What is the nature of nature? The latter “nature” I use in the sense of ecosystems or bio-physical communities of plants, animals and even humans. Many people speak of a nature comprised of raw resources such as soil and water, and see nature as a place where plants and animals live and flourish. People are not too naïve to understand basic concepts of ecosystems where different species of plants and animals live together, prey upon one another, and fill various ecological niches in foodwebs and in the landscape. For example we all know about grasslands, polar tundra, tropical rainforest, temperate rain forests, savannah ecosystems, and even aquatic/marine biotic communities such as those around deep sea vents and on coral reefs. We can understand the complex network of interactions between the plant, animal and non-biotic inhabitants/features of these ecosystems in a number of ways. A perception or belief that often arrises in basic understandings of ecosystems and early ecological theory is that “climax” ecosystems, such as old growth forests, are in some way stable, or finely balanced. That is, the climax community of organisms in an ecosystem somehow represents that location’s ultimate ecological potential and final equilibrium. In his book A Sand County Almanac, Aldo Leopold advances a similar understanding of a static nature. He says, “A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise” (225-255). As one can interpret from Leopold’s words, “things,” maybe behaviors, policies, etc. are better when they preserve the “stability” of the biotic community. And a thing is bad if it does otherwise, such as disrupting nature’s innate balance and equilibrium.
Other classic authors also present representations of nature that assume equilibrium. Take, for example, Paul Ehrlich’s Population Bomb and the seminal Meadows et al. piece Limits to Growth. Both classics attempt to show the consequences of “living out of balance” with the natural world by painting pictures of gloomy end-times as humanity has finally and irrevocably disrupted the fine balance of nature.
However, current understandings in ecology point to more tempestuous system dynamics than stable-state equilibrium and static climax communities. That is to say, ecosystems function less as natural logarithmic systems, moving in stages of succession to eventual stable-state climax communities, and more as complex adaptive systems composed of different levels of complex adaptive cycles acting together to form a “panarchy.” The idea is that large systems (such as ecosystems) are composed of many smaller systems that interact and build off one another in simple ways. Feedback loops exist in these systems and shocks (such as forest fires or oil spills) reverberate, magnify, and dissipate within these panarchical systems sometimes disappearing without a trace or potentially moving the system into a completely different state of being. This is the viewpoint and main philosophy of author C.S. Holling, a co-founder of the “resilience thinking” movement. Holling has a nice way of visualizing “panarchy” using a ball and a basin.
Picture an ecosystem (all the organisms within a geographical area) as a ball rolling around in a basin. The ball is constantly moving about; pushed, pulled, and swirled by events occurring within the system. Now, when the ball is in the basin it’s more or less in a state of dynamic equilibrium; moving around within, but not leaving the basin. If the ball is knocked out of the basin by a particularly large shock, the ecosystem will experience a regime change/shift. That is, the species composition within the ecosystem will fundamentally change. Ecosystems are more or less resilient to shocks depending on how deep their basins are. Big shocks could have little effect on highly resilient, deep basins (the ball isn’t knocked out by the shock). While in other systems small shocks could force the ball out of shallow basins relatively easily, therefore causing regime shift.
Understanding the resilient capacity and dynamic equilibrium of systems has many applications. For example, resilience thinking can inform how we extract resources from ecosystems as well as how we construct our own environments, namely cities, to be more resilient towards shocks such as natural disasters and economic recessions.
References:
Ehrlich, Paul R. The Population Bomb. New York: Ballantine Books, 1968.
Leopold, Aldo, Charles Walsh Schwartz, and Aldo Leopold. 1970. A Sand County Almanac: With Essays on Conservation from Round River. New York: Ballantine Books.
Meadows, Donella H., Dennis L. Meadows, Jørgen Randers, and William W. Behrens. 1972. The Limits to Growth: A Report for the Club of Rome’s Project on the Predicament of Mankind. New York: Universe Books.