Rorotoko

In a nutshell

The existence of a balance of nature has been a dominant part of Western philosophy since before Aristotle. But the science of ecology and evolutionary biology together demonstrate that there is no balance of nature—not today and not at anytime in Earth’s long history. The paradigm is based on belief, not data; it has no scientific merit.

The Balance of Nature traces how and why the balance of nature assumption remained prevalent in the public mind and in ecological research until quite recently. By presenting a brief overview of the history of ecology and evolutionary biology, I show how ecologists now understand that the balance of nature was really a perception rather than a fact.

Nature is constantly in flux varying in scales of space and time, and most of that flux is due entirely to natural causes. At this time of extraordinary human influence on Earth’s ecosystems and biota, I argue that it is essential for humanity to understand how evolution occurs and why ecology is far more dynamic than static.

With that information it will then be hopefully possible to formulate policies of ecological ethics that will help humanity act as responsible stewards of the planet—even in a time of climate change and loss of natural ecosystems.

I conclude with what I believe to be a tightly reasoned appeal to adopt a materialistically based, scientific view of nature and, from that understanding, move toward sound decisions about how best to ensure the continued health of the planet’s ecosystems.

The wide angle

I actually began thinking about this book about two decades ago. I teach at a liberal arts college and I have had numerous fruitful interactions ranging from casual conversations with professors outside of my discipline to interdisciplinary course collaborations.

For example, I once taught a course with a philosophy professor on Evolution and Ethics. This got me to read extensively about such things as the naturalistic fallacy, for example. Right now I have a formal connection between my introductory course on Evolution and Ecology and a course taught by a professor of English, called “Empire, Race, and the Victorians.” The connection focuses on Darwin’s views of race.

So, with my generalist background in the liberal arts, I am drawn to make connections with other disciplines. The Balance of Nature attempts to do that by historically tracing the likely origin and propagation of the notion of balance of nature. The idea of a balance of nature was never based one jot on science but on teleological notions of how things “ought” to be. One might almost count it among the multiple creation myths that characterize various human cultures.

I have always taught both a basic ecology course and various levels of evolution courses. When I initially approached ecology and evolution, as separate courses, the subject matter in each seemed fairly distinct from the other. I soon realized that distinction was false, a matter of scale. Evolution is ecology on a longer time scale. Ecology is vacuous without contextualizing it within evolution.

Back in the mid-1970s I thought of putting together a book of readings for ecology students that dealt with how evolution could inform ecology more directly than how it was represented in the dominant textbooks of the time. No publisher was interested.

When Ed Wilson published his sweeping book on Sociobiology in 1975 I felt as though ecology would be forced to embrace evolution in a manner similar to how Wilson brought animal social behavior into such a clear evolutionary light. Wilson’s book stirred controversy, because humans were included as though human social behavior evolved. Of course human social behavior evolves! But such a claim was anathema to many in academe at the time.

Meanwhile, ecologists did focus increasingly on evolution, and that was reflected in ecology texts. They began to apply more and more stochasticity to their analyses of ecosystem function, in particular to the analysis of the distribution of species within ecosystems.

I quickly realized that ecologists were moving away from equilibrium models. I realized as well that if there is little or no equilibrium attained in nature, there is no balance of nature, and that the term itself is misleading and meaningless.

I knew that the information ecologists were generating had broad implications for how the general public would perceive what it calls nature. As I did when conceiving another book, A Neotropical Companion, which is a broad overview of ecology of the American tropics, I thought that I could bring together an array of diverse information, all based on real science, that would synthesize into a cohesive volume. That’s how The Balance of Nature got started.

any form of balance of nature is purely a human construct, not something that is empirically real