A new study came out this week titled ‘Global diversity and energy of animals shaping the Earth’s surface‘. The authors’ findings should come as no surprise. It’s a subject I wrote about extensively in Wildlife in the Balance: Why Animals are Humanity’s Best Hope. The sheer scale of animal impactWhat 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 More on our planet continues to defy scientific belief. Yet it’s there and plain to see. The question of why wildlife’s heavy-lifting shapes our planet for the better still remains to be fully appreciated though.
Why is the Earth shaped by animals?
It’s not so much how they shape the Earth that we should be curious about. It’s more a question of ‘why’. Because they they do it, is a window into our own role on Earth. It evidences the interconnectedness of our minds, bodies and existence, with the everyday machinations of quadrillions of animals getting on with life. We are part of this system and alone we cannot keep it intact. We need it functioning the way it needs to, in order to build our own fabric for life.
An ant’s decision whether to turn over a grain of sand today, is part of the story of humanity.
When the scientists added up the known energyEnergy and nutrients are the same thing. Plants capture energy from the Sun and store it in chemicals, via the process of photosynthesis. The excess greenery and waste that plants create, contain chemicals that animals can eat, in order to build their own bodies and reproduce. When a chemical is used this way, we call it a nutrient. As we More it takes for over 500 animals to shift the Earth’s soils and rocks, they found it was equivalent to more than half a million major floods a year. This is a slightly cumbersome analogy though, since it’s loss of wildlilfe and functioning floodplain 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, that has largely contributed to soil loss and flooding.
The scientists also surmise that domestic livestock is doing 450 times more heavy-lifting than wildlife. However, for reasons I’ll come back to, that’s not all good news.
To understand the relevance of these findings in-context, we have to imagine these impacts happening every year, for literally millions of years. Then we need to understand why it’s happening. As one reviewer pointed out, ‘in many cases [animals] amplify erosion‘. If animals amplifyAmplification (of nutrients and energy). Animals consume plants and other animals and in doing so, reintroduce important energy-containing nutrients back into the environment, at even higher concentrations and in patches. Amplification of energy is driven by migration and happens at every scale, from insects moving daily in and out of your vegetable patch, to African wildebeest herds and the seasonal More erosion, this begs the question … why doesn’t Earth disintegrate? How was it even possible for evolution to happen? How could humans have existed in the first place?
Why doesn’t the Earth disintegrate?
The answer is somewhat complex and I tackled this for the first time in Wildlife in the Balance. All the energy animals shift around is contained on Earth in a dynamic form that collapses and decays everything around us, unless there are animals to reverse the process. Animal evolution, it turns out, originates from a pattern-forming behaviour of everything, leading to the most stable structures. It’s not that Earth isn’t disintegrating, it’s that it’s slowed to a crawl, allowing humanity time to exist.
An ant’s decision whether to turn over a grain of sand today, is part of the story of humanity.
For a moment, let’s return to domestic animals. Domestic animals can do more harm than good. This is because they lack autonomy and connection to the environment. Their culture and ability to make nature-positive decisions, has been taken from them. What we need in the balance, is to give existing wildlife autonomy and preserve their culture. From elephants, to whales and even ants, allowing them space to move and live.
Becoming wise
This study is another in a barrage of academic papers published in the last few years, acknowledging the scale of animal impact on Earth. It’s also placed this within an energy context, which is important. Because we’re all built from material that came from stars and our bodies are fuelled by a star (our Sun). This energy has to be normalised and controlled on Earth, or else we descend into 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.
Only once we acknowledge the sheer power of animals (and our role in looking after nature, so it can look after us) can we begin to make wise choices. This means accepting why we are completely dependent on wildife in the balance. We can then turn that wisdom into something we can use to better our own futures.
