The concept of "natural equilibrium" is a 1950s cybernetic machine fantasy projected onto the natural world rather than an accurate reflection of ecological reality. We can model the world in the language of system theory, but the models we make there might not have much to say about the real world. We can claim that from system theory it follows that there must be an equilibrium (as somewhat of an expert, I can say that even that is not true) and that if we disrupt the system, things will eventually go back to that equilibrium. And if we don't see it, we just needed to wait longer.
The whole stack of logic is not really build on any proper reasoning. The parallel with economics based on the "homo economicus" is striking, also there you reason from an ideal model and try to make inductive statements about the real world, which in many places directly conflict with observation. The "eco-system" and "natural equilibrium" stem from this approach of applying system theory to ecology, and are ideas which are now _very_ ingrained in western thinking, but which are obviously off.
Here is the start of that second episode: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FgoereMDUJ0
When you have the mind of "the models are wrong", you tend to be brought there by select counter examples, and in that space you only feed on counter examples. "The experts are wrong (and you can be right in 15 minutes if you consume this media!)" is abundant.
The actual reality is "the models work great until they don't". Not "the models don't work."
Ironically, the experts, the ones building the "wrong" models, tend to be the ones most aware of this.
Models are still great at helping us understand the world and are in many ways the best thing we have. The problem is that today we are overly relying on them to make real policy interventions on an ecology (e.g. what is a "healthy" amount of animals to cull or fish) based on an ecosystem, which is just a poor model.
If we could get rid of this idea of "stability" and "equilibrium" in economics and ecology, I would be a happy man.
> Ironically, the experts, the ones building the "wrong" models, tend to be the ones most aware of this
Exactly why I'm here :-)
This varies substantially by field, or by subfield. There is a vast decades-long intellectual wasteland of bad economics predicated on bad models that are only appealing on normative grounds. The entire field of behavioral psychology might be a scam. Etc etc. Science advances one funeral at a time hard part because people are unwilling to let go of their models, even when they have outlived their usefulness or have been simply proven too wrong to be useful even in their original purpose.
Even if we do make that claim, from practice in systems theory we should know that some systems have multiple potential equilibrium. If a system is perturbed, it may come to rest at a different equilibrium that is much less desirable.
I've worked with mechanical and computer systems where the ordering and timing of applied loads makes a significant difference to observed behavior. Sometimes you have to stop and restart the whole system when it ends up at an undesired equilibrium.
In the natural environment, stopping and restarting in a controlled manner is not something entirely in our control.
But this was a fantasy.
(Curtis's entire ouevre can be summarized in 18 seconds: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3YSwCJIpSXQ )
And there we have it: ideal state for one species? the most possible species? longevity for individuals or the species?
The myth of some "natural" (the word literally means without human influence) state that is desired/better is somewhat ironic, right?
Any ideal state brings with it subjective criteria.
Even if that's true, quite a bit rides on how long "longer" is. If "longer" is a million years, that's not exactly good news.
In the west of North America, like most places, almost all of the old growth forest was logged.
Some places where the soil and subsoil was particularly vulnerable to erosion and landsliding or just didn't have a lot of water capacity in the first place like on dry mountains, after these trees were removed and most of the soil washed away from rain, the forest simply has not come back a hundred years later. There are little trees gradaually getting started, and lots of mostly bare soil or rock still where erosion from rain is able to outpace the vegetation growth. It will likely take many thousand years for trees to get to the size they were before, and to build up the capacity for holding water like it had been.
In more abundant forests, trees regrow faster. But even there, a hundred years later, the total biomass per acre is often 10% of what it was as old growth forest, and the capacity for holding water on the land similarly much reduced. The old growth forests were the result of nature doing its thing often with help from humans for thousands of years and continually becoming richer. Eventually a major disturbance sets it back, but this might only happen ever 5 or 10 thousand years. This time humans did it.
All that said I still think we should just extinct disease carrying mosquitoes.
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/248428489_Centuries...
Fig. 2 [1] lists them. Fig. 3 I think indicates that 20 of them have positive effect size on biodiversity, which I think was the point. "Learning and inspiration" is an interesting category. Carbon sequestration ranks high, with Terrestrial (as opposed to the larger Oceanic) having quite a few studies behind it.
Instead of trying to perform a balancing act with nature we should just continue to shape things into things that are more convenient to us. Like redirecting water into a desert.
Of course, for many reasons, we should try not to drive species to extinction. That's not really science; it's just basic moral intuition. People seem embarrassed to admit that their motivations are perfectly reasonable things like "I like living things and we shouldn't kill them off".
