theory about Orca's eating the seals and causing a trophic cascade is a very lovely story and was a very clever hypothesis when it was proposed, but it has since been shown to be demonstrably false. Of course, the fact that it never actually happened has not prevented you, or many others, from repeating it as fact. In the history of Ecology, there have been a lot of theories that survived way past their expiration dates largely because they fit into the "balance of nature" worldview. As a scientist, I believe that it is far more useful to understand how nature actually works than to pretend that nature is a simple and moral.
There is a difference between saying "models that talk about a balance of nature are useful" (the usefulness depending on what you're trying to do) and "there really is a balance of nature, get used to it."
This article could really have benefited from a definition of "the balance of nature," before trying to decide if such a thing existed or not. Anyone who writes "life thrives in a balance between natural imbalance and balance" is obviously using multiple definitions of the word at the same time. That's good for metaphors and poems. Hard science requires something more specific.
Isn't a sense of "balance" present nearly everywhere else in the sciences? Matter and energy (neither created nor destroyed, but simply converted); action and equal/opposite reaction; evolution as a (species) survival response to new stimuli or circumstances .... somewhere I hear my pre-algebra teacher screaming "balance your equation!"
Nature, I would think, is constantly striving to *achieve* balance, despite constant disruption. How nature goes about to maintain or achieve that balance is the starling, beautiful, terrifying part.
The case of the otters in the Aleutians seems to show that nature is not in balance, by any meaningful definition of the term.
At any given moment there is a network of different species feeding on each other. If this system is in balance then changes to the system should result in further changes which bring the system back into balance. The feedback loops should work to smooth changes in the system.
Instead, what you describe is a system that is not at all in balance. A change to the system results in a catastrophic feedback loop which forces ever greater changes throughout the network.
Any system is going to be have a tipping point where balance cannot be maintained, but the specific case you cite seems to be inherently out-of-balance.
If we apply the same reasoning to climate change there is one school of though which says that the Earth's atmosphere is in balance. Our increased emissions will result in feedback that will bring the system back into line with our historical experience. The other school of though would be that the atmosphere is not in balance and changes we make may result in feedback that will exacerbate those changes.
I enjoyed this discussion of the values in stability and instability. The northern Adirondacks, where I live, is a relatively stable system but transforms observably within small segments of a human's (my) life.
In a short time frame, say less than 40 years, we want "stasis". Without it we lose control over our habitat. Unfortunately our human drive for stasis translates to the production and maintenance of lawns and parking lots. These perceived stable environments are wastelands. The oceans seem to be suffering similar habitat treatments.
So, pretending that there exists a "natural" habitat is to analyze in the distant theoretical environment, rather than describing the observation of forest and meadow, the charming otter example not withstanding.
I enjoyed this read, but prefer analyzing our World through the dual lenses of gardening and health. I define health as the ability of a habitat to clean itself and support an optimal species diversity. Gardening is choosing levels of evolution, such as forest or meadow. Analyzing and prefering specific levels of evolution has a period focus similar to the stability/instability article.
Health has a stasis goal. Short term and stable. But it differs from the current stasis model in that lawns and parking lots neither cleanse themselves nor support optimal biodiversity.
So, the healthy gardener analyzes his environment for strengths, chooses desireable periods of development, supports the perceived strengths, reduces pollutants, and after the system stabilizes, only then inserts missing elements - weed, protect, and after stability, plant.
Anyone who writes "life thrives in a balance between natural imbalance and balance" is obviously using multiple definitions of the word at the same time. That's good for metaphors and poems. Hard science requires something more specific.
Excellent point. To be honest, I think the author was being intentionally disingenuous by not presenting a clear-cut definition of balance. It feels like he needed to write an article, so he intentionally inhabited the spaces of ambiguity between definitions to make a non-argument.
The only thing I can draw from your article, Jonathon, is that you're somehow in favour of representing nature in terms of "balance" because that would make our relationship with it more emotive. Even if this means refuting or "reinterpreting" scientific fact. If you need to view nature as "balanced" to have an emotive connection with it, that's your problem, not something that we should cleave to. Nature doesn't have a homeostatic function, and it's pointless and damaging to try to force one on it
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