Hacker News Reader

Comment by spiderfarmer | Hacker News Reader

My problem with the term “ecological balance” is that it doesn’t exist. It’s a mythical term that seems invented by Disney. Nature is brutal. Populations will get wiped out, species will disappear.

That’s exactly why having a lot of species is important. But it’s hardly balanced.

View on HN

It does seem that there are periods and places where things are in equilibrium, or stable. At some point, something typically comes along and disturbs that balance. This can be seen in the fossil record, where you have lots of species going extinct during fairly short periods of time, while there are other times when not much happens.

What people are concerned about is that we, as humans, are the thing that is disturbing the balance at the moment.

Equilibrium truly doesn’t exist in nature. https://willsarvis.medium.com/the-myth-of-balance-in-nature-...

Things are not stable between the mass extinctions - the mass extinction events are just extreme events of high relevance.

The thing is that Earth is constantly shifting in unpredictable ways. There was an interesting paper recently published working to reconstruct the temperature record of the last 500 million years. [1]

The paper concluded that global mean temperatures varied (over time) in a range from 11c to 36c. We're currently around 15. And temperature is but one of countless variables, most all of which are constantly changing.

This makes longterm equilibriums basically impossible because each time things change, it disrupts the existing balance and there will be new winners and new losers.

[1] - https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.adk3705

I think the point is that those promoting ecological balance are concerned that humanity itself may be an extreme event of high relevance.

The TV series “All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace” talks about how scientists tried to simulate balance in nature with control theory and found that there isn’t much balance at all. The premise that there is balance, despite being very popular, was shown to be false.

I recommend a watch, it is very well-directed too. But here is Wikipedia saying the theory has been discredited if you don’t want to spend the time on the documentary series: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Balance_of_nature

I worry this view is both pedantic and harmful.

Of course over geologic scales extinctions are quite normal, and nothing is static.

That doesn't mean ecosystems aren't normally resilient to perturbations on a smaller timescales: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecological_stability

>Populations will get wiped out, species will disappear.

There is plenty of evidence that extinction rates are extremely high right now, and that humans are culpable. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/brv.12816

> I worry this view is both pedantic and harmful.

Yes it seems like excuse for enlightened apathy.

Why? It doesn't retract from the fact that biodiversity is important.

Biodiversity is important because nature is brutal.

And it's clear to anyone who is willing to listen that humans are culpable. But that doesn't mean nature will return to an equilibrium when humans disappear.

Is it really brutal? Can you single out "nature" and its characteristics?

Brutal sounds like a value judgement, one that I suspect explains nothing about the fact.

Can we accept that it just is, and we're part of that, for all our vices and virtues?

Embrace nature and go live in the jungle without clothes, tools, fire, water, food, medicine. Calling it brutal after such an experience wouldn’t be dismissed as a value judgement.

Since nature is brutal and natural balance does not exist, should we humans try to enforce an “unnatural balance” in order to preserve ourselves, or is that folly?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com