Nature's capacity to 'bounce back' when species are lost is overestimated: study (phys.org)

292 pointsby pseudolus11 hours ago147 comments

317070 9 hours ago

On this topic, I can never end recommending Adam Curtis's series "All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace", and on this topic of "bounce back" the second episode in that series.

The concept of "natural equilibrium" is a 1950s cybernetic machine fantasy projected onto the natural world rather than an accurate reflection of ecological reality. We can model the world in the language of system theory, but the models we make there might not have much to say about the real world. We can claim that from system theory it follows that there must be an equilibrium (as somewhat of an expert, I can say that even that is not true) and that if we disrupt the system, things will eventually go back to that equilibrium. And if we don't see it, we just needed to wait longer.

The whole stack of logic is not really build on any proper reasoning. The parallel with economics based on the "homo economicus" is striking, also there you reason from an ideal model and try to make inductive statements about the real world, which in many places directly conflict with observation. The "eco-system" and "natural equilibrium" stem from this approach of applying system theory to ecology, and are ideas which are now _very_ ingrained in western thinking, but which are obviously off.

Here is the start of that second episode: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FgoereMDUJ0

WarmWash 8 hours ago

A bit of caution with this line of thinking, because I was blindsided by it after more than decade of hand waving away "academics"

When you have the mind of "the models are wrong", you tend to be brought there by select counter examples, and in that space you only feed on counter examples. "The experts are wrong (and you can be right in 15 minutes if you consume this media!)" is abundant.

The actual reality is "the models work great until they don't". Not "the models don't work."

Ironically, the experts, the ones building the "wrong" models, tend to be the ones most aware of this.

317070 8 hours ago

It's because the models have different purposes in decision making, in ways which decision makers don't often appreciate.

Models are still great at helping us understand the world and are in many ways the best thing we have. The problem is that today we are overly relying on them to make real policy interventions on an ecology (e.g. what is a "healthy" amount of animals to cull or fish) based on an ecosystem, which is just a poor model.

If we could get rid of this idea of "stability" and "equilibrium" in economics and ecology, I would be a happy man.

> Ironically, the experts, the ones building the "wrong" models, tend to be the ones most aware of this

Exactly why I'm here :-)

WarmWash 8 hours ago

Maybe the best way to illustrate our point is to use weather models, as it's pretty tangible for regular people.

Weather models are ridiculously advanced running on super computers crunching a massive global network of real time data. But they still aren't anywhere close to perfect.

That being said, just because it rains on your birthday when it was said to be sunny, doesn't mean you delete your weather app, call meteorology pseudoscience, and start a substack of "the forecast was wrong again" blog posts.

People intuitively grasp this foolishness because they constantly interact with weather models. But for things they have almost no contact with, it's easy to write it off on a single "bad forecast"

(I'll also admit the caveat that not every model is as good (or bad) as weather models, another dimension at play to throw a wrench in peoples gears)

pton_xd 6 hours ago

I love this analogy... The Heresy of Meteorology! Everything You Thought You Knew about Weather is Wrong. How Weather Reports are Sapping the Joy From Your Life. The Truth about Weather! The Misguided Science of Predicting Mother Nature.

adrianN 5 hours ago

It sounds funny until you meet people who actually hold those beliefs.

kurthr 4 hours ago

I've come to doubt that they really hold positive beliefs. Having had one IRL conversation with a supposed "flat earther", I quickly decided that they didn't really believe what they were saying other than to be "right". My response was to tell them that they didn't really believe it, and when they tried to convince me, I used the same "I know better" attitude on them.

Of course, they never convinced ME! Silly, wannabe flat earthers.

legulere 2 hours ago

The weather is easy to measure though, which leads to a continuing improvement of the models. In a lot of fields it’s very difficult to make experiments and measure the results. In those fields models can stay very bad for a long time.

enaaem 26 minutes ago

Decision making is risk management, and is often simpler than making predictions. You need to think in terms of utility functions and you need to stay far away from the catastrophic regions. You often don't need super accurate predictions for that.

