No offense meant at all to your brother, it sounds like an interesting investigation. That said, the answer to these sorts of eco-questions always seems to be that the way nature has worked for millions of years is actually the best way (for loads of reasons we didn't know) - and if we mess with it too much, there will be some problems. This just seems kind of inevitable though. If nature's way didn't work, it wouldn't be happening. I suppose finding the reasons behind it being optimal are where the "meat" of such an investigation is. Interesting stuff.
Your comment bothers me because it is based on very shaky premises.
Nature doesn’t work in the most optimal way, so it’s not always best to replicate it. Tons of things happen in nature that may wipe out important ecosystems. I suppose one could argue that at a long enough time scale it will even out but that time scale can be millennia. In the meantime, nature can wreak tons of havoc.
Nature (and by that I mean ecosystems because nature is a vague) also doesn’t behave in necessarily intuitive or easily observable ways either. What might seem “obvious” at first can be very wrong.
Nature (and again I mean ecosystems) also doesn’t exist in vacuums. What may have worked for centuries can be upset by even the most subtle of temperature shifts, and those might be caused by effects hundreds of miles away.
Unchecked nature is also not always going to be conducive to human needs either.
The entire field requires constant observation and inference. Even the ways of indigenous people that are fetishized as natures way by many, are scientific in nature. They’re the result of many years of observation, experimentation, learning and modifying how nature works to fit our needs.
"but that time scale can be millennia. In the meantime, nature can wreak tons of havoc."
For sure - I suppose I'm questioning humans' ability to mitigate such havoc without causing a load of unintended consequences.
"Nature (and by that I mean ecosystems because nature is a vague) also doesn’t behave in necessarily intuitive or easily observable ways either. What might seem “obvious” at first can be very wrong."
I think I was saying a very similar thing, actually. I certainly agree with you on that.
Nothing is "optimal", it's only ever "optimal for". So asking if nature is optimal is nonsense unless we have a firm agreement on what nature is for (which we certainly don't).
But the linked article doesn't have this problem. The "for" there is quite clearly the recovery of forests after logging, so they can be used again for whatever you may be expected to use a forest for (including more logging)
I think you’re arguing against a point that I am not making. In fact I think you’re making the same argument that I am, which is “nature isn’t seeking an optimal outcome because that is too abstract”.
The person I was replying to was saying “just do what nature does”. But that doesn’t mean much. My point was you can’t just blindly follow “nature” without observation and study because it can just as easily go and do something catastrophic as it can do something good.
Optimal as in preserving life if we’re going based off of the person I was replying to, but in general that is hard to define which is part of my point . Nature can just as quickly extinguish entire ecosystems, just as much as it can make them thrive.
Just trusting nature to do the optimal thing and trust that it’ll turn out okay isn’t sensible unless you also don’t care about the constituent parts of that ecosystem.
Insects can ravage entire populations of trees, rendering them dead and inhospitable to wildlife. Blight can do the same. Those are just as much nature at work as happy trees in a forest.
Well, yes and no. Yes, in the sense that 'nature' is what organisms learned in millions of years and the emergent processes of the ecosystems in which they 'learned' things. And because this is so vastly complex, we often don't understand it and our interventions will have unintended consequences.
No, in the sense that humans are actually part of these ecosystems and it is possible for us to understand these processes and work with them. And this is the point of the research posted here: planting native seedlings is superior for restoration than 'just leaving things to nature'.
There's a technical side to this and a 'worldview' side, where there are two competing concepts of 'nature': one defines it as 'everything except humans' and the other includes humans as being part of nature, a useful part even.
"No, in the sense that humans are actually part of these ecosystems and it is possible for us to understand these processes and work with them. And this is the point of the research posted here: planting native seedlings is superior for restoration than 'just leaving things to nature'."
I agree with what you're saying - but I think this point is slightly misleading. Planting native seedlings is exactly what nature would do - we are just accelerating nature's own process - not changing it for another process.
That is well put and also exactly my point. However, you are accelerating something, so there is an intervention. For some people this doesn't count as natural! The word 'just' in your sentence does a lot of work.
The line is, in fact, not always obvious. Would those seedlings have come there naturally? Or would it have been a different mix? If so, is the end result actually the same as would have happened without human intervention, or would it have been different? Maybe there are actually 50 or more species that could and would find a place in this biome.
You can say the same about exotic species, eventually most (or at least some) of them would have come here anyway - via birds for example, but its the pace at which they are introduced which makes all the difference. Well, is it a good thing then to introduce exotic species, after all its just accelerating nature's processes, or is it not? Evidently this one is not always only beneficial, so it depends.
Again, I agree entirely with you (yet still feel the need to respond) :-)
To some extent, who can say what exact mix of seedlings would arise if nature were left entirely to it's own devices. But one can imagine the basin of attraction for arriving at such a stable state is somewhat large (perhaps this is the crux of your point - such a basin cannot be mapped, and therefore one never knows if one is in it or not). Nevertheless - I feel able to draw a distinction between something that plausibly may have happened naturally, and, say, a vast grid of identically aged, undifferentiated pine trees. Though who knows, perhaps there is no distinction to be made - other than that of intention.
I agree too. That distinction is clear and useful.
I'm interested in creating a plausible-natural agricultural ecosystem, aka a food forest. Such a system draws more criticism from ecologists, probably because where I live almost all of the desirable species aren't native.
On the one hand, this clearly isn't a normal agricultural system and often looks more like nature, on the other hand 'nature people' often do not really understand its ecological value. So thats where I'm coming from, maybe that clears it up a bit.
There's a weird aside to this story though, because what we (Netherlands) generally consider to be desirable nature is often a landscape created by old agricultural practices.
I just know what he told me about it verbatim, but the "meat" of his investigation was that he did statistical analysis on vast amounts of (LIDAR-based) tree-height data and comparison of storm damages. On top there were many other GIS-data layers included, so in addition to that simple finding the "meat" is that he found multiple concrete combinations of circumstances that are especially benefitial to resilience.
Not that a skilled and experienced ranger might not have known some of these combinations as well, but the data-based approach can help planing better where to plant what specifically, as opposed to just mix it based on chance.
