A human as terrifying as a volcano – a scribbled note on resilience thinking

Environmental inquiry as scientific and philosophical subdisciplines benefits and suffers from its overlap with popular conceptions of the workings of nature.  On the one hand even relatively arcane observations from environmental scholars can be of interest to a lay public and can influence public policy.  On the other hand, persistent and popular misconceptions may conflict with emerging research perspectives in a manner that can be confusing and frustrating for environmental practitioners.  For example, although the term Balance of Nature means very little to researchers the notion is persistent among a broader public and can serve as a faulty map to environmental practice.

Ecology in the 20th Century had two central themes.  One theme concerned to identification of objects of ecological thought and enquired about the processes that sustained them long enough, at least, for us to examine them.  This perspective brought us populations, communities, ecosystems, Gaia and so forth, and employed cybernetics, systems thinking, hierarchy theory and other mechanistic tools to understand their persistence.  The other major theme in ecology stressed the dynamics of nature – how do the objects of nature change over time (for convenience we will call this “succession”.)  Now, though it does some injustice to the complexity of positions at any one time over the past hundred years, it is plausible to state that in the early years of the last century ecologists emphasized the progressive nature of ecological change, the stately development of communities from their creation (after a volcano, say) through a series of prescribed steps until the achieved their mature form (a “climax community”).  And this mature stage persisted as long as it is not disturbed (especially by humans).  By the late century such schemes were out of favor and ecological thought was more concerned with disturbance and disruption.  Though systems may develop, succession was no longer seen as quasi-ontogenetic.  In this scheme humans were not the only disruptive (or creative) forces influencing the behavior of ecological systems.  Although ecologists in the late 20th C had largely abandoned an understanding stressing the progressive development of steady state, close-to-equilibrium, climax communities, this view remains forceful in popular conceptions of ecology.

These historical developments are well enough known.  However, the recent interest in “resilience thinking”, a set of models that stem from the work of C S Holling and other, collectively attempt to explain the patterns of stability and change, that is, to reconcile accounts of stable-states and disruption have implications that are insufficiently examined.  The significance of resilience thinking for examining human activity derives from the fact that the inquiry places as much emphasis on the capacity of systems to absorb disturbance as it does upon the potential for catastrophic change when a system is pushed passed its limits: that is, resilience thinking can allow us to imagine ourselves as “well-behaved” systems components, as well as elements that tip the systems into brilliant and/or terrifying new states.  So resilience thinking is a framework that accommodates thinking about the disruption of ecological system behavior in response to hurricanes, forest fire, and human disruption, all with the same tools.  In resilience thinking humans look like nature.  Looking like nature expels neither the horror nor the joy from the human project.

Is your climax a super-organism? The complexity of nature. Or, on being made of little parts

Vegetation Climax, Western Ghats 2009

ECOLOGICAL PAPERS WRITTEN IN THE 1930S are the Burgess Shale of the discipline. As in that middle-Cambrian fossil bed of primordial forms, everything is already there and often piled pretty closely together. Arthur Tansley’s 1935 paper “The use and abuse of vegetation concepts and terms” appeared in the journal Ecology and re-reading it three-quarters of a century later opens a window on the debates in the early years of discipline. Tansley’s proximate concern is to chastise the younger South African ecologist John Phillips, whose views on vegetation development had chagrined him. In the background is the powerful figure of Frederic Clements, the senior American ecologist and archdeacon of the concepts of “succession” and the “complex organism”, whose views Phillips was advocating and justifying. These days Tansley’s paper is primarily remembered for introducing the term “ecosystem”; however, other debates swirl around it, including questions concerning the degree to which we might regard the largest entities of nature as “super-organisms”.  (For an account of this paper go here) Is the plant community correctly seen as a large independent organism that grows, matures, and reproduces in the way an individual plant or animal does? Debates about this matter – a storm in arcane scientific teacup – prefigure more contemporary debates about Gaia: can the planet itself be regarded as a single super-organism? 

What was eating at Sir Arthur G. Tansley? On the occasion of 76th anniversary of the ecosystem concept

Remembering the late Frank Golley who wrote about it.

This month is the 76th anniversary of the naming of the ecosystem concept. The paper in which the term first appeared is entitled, appropriately enough, “The use and abuse of vegetation concepts and terms”, (the ecosystem being offered, naturally enough, as a useful one) and appeared in Ecology, the flagship journal of the Ecological Society of America, in July 1935 . In it, the British ecologist Sir Arthur George Tansley takes a scythe to the conceptual crop that the infant discipline of ecology had produced since the early years of the 20th Century. He separated the terminological wheat from the chaff. The task was not, of course, simply to determine which were the more delicious ecological terms; ecologists have always loved their terminology: climax communities, subclimaxes, proclimax, seres, plagioseres, prisere, succession and so forth; little of it is euphonious. Rather, he determined the utility of terminology based upon his perception of the “naturalness” of the units of nature they entail. Terms are abused when they promote analogies which do not produce fruitful empirical research programs. Terms are also abused, as Tansley hinted, when they smuggle in a set of metaphysical assumptions (e.g. “an imagined future whole” to be realized in an ideal human society); assumptions Tansley believed had no business in the dispassionate contemplation of nature. Especially when ecology was struggling to assume a position among the other natural sciences it seemed not the time for the discipline to divert on philosophical tangents .