A-B-C Ecology

Ecology is a science and, to most of us, it's pretty complicated. It's easy to get complicated with ecology, because it's so big and so complex and so ...in trouble. What can we do but leave it to the experts, who will presumably create relevant curriculum content so that at least our children will grow up knowing what to do?
When we think linearly (as the reductionist fathers of modern science taught us to do), we necessarily have to leave out huge chunks of data, linking only the most "relevant" information together in series, like a chain. A nice, strong chain that unifies all members of society into a cohesive, coordinated and effective response to the converging crises of the 21st Century.

The problem with hard logic linked into a strong chain is that there is no accounting for the constant change that is actual reality.

For this reason, it is much more useful to take a little extra effort at the outset and accept complexity, which means being willing to examine systems as a whole, and to speak in terms of system dynamics, feedback mechanisms, interaction, and energy flow. Systems thinking will be our saviour through the converging crises of the 21st Century.

According to Natural Resources Canada,

“An ecosystem consists of a dynamic set of living organisms (plants, animals and microorganisms) all interacting among themselves and with the environment in which they live (soil, climate, water and light).”

Pretty much all definitions of ecosystem run along these lines; that is, "biological things interacting with physical things."

A vital component of the ecosystem that surrounds you has been completely left out of this definition. As a result, none of us, "experts" included, can do a bloody thing about the ecological crisis.

Present-day ecological disease arises from our culture's sense of separation from those interacting biological and physical systems. To modern Western society, the ecosystem is out there somewhere. There's us and it. We somehow interact with it, perhaps by buying produce at the farmers' market or by going on camping trips, but, in our practice and in our mythology, it's largely something separate from us.

This is why an average school child will learn about the rainforest or  about polar bears or about how to put tin cans in one bin and paper in another, but will not have a clue about where his own lunch really came from, nor where it goes later when he flushes the toilet. He hasn't been taught how his own body-mind works, let alone how it is nested within other complex systems.

This rift in consciousness, this paradigm, mythology or belief system, is neither biological nor physical. It's another thing altogether. To the question of ecosystem healing, it makes all the difference in the world.

Ecosystem - Three Sets of Systems in Which You are Nested
The ecosystem in which you reside comprises three broad sets of systems that are nested within one another. These three sets of systems are, from biggest to most subtle:

1. physical systems - interactions between biological communities and their physical surroundings;
2. biological systems - interactions between species; and
3. social systems - interactions between individuals within a species.

All of these interactions happen simultaneously, are continuously dynamic, and are completely interconnected with one another. None of them is a closed system. They continually draw energy from one another and give energy to one another.

It might not seem obvious (because rocks, water, and air seem pretty inert), but physical systems are the most complex, contain the most energy, and are the largest part of any ecosystem. Biological systems are much smaller and less complex, contain less energy, are nested within physical systems - and are utterly dependent on physical systems. Much smaller and much less complex are the social systems that are nested within and utterly dependent on biological systems.

Nestedness doesn't end there; these are just the three broad generalizations of the different kinds of systems that make up the biosphere. Individual organisms are nested within their own social systems and are utterly dependent on them, and organ systems are nested within individual organisms. Cells are nested within tissues which are nested within organ systems ...and so on down to the smallest quarks from which the physical universe is (hypothetically) composed. We can go upward with ecological nestedness, too. The physical systems of the Earth's climate - hydrosphere, geosphere, cryosphere and so on - are all nested within the larger physical system of the Earth's energy supply, which is the solar system. Sol is nested within an outer spiral arm of the galaxy we call the Milky Way.

And so on. Being aware of nestedness is very important to understanding your individual position and influence in the world.

It's always about energy

Everything in the physical universe is made out of energy, and all systems are simply patterns of movement of energy. What does this look like in ecosystems?

At the physical level, energy moves here and there by converting from mass to light to heat and back to mass again. This is energy as we study it in the public schooling system, and the entire manifest universe is made out of a finite amount of energy.

Energy from physical systems is drawn into the biological systems of the world by the process of photosynthesis, in which living creatures convert light into hydrocarbon compounds that organize themselves into a pattern called "DNA."
At the biological level, energy still runs the game, only here it moves from one species to another in addition to moving from one physical state to another. How is energy converted from one species to another? When we eat each other, that's how! Now this seems pretty nasty, and is probably why the energy discussion doesn't get anywhere close to this far in the education of the vast majority of we citizens of the West. However, the food web is primarily cooperative, with minor competition within very small contexts. After all, we are all in this together, as a single Community of Life. No individual gets to live forever, even the greatest of kings has largely been converted - energetically speaking - into fungi, ants, and worm flesh. The process begins at the moment of conception.

