Would Mother Nature Wear a Sealskin Coat?

A correspondent recently opposed the seal hunt with the following argument:

“By definition, healthy ecosystems are perfectly balanced. All the participating organisms, including humans, have evolved while coexisting, and thus form a well-tuned whole. One cannot improve a perfect system; modification can only make it less perfect.”

Amazingly enough, this seems to be a common point of view.

But it is nevertheless a very strange one.

Nature left to itself is perfectly balanced? Then how to account for those plagues of locusts as early as Biblical times? There was another one across North Africa last summer.

Wallace, co-discoverer of the Theory of Evolution by NaturalSelection, scoffed at such claims of a balance in nature.

"The numbers of wild animals are constantly varying to a greater or less extent, and the variations are usually irregular in period and always irregular in amplitude."

This can, quite naturally, reduce species to very low numbers, even to the point of extinction. Stephen Jay Gould's concept of "punctuated equilibrium" relies on these natural fluctuations; without them, we cannot explain the fossil record.

I recommend a brilliant paper on this issue by Canadian KimCuddington, available on the web at:

http://oak.cats.ohiou.edu/~cuddingt/pubs/B&P.pdf

As she points out, the term “balanced” in this context has no meaning, beyond expressing an arbitrary preference for the “natural” over the cultivated. Indeed, even the term “natural” itself is badly in need of deconstruction. It’s all a sort of pseudo-religion.

I’d also challenge whether there can be such a thing as a “healthy” or “unhealthy” or “crippled” ecosystem. Sounds like anthropomorphism to me.

And what does it mean to say “Nature” is “perfect”? Perfection is more commonly an attribute of God. I can see the sense of talking about a theoretical “perfect” equilateral triangle, of course always with the proviso that such a thing cannot occur in nature. What can it mean to claim that nature itself is “perfect”?

I suppose one is entitled to a religion of nature worship. But it should at least be recognized as a question of faith, not science.

And note an apparent inconsistency here. The correspondent himself argues that perfection necessarily implies an absence of change: “One cannot improve a perfect system; modification can only make it less perfect.” For this very reason, Mother Nature is an unlikely candidate for divinity. For the word itself, “nature,” means change: “nature” is that which is born (and, by extension, dies). So it cannot be perfect in the sense claimed.


Of course, actions on natural systems can have unforeseen results. As with most things, it is nevertheless true that humans have a better chance of managing them than does random chance. Compare any managed garden to a vacant lot. Granted, the garden probably never produces exactly what the gardener intended, but it probably comes a good deal closer to it than does the vacant lot next door.


And what qualifies as “destroying an ecosystem”? Is it any change, or any human change? Or is it a certain level of change? If so, what level? Because ecosystems can’t really cease to exist, barring some sort of cosmic cataclysm.

In practice, eco-advocates seem to define “destroying an ecosystem” as any major human change, and are merely expressing a prejudice against humans. For lions and gazelles, as Wallace points out, are certainly capable of changing their ecosystems—to the extent of eliminating other species.


Yet in opposing all human intervention, eco-advocates are faced with a paradox: humans themselves are part of any natural landscape. It is profoundly unnatural to remove them. They usually seek to overcome this by making a radical difference between modern “civilized” agriculture and the traditional activities of “aboriginal” or “primitive” groups.

So this correspondent:

“These [plagues of locusts] are symptoms of a damaged ecosystem. Cultivation cripples an ecosystem by reducing genetic diversity to a fraction of the original species. Locust populations would not boom without a large monoculture of grain plants on which to feed.”

But unwanted change to the environment is actually more likely to happen in a “primitive" or “aboriginal” culture, as this generally means a culture having less material technology. It rather follows that, with less knowledge of nature, one is less likely to use it wisely.

Recall, if you will, some of the examples of treatment of other species by North American Indians: chasing entire herds of buffalo off cliffs; burning entire forests to snare fleeing animals.

There is nothing “respectful of nature” here. Just rather inefficient, wasteful, material technology. Given the rifle and the horse, the Plains Indians did not reject them in order to maintain their spiritual balance with the buffalo.


And what if such plagues are indeed caused by cultivation per se? Where does that leave us? If human cultivation were banned or prevented, there would be a massive die-off of that particular species, humans. It would be far greater, both proportionately and in absolute numbers, than anything happening as a result of the hunt of harbour seals. How justify the one while opposing the other? How justify this extreme preference for one species over another?

In any case, this cannot account for the massive die-offs and ballooning of species we find in the fossil record. These clearly happened without human cultivation.


What about the notion of human "monoculture?"

The climate in North Africa (I am nearby, in the Persian Gulf) is pretty monocultural with or without a human presence. The number of viable species is quite limited in such severe climates. With human intervention, it is probably more diverse than it would be naturally. Ditto the Canadian prairies. They naturally have a pretty limited range of species. Humans, with their supposed monoculture, have probably introduced many more new species there than they could have made extinct, at least in historical times. This may not be true everywhere; but it is commonly true, of areas under cultivation.

Cultivation also probably usually produces a larger biomass than wilderness, with such improvements as irrigation and systematic reseeding. So it presumably means more animals and plants, in absolute terms, get to live. Why would anyone be opposed to this, unless they care nothing for either animals or plants, let alone human beings, but only for an anthropomorphized abstraction such as “Nature”?

I’d call it all silly Romanticism, except that this would not be fair to the Romantics. For it was William Blake who wisely wrote, “Without man, nature is barren.”