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Animal Impact

by simon

What is Animal Impact?

Without wildlife, Earth would not be habitable for humans, because it’s animals that stabilise ecosystems. It’s a fundamental law of nature that animals (and humans) exist because we are the most likely lifeforms to minimise environmental chaos. Animal impact, therefore, is a measure of how much all wildlife is collectively responsible for creating a habitable Earth.

The term “impact” describes the role that animals have in supporting nature-based solutions and ecosystem function–like a charity’s impact statement, the outcome is positive.

Animals, through their actions to stabilise ecosystems, create global food security and maximise carbon capture (creating climate resilience). If we allow mass extinction to continue, even while addressing atmospheric carbon, the system will be too chaotic to support us.   

  • How do animals make our planet liveable?

    How do animals make our planet liveable?

    The first land animals appeared on Earth about 350 million years ago but the runway for creatures of our kind to take off was bumpy. Long before that, the first…

The first and most important thing to realise is, that human beings are high-order mammals. We came after all the other creatures. We live on the very rim of a network of processes that had to be established before we existed and in order to obtain nutrients at sufficient concentration, we needed animals to transfer, amplify and concentrate the planet’s energy (nutrients), so we have enough to feed ourselves.

The story of Animal Impact, justifies why we have to conserve animals and how conservation is absolutely essential for the future of the human race. 

This will be the subject of my forthcoming book, so make sure you sign up to my mailing list.

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A more detailed overview of the science

  • Plants capture the Sun’s energy and create massive amounts of waste and heat (enough to cause mass extinction in the Devonian, before land animals evolved). 
  • Herbivores graze this excess and after about six steps in the trophic pyramid, enough of this free surplus energy is entrained into biological processes. FSE release increases system entropy and leads to pollution and destabilisation of the chemical pathways. It’s the reduction in nutrients that balances things like climate and soil fertility. If you take the animals away, the resulting increases, cause ecosystem chaos and collapse. 
  • It’s not the number of species, or even so-called “keystone” species that matter. To stabilise ecosystems, requires an abundance of animals in the right proportions. When Maximum Entropy Production (MEP) is achieved (this takes about 25 million years), free surplus energy is minimised leading to resources that are predictable in time and space – this is how animals know where to forage (the evolutionary process is hand in glove – entropy processes also drive evolution of behaviour and speciation). 
  • The primary reason animals are the only mechanism that can minimise chaos, is because they are mobile. Migration, at any scale, is the pivotal mechanism for ecosystem stability. Plants cannot achieve this, because they are both sedentary and such powerful primary producers, that they create massive amounts of residual energy and waste. 
  • Humans can only exist within the animal domain, not the plants. We evolved as part of the MEP process that stabilised ecosystems, and we’re part of it. We cannot exist without our supporting cast of animals. This is because our metabolism requires access to predictable resources at suitable concentrations to feed ourselves and our entire farming and fisheries are built on the spatial redistribution of nutrients by animals. 
  • The MEP function that animals do, is to transfer, amplify and concentrate nutrients where and when other animals (including humans) expect it. That’s how the most fertile farmland and rich fisheries came into being. In the oceans, this transfer mechanism has declined massively.  
  • As we destabilise ecosystems by driving animals to extinction, we release more and more free energy into lower trophic levels, where patches become less concentrated and less predictable, meaning a more chaotic ecosystem. This leads to a break down in the information needed by animals to find food (this is why we end up with unpredictable and changing wildlife distributions).      
  • Conservation is beset with the need to conserve animals but considers their role as one that is based on ecosystems … the truth is, animals are critical to ecosystem stabilisation and the sole mechanism that made ecosystems habitable for humans and animals alike. 
  • Animals, therefore, create global food security and maximise carbon capture (creating climate resilience). If we allow mass extinction to continue, even while addressing atmospheric carbon, the system will be too chaotic to support adequate food security.   

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