One example is pandemics. The thing is pandemics are extremely fat tailed in terms of fatalities. You need a lot of data to fit any outbreak model and no one has time for that. But the reaction to diseases out breaks is very simple. Is it super deadly and contagious? If yes, shut everything down! This is essentially what Asian countries like Vietnam and Taiwan did during Covid and they handled it way better than the West. I remember arguing about outbreak models, which is a completely useless activity.

gwerbin 7 hours ago

> Ironically, the experts, the ones building the "wrong" models, tend to be the ones most aware of this.

This varies substantially by field, or by subfield. There is a vast decades-long intellectual wasteland of bad economics predicated on bad models that are only appealing on normative grounds. The entire field of behavioral psychology might be a scam. Etc etc. Science advances one funeral at a time hard part because people are unwilling to let go of their models, even when they have outlived their usefulness or have been simply proven too wrong to be useful even in their original purpose.

pohl 5 hours ago

Until this moment, I hadn't even thought that economics might be a scientific field. Do they really see themselves as one? It hasn't seemed like one from the outside.

bell-cot 4 hours ago

Economics is a scientific field in the same sense that Astrology and Politics are. You formulate theories about what your customers want to hear. Then test those theories by telling your customers things, while observing both immediate reactions and how situations develop over time. That latter in conjunction with formulating updated theories about what your customers want... Endless loop.

Do they believe it's a science? Assume that Upton Sinclair's famous quote applies.

bawolff 4 hours ago

This is silly. Economics is not science in the same way physics or chemistry is. But it is not totally without predictive power like astrology is.

itsalwaysgood an hour ago

Etymology helps.

Eco: house, household, or dwelling place.

The -logy suffix is 'science'. So ecology is: the scientific study of how living organisms interact with one another and with their physical surroundings.

The -nomy suffix is a field or system of something.

Economy is the ecology of finance. Or, Economy is a field of science that predicts financial systems. Any scientific field helps you make predictions, once you know the material. But useful predictions require useful measurement.

tenacious_tuna 3 hours ago

without getting too deep into "field purity" [0], it's certainly a field of study insofar as game theory, psychology, anthropology, etc. are fields of study. It's possible to make certain models of behavior or outcome potentials, but running experiments is significantly more difficult than e.g. physics or biology.

So it's science inasmuch as anything with n=1 repeatability can be science

[0]: https://xkcd.com/435/

howunfortunate 2 hours ago

Weirdly, it's much easier to run empirical experiments in psychology (my field), but economics for whatever reason is MUCH more rigorous and empirical than psychology in my experience.

It may have to do with the overall complexity being easier to effectively model. Psychology has such big error terms that you either give up or get comfortable with a lot of hand-waving and dogma. A huge proportion of psychologists are just activists and have no real interest in being scientists (beyond the prestige).

usernametaken29 5 hours ago

> The entire field of behavioral psychology might be a scam

I studied cognition and came to the very same, sad conclusion. There’s a reason there was a reproduction crisis and it’s far from over. I remember vividly how one of my professors, during a paper debate, would end criticism with: “but it’s been published” as if that handwavy gesture could explain away serious research gaps that even graduate students saw through right away. Shoddy statistics in a system that rewards quantity can do a lot of damage.

datsci_est_2015 3 hours ago

I was always a fan of what a former senior colleague ingrained in me early in my career:

  - a model is primarily judged by its predictive power

A model that has no predictive utility is a bad model, but every model hits its limits in terms of predictive power. Some models have a very steep cliff in accuracy at the "edges", and some gradually lose fidelity like an out-of-focus photograph.

Most anti-science criticism I see is completely ignorant of what it really means to model a system or phenomenon: the challenges, the limitations, the end goal, the criteria for success, etc. It's sort of a statistical / scientific ignorance that's deeply cross-discipline. To perform science in a lot of ways is to engage with what it means to build a model, and in some ways, interrogate the universe.

If you're both an idiot and overconfident, it's tempting to throw your hands up and not engage with something as complex as "modeling", and just decide almost out of whimsy what the universe should truly be. But at least some people who find modeling too intellectually taxing at least admit that there are things that they'll never understand.

epihelix an hour ago

> When you have the mind of "the models are wrong", you tend to be brought there by select counter examples, and in that space you only feed on counter examples.

Box's (possibly apocryphal) aphorism, "all models are wrong, but some are useful", is the better mindset.

