‘The original budget of $30 million ballooned to $200 million. In April, Bass’s bankers, accompanied by armed federal marshals and sheriff’s deputies, issued a restraining order against management … In the words of scientists looking back at the grand experiment, “It proved impossible to create a materially closed systems that could support eight human beings with adequate food, water, and air, for two years.” The unknowns are too great, the surprises too many, and the complexity of Earth’s real biosphere too vast to fully comprehend’
DeFries was writing about the failed Biosphere2 experiment, a private initiative to work out if human life can be maintained on distant planets. It’s a way of saying it can’t … and that we need to look after the planet we have.
Only a scientist who listens to the world and spends time in nature can write a book like this, someone who is regularly immersed in the complexity of the world. DeFries talks of wilderness trips with her family and presents an acutely humbling view of how little we know – for which DeFries uses the metaphor of dragons, like in old nautical charts, depicting the unexplored.
It’s a simple and light read with one clear message: that our survival depends, not on creating our own way of behaving, but to adopt the methods that nature uses to overcome complexity. Nature, after all, doesn’t use learned knowledge to survive. Its skills are based on millions of years of practice makes perfect – it’s easier for us to watch nature than to try to reinvent the wheel.
The author compares the failures and success of key societal systems such as food security and climate, against what animals do and how resilienceReferring to an ecosystem’s ability to maintain a steady stable-state. The need to build resilience is entirely anthropocentric and symptomatic of ecosystems that are damaged or declining, leading to loss of ecosystem services on which humans depend. More is formed through cooperative and localised structures that self-correct. Diversity, adaptation, network architecture and grass-roots decision-making are all successful strategies we can learn from nature.
DeFries gives copious examples of systems similar to nature that have worked and other deviant ideas that have proved useless, as they try to run counter to natural laws and she lauds the work of the Nobel Prize-winning economist Elinor Ostrom whose ground-breaking theories have helped influence the way we perceive people managing common law resources like fisheries, forests and climate, saying:
‘As birds form flocks and ants carry food to nests using bottom-up principles of communication and collective action, people can solve their own problems’.
What I took away from this book was the strongest sense that to live sustainably, we need to empower local people to determine their own environmental outcomes as we are animals and nature will find a way quickest, if given the freedom to do what it does best. DeFries documents examples of centralised management of grain and climate, which inevitably led to failure, adding:
‘The idea that one set of rules does not fit all, without a central commanding authority, seems discordant to the human psyche. It runs counter to the popular notion of “scalability”. But evolution’s experience shows that order can emerge without blueprints or control from a top-down authority’.
Right now, the world is seeing a huge global move against centralised power that has proven to damage the environment. It is one of our planet’s greatest hopes. It certainly exceeds anything I could have imagined years ago. DeFries reminds us that this isn’t just hopeful but essential. Giving people more power over how they use the places they live and love, will lead to greater and faster outcomes for nature.
This 166 pages is a great read for a weekend. DeFries deliberately labours some of the intention but it’s necessary to instil the main points, as thinking about nature as an enabler for humanity, as opposed to a commodity, is not a common way of thinking these days.
Mostly I am delighted to have found an author who is writing down many of the things we are all thinking. It’s nice to discover an accordance with the principles of nature that we hold dear.
I do think it’s a shame that DeFries stands in isolation, as one of the few with the wisdom to draw these connections and frame them in a way that is clearly essential for our society’s future. I would like to see this book become more widely influential.
I’d encourage anyone interested in conservationWhy is animal conservation important? Animal conservation is important, because animals are the only mechanism to create biodiversity, which is the mechanism that creates a habitable planet for humans. Without animals, the energy from today’s plants (algae, trees, flowers etc) will eventually reach the atmosphere and ocean, much of it as carbon. The quantity of this plant-based waste is so More to get a copy and read it!
‘What Would Nature Do? A Guide for our Uncertain Times’ by Ruth DeFries is published by Columbia University Press.
