In her latest book Kristin Ohlsen investigates the body of knowledge that describes how cooperation, not competition, has created life on Earth as we know it. I highly recommend you read Sweet in Tooth and Claw’s vibrant history of our role in nature and our understanding of our relationship with it. Here is my Sweet in Tooth and Claw book review.
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It’s hugely satisfying when you read any book that validates your own thoughts. In this case, every page of Sweet in Tooth and Claw is loaded with examples I want to share with you. I’m humbled by Ohlen’s depth of investigation. Focusing on mutualism (or cooperation) she details many points I could only remark on briefly in Wildlife in the Balance.
Isn’t this the most exciting time to be alive? There is a paradigm shift happening which is going to change our attitudes to wildlife forever. Science has been a bit slow to keep up but the evidence is not coming from there. It’s from people living inside nature, not studying it from the outside.
This is giving us a new way to see the world and authors like Ohlsen are essential in helping scientists rebuild the narrative. Books like this and others I have reviewed recently, are at the front line of creating important conversations – conversations we need to have, if we’re to learn to rebuild a habitable world.
Fighting is no way to survive
Why do humans try to cheat ecosystemsHow ecosystems function An ecosystem is a community of lifeforms that interact in such an optimal way that how ecosystems function best, is when all components (including humans and other animals) can persist and live alongside each other for the longest time possible. Ecosystems are fuelled by the energy created by plants (primary producers) that convert the Sun's heat energy More? Does that make us bad animals? Cheating is uncooperative but is also common in the animal kingdom.
Ohlsen refers to work done by scientists from the University of Arizona studying bumblebees. They found that some bees bite through flowers to gain easier access to nectar. But this also bypasses pollination. So, if it’s easier for bees to ‘cheat’, how come the plants don’t die out?
Most of us choose not to cheat because we can envisage the chaos(Of energy and ecosystems). Ecosystems are thermodynamically driven. Disorder occurs when energy dissipates and becomes more chaotic. For example, the release of hot air into the atmosphere results in that energy is freer to disperse (maximum entropy). The opposite is true when energy is locked into biological processes, when it is stored inside molecules (minimum entropy). Stability in ecosystems occurs More if everyone did likewise.
This is one of those wonderful situations in ecology where systems-thinking is needed. Cheating, like aggression and uncooperative behaviour is a large part of any society. Indeed, it seems sometimes to dominate our own world.
Cheats die out and cooperatives survive
This got me thinking. In humanity there is no greater example of cheating than to go to war. One of the things that makes Putin’s war with Ukraine so horrendous is its natural absurdity.
A friend of mine who once worked with the Australian security services reminded me that ‘a collaboration of the western world’s leading military forces couldn’t keep hold of a country fought for by people with home-made guns living in caves’. Putin will never overthrow Ukraine for the same reason Afghanistan returned to the Taliban. That amount of ‘cheating the system’ or forcing an outcome, cannot be sustained.
Thankfully the vast majority of of humans and animals are kind, compassionate and responsible.
Evolutionary biologist Suzanne Sadedin points this out in an article in Forbes Magazine,38 saying that humans are mostly nice to each other and we are disappointed when we act selfishly.
from ‘Wildlife in the Balance‘
Does the bee comprehend this? Is compassion part of its emotional arsenal? After all, scientists have recently shown how bees like to simply play. Does a bee need to know it’s behaving nicely? Just because we can make calculated decisions, does that mean any other animal needs to justify itself ‘inside its own mind’ before doing the right thing?
These are not new ideas.
Kropotkin, an unsung genius
Ohlsen presents an utterly fascinating biography of Russian anarchist Peter Kropotkin from the late 1800s. It’s worth buying the book for his remarkable life story alone. As Ohlsen says
‘… film-makers looking for flesh-and-blood superheroes could have a cinematic contender in this man’.
When he wasn’t running from the Russian police, in jail or exile, Kropotkin studied nature. He was an unsung genius and disciple of Darwin who questioned the extent to which animals really do fight for a living, observing that:
‘We know at the present time that all animals, beginning with the ants, going on to the birds, and ending with the highest mammals, are fond of plays, wrestling, running after each other, trying to capture each other, teasing each other, and so on’. adding that this is ‘a manifestation of sociability proper, which is a distinctive feature of all the animal world’.
Peter Kropotkin, late 1800s, quote from Sweet in Tooth and Claw.
Surely our (human) decisions to cooperate are just as instinctive? One of the only things that seems to separate us from the animal kingdom is our ability to contemplate the consequence of our actions before we do them. Think about the queues of cars lined up on the freeway exit. A few unscrupulous drivers nudge in at the front of the queue but the vast majority (hundreds) wait their turn patiently.
Most of us choose not to queue-jump (cheat) because we can envisage the chaos if everyone did likewise.
Is a similar version of empathy in-built in the culture of wildlife? It seems so. Does it matter if the bee is cooperative, plays or has empathy instinctively, without being able to think about it first? Probably not.
That is a truly fascinating idea that I had not considered before doing this Sweet in Tooth and Claw book review. It may warrant more thought. We are so careful not to place human characteristics on animals that we can forget how similar we, in actual fact, to them.
Our extraordinary relationship with microbiota
Meanwhile, one group of animals we can’t wage war on are microscopic biota. In the book’s early chapters, Ohlsen looks at this subject in some detail, and it blew my mind.