It could be argued that some serious science starts with "just looking at correlations", guided by intangible drives like imagination and moral intuition. I wouldn't dismiss it as "not really science", and may even lean toward saying that it's important for the scientific process, or even the development of mathematics, to listen to your moral intuition and follow your nose. It's often driven by asking questions and posing theories.
Nearby me is a cloud forest in central America. The last time we had a strong El Nino, substantial amounts of endemic amphibians that live up in those forests lost the mist-melt puddles they depended on. If the drought we're experiencing continues as long as expected from this cycle, we're going to lose a lot of beautiful frogs forever.
Can I do anything about this? Find my favorite frog community on my favorite mountain and regularly lug a backpack of water up there? Run up a sprinkler system? Will it make a difference?
I think we have made great strides at saving some near extinct species, the kakapo for example, but we can do better.
Reading the title, I was ready to come in with arguments about the Cambrian explosion and different timescales, the article it's self however is not really talking about things along those lines, it is talking about the short(or very short) term where we assume that once species will easily take up a niche that was occupied by another if one goes extinct. Which I believe is looking at things on the wrong timescale, even if we assume punctuated equilibrium rather than gradual evolution.
Often cited mosquito eradication (at least those transmitting malaria, dengue, yellow fever, zika and so on) would change few things even though most folks would not even notice... and I couldn't welcome it more intensively. These academic discussions in the west would quickly die off when people around you start dying frequently from these (especially small children, but also grandparents or just weaker / more unlucky folks).
Massive droughts this summer still continuing here where I live wreaked way more havoc not only in insect world than any such engineering would do, yet I see no violent mass protests all around the world about banning cars, huge transport ships or commercial & private jet flying for example, or some other big pollutants. Literal frog in boiling water situation.
Paraphrased: "Nature will be fine, it's humanity we should be worried about."
Bounce back can take millions of years.
In the end this is about protecting and preserving our own ecosystem without which we will perish.
I refuse to believe that humanity on a whole is that incapable. Or at least unwilling to try to do something different.
Push your leaders to stay the course
That's all observation, reasoning, and logic. Merely observing what occurs in a system that loses or gains is enough data to make fairly striking conclusions. The systems never return to baseline. Not once. Not ever. We've never observed a return to baseline after a species is destroyed, nor if an invasive species enters the system.
Once balance is lost, it cannot be attained again. Will not be. Has not been. Observed data is clear about this pattern. There is no equilibrium. There is a system that is functioning and then there is a system that no longer functions. There are no return to function systems in nature. Humans have not observed a mechanism that would bring that about, nor observed the occurrence of such.
One failure leads to another, and to another. Cascading. That's what we observe over generations of data collection.
Even letting aside any survival mechanism we have there are two rational posibilities:
1. We are alone in the universe => super huge loss of complexity and consciousness
2. We are not alone but at Universe scale intelligent life seems rather scarce => still huge loss in diversity
The article is more focused on oceanic and coastal diversity but I agree about the mosquitoes.
The modern version of Carthage should be destroyed.
I'm doing my part
It's an invasive pathogen to a mosquito population, but it benefits humans.
https://youtu.be/7W33HRc1A6c?si=HqyW8mys0uNBuFdW&t=147
Humorous, but not inaccurate about what climate change means to primates. =3
For all we know the universe could be teeming with life, in whatever shape or form. And since we see the first signs of life about 500 million years after the plant was formed, there's a good argument to be made that life doesn't need much more than a stable energy gradient and some basic building blocks to get started.
Weather models are ridiculously advanced running on super computers crunching a massive global network of real time data. But they still aren't anywhere close to perfect.
That being said, just because it rains on your birthday when it was said to be sunny, doesn't mean you delete your weather app, call meteorology pseudoscience, and start a substack of "the forecast was wrong again" blog posts.
People intuitively grasp this foolishness because they constantly interact with weather models. But for things they have almost no contact with, it's easy to write it off on a single "bad forecast"
(I'll also admit the caveat that not every model is as good (or bad) as weather models, another dimension at play to throw a wrench in peoples gears)
That's why it's important to find joy in the moment and ways to share that joy and happiness with those around you.
The Sahara is teeming with life compared to Mars, but we also know it once hosted significantly more life before it was a desert. That old system collapsed.
The knock on effects of those changes to one of the most important and diverse ecosystems on the planet cannot possibly be completely predicted beforehand.