It’s certainly exciting times to be writing on this topic. First off, a big shout out to the /r/ecology /r/nature and /r/megafaunarewilding threads on Reddit. The discussions and content are truly enlightening. Thank you to everyone who has interacted.

Yesterday there was a really great conversation that began on the subject of native garden revegetation /u/rflil posted a great resource for native gardens in North America, showing on why native plants are better than non-native for climate adaptation. The study found that native plants have twice as many bees, three times as many butterflies and 50% more birds.

An accompanying graphic stated “native trees support twice the caterpillar diversity”, followed by the statement “caterpillars in your yard might sound alarming …”

Plants do not “support” animals, it’s the other way around and if we knew that, we could more easily convince gardeners (and farmers) that animals are critical to creating better soil, reducing pest-risk, cost us far less in habitat management … not to mention, they are essential to addressing climate risk too (noting that in a discussion on nature-based solutions and “connecting to nature” recently, it was pointed out to me, that people don’t like insects).

Just to be clear, there is nothing wrong with the work.

These two statements together are simply what fascinate me most as they cut to the heart of a problem that the ecology industry faces and could better-empower conservationists and nature-based solutions.

So why do ecologists get this wrong?

In a nutshell, even small ecosystems like gardens, are highly complex. Ecologists compartmentalise systems in an effort to try to understand the mechanisms but the overall patterns are so complex, they can never be described in totality. It’s also because we’re big, blundering mammals and we only see what we see. We observe a cloak of green and believe that’s the sum total. Animals, birds and insects are both less abundant and free-ranging, so unless we happen to stumble across a moment when there are lots, our instinct is to assume their impact is insignificant.

Today’s dominant scientific approach can be traced back to the early 1900s, where there was a bifurcation in theory. You had Einstein’s views on the second theory of thermodynamics alongside Darwin’s theory of natural selection and debate had begun, about the paradox (the Schrödinger paradox) between the two. If ecosystems are entropy-driven, how can they stabilise through natural selection? There is more to discuss about Schrödinger and his infamous cat thought-experiment, but that’s for another blog.

It wasn’t until recently, that scientists such as England [1] and Friston [2], have been able to more completely answer how entropy and natural selection are compatible.

Meanwhile, there were two world wars and out of the dust of the “years the locusts hath eaten” (Churchill was talking about the collapse of global economies) came a revolution in scientific method, designed to maximise agricultural yield. This approach branched away and led to much of what we presume about how ecosystems work today and our fundamental approach to experimental research and statistical design.

The latter approach suffers from the complex systems dilemma. It’s easy to experiment with corn and add fertiliser to create maximum yield. It’s relatively simple to experiment with grazing regimes to maximise plant growth to create maximum caterpillar yield but neither of single systems could exist in their own right and it’s highly unlikely, that either would exist in nature, except in specific situations.

We study broken systems and rely on controlled experiments (where we deliberately break a system to see what happens). When we try to rebuild broken systems, we take an inherently linear approach but ecosystems don’t work like that.

Let’s take a pause for thought. What are we trying to achieve? Do we want a self-regulating planet where nature-based solutions are provided as a service, or do we want to pay for and manage ecosystems in perpetuity? I don’t think the latter can work as how would we afford it? If we want a return to steady, stable-state process-driven ecosystems, we need a new paradigm. Because let’s face it, business as usual isn’t working very well is it?

Ecosystem processes are neither linear nor cyclical, they are simultaneous and integral. What we don’t study – and on land in particular, can almost never study – are pristine ecosystems. This is because 70% of the land surface of Earth is already colonised by humans and the remainder is almost completely modified / broken. The situation that created, say, high-diversity ancient grasslands in Europe, stabilised over millions of years (thanks to these being among the richest with animals and plants per unit area in the world) and once the ground is disturbed, it’s almost impossible to recreate.

In order to rebuild an ecosystem, to create a steady stable-state, you have to identify and rebuild structure, function and processes simultaneously. That means going back to Einstein’s theory and applying a new way of thinking, a departure from what ecologists have been traditionally taught, about how things work.

There are very few, if any, examples of how this has been done well. The Rothwell Sanctuary in Melbourne’s You Yang ranges is possibly one of the few examples I know of, where a whole-system approach is being taken. But this is incidental … these are land managers who use observational study and field manipulation and have “invented” the result.

In Lovelock’s Novocene, he talks about the fact that research doesn’t invent things. The biggest leaps forward in human endeavour have been created by minds experimenting with that they intuitively thought would work. Science often cannot explain what has occurred until much later. The greatest physicist of the 19th century, James Clerk Maxwell, “lay awake for three nights” trying and failing to explain, how James Watt’s steam engine governor worked.

True inventors don’t know what will work, they just believe based on evidence and experience, they can make it work. We didn’t know for certain that epidemiologists could create a safe and effective mRNA COVID vaccine using lipid-based nanoparticles but we just did it. It’s never been done before. The scientists continuously experimented with ideas and intuition, until they made something. I sincerely doubt they know exactly how it all works, just that it does. What would have been the point in waiting to describe the mechanism?

“Dynamic, self-regulating systems wholly defy a logical explanation that uses step-by-step arguments”

–James Lovelock, Novocene (2020)

The mass extinction crisis, climate change and human food security are all based on nature and if we resort to science to describe mechanisms upfront using linear thinking, we will never be able to engineer what should be intuitively obvious and this will simply hasten our own demise as a species on Earth.

Back to the subject of why animals are essential for ecosystem stability.