What about energy at the social level, then? Is there such a thing, or is it a made-up New Age concept?

Social energy is just as real, and is just as much energy, as energy in biological and physical systems. It takes the form of attention. All else being equal, she who gets the most attention thrives the most, socially speaking.

Yes. The whole struggle for power, the constant barrage of advertising, all the egotism of the world and the dramatic course of our lives - all of it is about getting one another's attention, and thereby getting energy from one another!

We all get our daily allotment of physical and biological energy, from the sunshine that lands on the planet (or ancient sunlight that's been recently unearthed and burned) and the food that we eat. That daily allotment is exactly adequate for each of us to have a meaningful and satisfactory life.

All the dramas of modern life, however, are about hoarding energy. Pay attention to where you pay your attention.

Anomalous Humanity?

We the people of modern society have some pretty distorted ideas about the human place in ecosystem. Our acculturation has given us the bizarre concept that humans are innately different somehow, that the rules of the universe - and certainly of ecosystems - do not apply to us. Partly this is because we don't understand that there are these unbreakable rules, but mostly it's because our acculturation has given us minds that believe (and therefore see) certain things that don't really exist.

We believe, for example, that humans are innately flawed as a species because we cannot get our population under control. I'm curious, though, if there is any species that controls its own population.

We believe that humans are too smart for our own good, able to blow the up the whole planet and destroy ourselves by our own "intelligence," like some kind of monster eco-villain. And yet, has it ever happened to justify such guilt? Isn't it kings and emperors that build destructive forces and lead them against the world?

We believe that only humans fell from Grace in the original paradise a few thousand years ago. Apparently only humans were special enough to be given the chance to make this colossal (and immediate) screw-up.

We believe that humans have control over disease and food supply and all the other biological systems of the planet. Meanwhile, we're at the mercy of non-existent malevolent forces like "germs," "bird 'flu" and "obesity."

We believe that ours is the one moral and proper correct way to live, and yet here we are on a collision course with the converging crises of the 21st Century. It's a race of good against evil, and all of life on Earth is at stake!

Winning the Race

There's a growing understanding that human interaction with the world is not inherently destructive. Instead, it is a problem with our population size. There are so many of us, that the planet is getting out of balance to support us. What is the ecological basis of population growth?

We interact in physical systems to get heat, light, water, air, and transportation. We do this through various evolved abilities, such as being warm-blooded and being able to walk, and also through the evolved ability to use technology to control temperature, water availability, terrain, etc. Physical interactions determine how much life - altogether - can exist in a given area.

We interact in biological systems in order to feed ourselves (and to be food for other organisms). Many of our relationships with other species are symbiotic, such as our interaction with our own internal microbes. Biological interactions determine the relative population sizes of different species within a given area.

The primary determinant of population size of any species is the size of its food supply!

Stop feeling guilty about how many kids you want or don't want.

We interact in social systems in order to determine our mating relationships, our territory, and how we learn about the world. Social interaction determines who is rich and who is poor. It determines what kinds of people are more common or less common. It determines who is leader and who is follower, where we spend our time, and on whom we put our attention. Social interactions determine the prevalence of certain kinds of individuals within a given species.

Humanity has evolved many skills and adaptations for obtaining the necessities of human life sustainably. If our evolved adaptations were not sustainable, humanity would have become extinct long ago.

Population, Community and Succession

The study of ecosystems looks at the way that energy flows through and between physical, biological and social systems by examining population dynamics, the way species evolve together into ecological communities, and how those entire communities shift over time in ecological succession. Ecology is normally very academic because well-understood factors influence population, community and succession dynamics.

As a society with major ecological calamities about to occur, however, there must obviously be some glaring gap in our experts' understanding of how ecological population, community and succession works - or we could have implemented effective programs years ago and avoided this whole mess in the first place.

Indeed, there is a tremendous blind spot in the scientific community when the species that is being studied is the special one - humanity. When humans are the species of interest, all those well-understood factors are thrown out and people start yelling at each other and worrying about where their next research grants will come from.

For example, we're convinced that the factor which most strongly influences population size in all other species is irrelevant for humanity.