‘The skin microbiome has been shown to help with wound healing and protection against pathogens … chimpanzees who engage in lots of … intimate social behaviours had a more diverse microbiota. ‘Now that we know that most microorganisms are commensal [just living there peacefully] or even beneficial, it seems reasonable to think that this transfer(of nutrients) the thing that sets animals apart from plants, is that they can move. Some of the biggest migrations on Earth every day, are the movement of insects like caterpillars, from the stem of a plant to a leaf and back, before turning into butterflies and transferring the energy elsewhere. Large-scale migration of grazing animals and migratory songbirds moves More of microbes is in many ways beneficial’ (Andrew Moeller of Cornell University)’
There is this whole dimension of ecosystems inside us that we are inadvertently damaging. Ohlsen adds:
‘Fifteen percent of the small molecules in our bloodstreams come from … gut microbes, and those interact with every cell in our body.’
I knew that pesticides made things worse by killing other vertebrates. I could even envisage ecological imbalances brought about by this. But Ohlsen has introduced me to this concept on a whole other level.
Our man-made chemicals are waging war on fungi, bacteria and viruses. The world’s leading research scientists have overlooked this and it may just be resulting in the riskiest ecological failure of our modern age – the death of bees.
Gut health and impact of pesticides
Global behemoth Monsanto argues that Roundup only disrupts an enzyme found in plants and micro-organisms. But as Ohlsen discovers ‘honeybees, like humans and most other living things, have a mutualistic relationship with microbes that keeps them healthy.’
Researchers working for genetic engineering companies don’t understand ecosystem function(Of an ecosystem). A subset of ecosystem processes and structures, where the ecosystem does something that provides an ecosystem service of value to people. More … least of all on a microscopic level.
‘… glyphosphate diminishes the presence of eight big players in the bee microbiota and … bees with impaired microbiota are more likely to die when threatened by a pathogen.’
Add neonicotinoids into the mix and microbiota are under constant attack but there is no way to separate animals from the ecosystem, both outside and within themselves. ‘Colony collapse disorder’ is affecting bees and putting whole agricultural economies under threat. Verroa mites never used to be such a problem.
These days it only takes a small number of mites to make a bee fatally ill. The mites are part of an ecosystem and aren’t the real problem. The problem is due to a decline in immune function – the same thing that is causing illness in humans (who are also affected by chemicals for similar reasons).
The researchers were inadvertently asking for a study on how things don’t work rather than how they do work.
Creating more pesticide to treat verroa mite is only going to make things even worse.
As I write this Sweet in Tooth and Claw Book Review I’m reminded about how Elizabeth Kolbert sums things up in Under a White Sky as ‘… people trying to solve problems created by people trying to solve problems.
We cannot fix ecological problems using technology. Science needs to change and begin to appreciate that the complexity of ecosystems is simply too great to control through killing more. We need to stop using pesticides in order to cooperate fully with wildlife.
But first, a paradigm change in attitudes to nature is needed, before things make sense enough for scientists to work this out.
Controlling for the misconceptions in science
Agricultural technology has removed people from the landscape. Industrialisation replaces humans living inside a system and replaces them with genetic engineering, chemicals and machines. This has also led to a global-scale scientific error of judgement that means ecological research is more-often-than-not based on an entirely flawed assumption – that people are nature don’t mix.
This fact is wonderfully illustrated when Ohlsen talks about the work of farmer Ivette Perfecto in South America.
Perfecto applied for grants to study integrated coffee farming and biodiversityWhat is the definition of biodiversity? When we ask, what is the definition of biodiversity? It depends on what we want to do with it. The term is widely and commonly misused, leading to significant misinterpretation of the importance of how animals function on Earth and why they matter a great deal, to human survival. Here I will try to More but was blocked by 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 biologists wanting to see a forest ‘control’ included.
Allow me to explain what ‘control’ means.
The scientists wanted one untouched system (the ‘control’) and one changed system. The idea is you measure the difference between the two. There is a fundamental problem with this approach, even though it underpins the vast majority of ecological science.
The ‘control’ would be a forest without people. The conservation biologists assumption is that human activity is the driver for negative change. It may have never occurred to them that people might be the most important driver for ecosystem recovery. It means they have introduced their own arbitrary conceptual bias into the experiment before it even begins.
People are animals too
The reality is that human beings are part and parcel of ecosystems, in particular where human food production is concerned.
Measuring ‘change’ is also moot. The idea is to simply create a functioning ecosystem, one with ecological balance that is also providing an economic source of food. The researchers were inadvertently asking for a study on how things don’t work rather than how they do work.
But science can be so bogged down by years of inertia. This is often underpinned by an almost religious determination to recognise people as separate from nature. This is why many journalists, conservationists and researchers will argue that farming and humanity cannot co-exist. But the problem is not about farming, it’s about the separation of people and biodiversity. Industrialisation has caused ecosystem collapse, not people.
Ecosystems function on complexity, diversity and abundance. People are one of the most powerful and influential animals in that mix and have been for thousands of years.
The incidental consequence of humans spreading out to colonise Earth tens of thousands of years ago was to build the incredibly biodiverse animal-driven ecological structures needed to support and sustain our species … Twelve-thousand years ago, over ninety per cent of temperate and tropical ecosystems may have been reshaped by our species.
from ‘Wildlife in the Balance‘
If a system has lots of wildlife in the right ‘balance’ and is working economically, that is evidence of success.
The only control we need is a glance at the abject failure of all other industrial efforts and start rebuilding wildlife populations.
Conclusion
I loved doing this Sweet in Tooth and Claw book review but there is so much more you can learn from reading it. Thank you Kristin Ohlsen for this piece of inspiration!
It’s cooperation with other wildlife (and each other) that is key to our survival. That is the dominant force beneath everything.
As Ohlsen sets out, cooperation is everywhere, once you know how to look. But for too long you might have been seeing the non-cooperative components. That is the diet of culture you’ve been brought up on.
If you haven’t done already, get a copy and start reading and helping tell these stories. Because we all have a role to play in shifting the narrative and creating the global change in human values needed to secure our own futures.
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