In a thermodynamic system, the greatest sources of energy pose the highest risk, in the absence of something to moderate their effects. Plants are “primary producers” and are so awesomely powerful, that their rise on land during the Devonian, contributed to the extinction of almost all animals on Earth (at the time, living exclusively in the ocean). It was only the rise of animals and entire trophic pyramids, that captured enough free energy, to stabilise the atmosphere and ocean chemistry. This process took a few hundred millions of years.

Humans evolved into, and as part of, these entropy processes. Humans are just another animal and it was the distribution and abundance of animals on Earth, that created habitable conditions for our species. That remains the case today, with 50% of global Gross Domestic Product (GDP) dependent on nature [3].

So, when we assume vegetation is the most important component of an ecosystem, we ignore the fact that we are animals, born into a community of animals. We ignore the way ecosystems function thermodynamically and the threat plants alone, impose on ecosystem stability. We ignore the fact that we cannot stabilise Earth’s habitats without animals and that one animal species isn’t enough, to achieve balance and only that can be achieved, with animals in the right proportions.

We also assume vegetation can be recreated like-for-like. Sadly, much of the world’s land has been absent of megafauna for thousands of years and abundant predators for a hundred or more. The underlying conditions have altered so much, I’m not convinced that the definition of “native” versus “non-native” applies so strongly in many cases. After all, we’ve created “non-native” soil nutrient conditions because we have lost 68% of individual wild animals in the last 50 years [4]–the animals that were critical to ecosystem function, on which ecosystem processes were built and human survival depends.

Whatever we rebuild now, cannot be the same as what came before. It can only be similar, and only in habitats where animals were recently, or still present.

“Changes in vegetation composition due to varying grazing intensity should be more easily reversible in systems with a long evolutionary history of grazing, which are more resilient … in contrast, systems with a short evolutionary history of grazing are non-resilient, and thus will switch irreversibly to an alternative state when subjected to intense recent grazing” [5]

This is why gardeners, farmers, conservation scientists, amateur naturalists and ecologists, academic or corporate, need to separate the study of ecology from the management of ecosystems. Otherwise, we’re trying to rebuild old components into a new operating system.

Think of Earth like software on a PC … at the base is MS-DOS. This basal operating system is like the sunlight that hits the Earth and all the physical continents and ocean. Microsoft Windows sits on top of MS-DOS. It’s like the plant layer, that translates the basic operations into functions that can be read by software. Then, to make life liveable, we need a suite (an “ecosystem”) of interacting software. This is run by the animals (including humans), much in the way you are currently running the computer or phone you’re using to read this. When we all operate altogether, we perform our daily tasks as part of a system, which has ‘biodiversity’ value throughout.

https://simonmustoe.blog/animals-and-ocean-deoxygenation/

Suffice to say, there are far more examples of failures in habitat restoration than there are successes and this has led me to think deeply about what is missing. The answer I always come back to is … wildlife and animals. It seems abundantly clear to me, that an absence of wild animals hinders ecosystem restoration, because free energy makes our efforts mundane and chaotic. Chaos is our biggest enemy, because it’s entropy-formed and it’s what leads to cost-blowouts and failures to create sustainable habitat.

Going back to the aforementioned study. It’s a little cynical of me, perhaps, to say the plants don’t support animals in any way. At least in the outset, if you’re recreating habitat in a place where there are still some wild animals e.g. butterflies and birds, then it stands to reason, that plants they feed and breed in, will be beneficial to attracting them. This is only the case, however, in the short-term. If the habitat outcome you’re looking for is low-impact, low-intensity, low-management and long-term, then the animals will become the determining factor that creates the outcome. When we promote conservation, therefore, we could do better to explain why the animals are integrally important and not just the icing on the cake.

How much better would it be, if we could explain to the world, why insects in our gardens are actually essential to planetary health and our own survival?

While the elevation of animals to process drivers may seem trivial to some, it does completely alter the way we value biodiversity, the decisions we make and our likelihood of successful land restoration. In my opinion, it’s the missing piece of the biodiversity puzzle. That without restoration of animal populations, we cannot restore our planet’s land to a functioning system.

In the next blog post, I’m going to write about kangaroos. Conservationists are considering widescale killing of these animals (the largest megafauna left in the country) that are essential to stability; why, putting vegetation first, has led to this decision; and how that could be a terrible outcome for land management.

The narrative of why animals matter, will be the subject of my book and I often get asked for citations. This isn’t possible, because no-one has synthesised the bibliography before and what I’ve tried to explain here covers a great deal of information in a very concise way. If you’re interested in knowing more, then make sure you sign up to my mailing list. I’m covering sections of this as topics arise and you’ll be among the first to hear about the book.

Spotlight

Buy Wildlife in the Balance Worldwide

https://simonmustoe.blog/join-my-mailing-list/

1. England, J., Statistical Physics of Self-Replication. The Journal of chemical physics, 2013. 139: p. 121923.
2. Friston, K., A Free Energy Principle for Biological Systems. Entropy (Basel, Switzerland), 2012. 14: p. 2100-2121.
3. WEF (2020) Nature Risk Rising: Why the Crisis Engulfing Nature Matters for Business and the Economy. http://www3.weforum.org/docs/WEF_New_Nature_Economy_Report_2020.pdf
4. Haddaway, N. and D. Leclère, WWF Living Planet Report 2020. 2020.
5. Cingolani, A., I. Noy-Meir, and S. Diaz, Grazing effects on rangeland diversity: A synthesis of contemporary models. Ecological Applications – ECOL APPL, 2005. 15: p. 757-773.