We also cannot seem to grasp how we have evolved together with many thousands of other species and we belong to that community as much as bugs and blackberries do. Don't believe me? Try and convince the average environmentalist that it's okay for you to go out and set yourself up a comfortable life in the wilderness. You are a raper of the planet! Your ecological footprint should be zero! Join the voluntary human destruction committee and die a martyr in the great environmental jihad. 

The reason we have to takes such drastic measures, is that when it comes to changes in the physical systems upon which we depend - such as oil, climate, and clean, fresh water - our culture is positively convinced that changes (ecological succession) in those systems spell nothing short of total doom, not only to humanity, but probably to most other life on Earth!

Oh, the heavy weight of responsibility we have as masters of the universe!

The outcome of this schizophrenic rift in our collective worldview is that almost every program that has been developed to attempt to avert the converging crises of the 21st Century is an ineffective time-waster. Several of these proposed solutions are actually accelerating the crises.

Population: the central ecological problem

Most of us agree that any human lifestyle would be sustainable if the population was low enough. The world could easily sustain the American lifestyle with its enormous ecological footprint, if there were only a few hundred thousand Americans. On the other end of the spectrum, calculations indicate that the planet could support up to 50 billion people if we all lived the lifestyle of the poorest of the poor.

These points are moot. First, the American lifestyle is dependent on growth, and without perpetual growth (of population and individual ecological footprint), it wouldn't be the American lifestyle. (The U.S. economic crisis is a crisis of lifestyle change, not food shortages!)

Second, all humans couldn't live the life of the poorest of the poor, because then it wouldn't be human life. Humans have evolved to live in rich cultural networks (tribes) of about 100 people on average. If you put 50 billion people together - especially if we were all terribly poor - our evolutionary programming would immediately trigger a killing spree of inconceivable proportion.

Without mortality, any species on Earth is capable of an exponential population increase that would eventually overtake the entire planet. The question of how long it would take depends only on the size of the individuals and how quickly they reproduce. This potential for population increase is termed the "biotic potential" of the species.  Biotic potential is what life is all about, the primordial drive to exist and to thrive.

No species reaches its biotic potential and takes over the whole planet because every species experiences mortality, the terrible limiting forces of nature that balance all systems' growth. These limiting forces, collectively referred to as “environmental resistance,” manifest in myriad social, biological, and physical dynamics of the ecosystem.

So, a stable population is one in which the biotic potential and the environmental resistance are in balance. Like every other species, the biotic potential of humans is balanced by environmental resistance.

Physical environmental resistance: you can have the biggest food supply in the world, it is irrelevant if you have no air or your water is contaminated or you are standing naked at the North Pole.

Biological environmental resistance: you can have the greatest social network and be loved by everyone, you can have plenty of water and the temperature could be perfect - you will not survive long without food (unless you're a breatharian, I guess) or if you're sharing a small, fenced-in yard with a grizzly bear.

Social environmental resistance: if you're really unattractive and no fun to be around and quite incompetent, you have a lot less chance of successfully raising a big family. 

The Law of Life

Scientists, as well as most other civilized people, often have no faith in the way the world works. This is simply because, with our dominating paradigm, we do not understand the way the world works.

There is a system in place that works perfectly to maintain life on Earth in balance. It is the system of the biosphere itself, an evolved system by which all living species function together as part of the one living Earth ecosystem. This system is the Law of Life, because it is obeyed by all – even humans. Many scientists don't believe in or know about this Law of Life because they share the paradigm that humanity is special and different and separate. So we're in a panic that if we don't control everything that happens (as though we ever could), if we allow the slightest change in circumstance to occur, the bottom will fall right out of everything and we'll all starve to death or kill each other or otherwise stop being exactly who we always were.

The Law of Life is very simple. It has to do with naturally not taking anything more than you need right now, not hoarding - or having the need to hoard. It's the “sharing economy.” At the social level, the sharing economy keeps people within the tribe friendly. In biological systems, the sharing economy balances and stabilizes population size. In a physical sense, the sharing economy is simply the laws of thermodynamics.

When the food is abundant, the feeder population grows... until it eats up enough of its food that the food population begins to diminish. As the food population diminishes, the feeder population diminishes. This lets the food population rise and become abundant again, which allows the feeder population to grow... until it eats up enough food to diminish the food population and then the feeder population goes down and then the food population goes up and then the feeder population goes up ...forever, through the eons of time.

Energy moves from one biological system to another through the food and feeder relationship.

Energy moves from one physical system to another through conversion of mass into heat and light and back to mass again.

Energy moves from one social system to another according to where its participants put their attention.

It's all about energy flow.

And those are the A-B-C's of ecology.