Obviously we can never perfectly model nature, but we can often get close enough to form useful predictions. A minor predictive failure does not necessarily mean you throw the model, and all of its predictions, out entirely.

> "The experts are wrong (and you can be right in 15 minutes if you consume this media!)" is abundant.

Social media, sadly, preys on the feeble-minded or willingly-deceived :(

order-matters 20 minutes ago

the unspoken permanent wrench in the gears lies in chaos theory. models always have some level of consolidation of reality that gets treated in blocks. While this has intuitive inaccuracies like rounding errors, edge cases, and such, we also know reality often shows emergent behavior from chaotic interactions in a way only understandable after it's actually happened. these could be erorrs that could completely break the models relevance

After observing the emergent behavior, we can often then incorporate it into the model by breaking up prior consolidations into more parts, but the fundamental problem still remains. This makes models for things that arent part of a relatively rapid feedback loop for model improvement (like climate change) to be very vulnerable unknowns. thats not to say they are completely useless, but it can very much take away the weight behind any specificity of the models results, and should open up a second conversation about the direction in which the model might be expected to fail.

Additionally, when creating models that involve human behavior you can appeal to game theory, psychology, sociology, statistics, etc but ultimately chaos will be in full force. now with AI it is going to become a factor amongst automation as well in a way it previously was not. there is no practical way to model how the weights of neural networks might act unexpectedly in various contexts.

all this to say models are not often that great at giving useful predictions as much as they are great at building foundations of understanding of relationships in complex/complicated and what "clean" situations might look like, which can then be taken into consideration of what reality is likely to look like and happen. this distinction is important because currently, automation tools and AI lack that final chaotic adjustment that astute humans are able to apply. Ai has gotten very good at making complicated models but it ultimately is, by design imo whether intentional or not, limited in the same way models themselves are.

that final adjustment to make real world decisions and have personal accountability is more rooted in beliefs/feelings than it is in model outputs, albeit the model outputs help to refine it.

deepsun an hour ago

Same thing said by Isaac Asimov in 1986: "The Relativity of Wrong"

https://web.williams.edu/Mathematics/sjmiller/public_html/23...

breuleux 8 hours ago

> if we disrupt the system, things will eventually go back to that equilibrium. And if we don't see it, we just needed to wait longer.

Even if that's true, quite a bit rides on how long "longer" is. If "longer" is a million years, that's not exactly good news.

317070 6 hours ago

But if you apply the logic that led to the conclusion of "natural equilibrium", truth of the matter is that we wouldn't be able to say if the waiting will be over before or after the heat death of the universe.

Even the "million years" is an overoptimistic view, and probably reflects the idea that the ecosystem was in some kind of messianic state of equilibrium before man arrived, which happened roughly in the last million years. But even that is broadly a fiction. Ecology is not a system, and it is not stable even without human intervention.

breuleux 5 hours ago

Yeah, it's a bit absurd on its face to speak of equilibrium in the context of evolution, which is basically a litany of innovations and equilibrium breaks. Nature regularly throws itself out of whack, like when cyanobacteria appeared I recall, and then when nature made us, obviously. Whatever equilibriums existed through time are rarely returned to once broken.

tkdb 8 hours ago

Doesn't the premise of bouncing back imply an ideal state to bounce back to?

And there we have it: ideal state for one species? the most possible species? longevity for individuals or the species?

The myth of some "natural" (the word literally means without human influence) state that is desired/better is somewhat ironic, right?

Any ideal state brings with it subjective criteria.

antonvs 6 hours ago

> Doesn't the premise of bouncing back imply an ideal state to bounce back to?

No, it's an "equilibrium" state, i.e. "a state of balance where opposing forces ... are equal" (from the MW definition.)

The general concept is that a stable system has at least one equilibrium state, in which no processes go out of control and potentially destroy the system.

A simple(?) example would be global warming - if the atmosphere keeps accumulating carbon, temperatures keep going up, the planet becomes uninhabitable, everything dies. Of course, that's subjectively an undesirable outcome for us - not an "ideal state", as you say - but the point is that any state in which no equilibrium can be reached (or at least approximated) exists is subject to such risks.

You could say that equilibrium is a necessary condition for an ideal state, but it's not sufficient. There can also be equilibrium states that are decidedly non-ideal, like the "everything dies" one I mentioned.

tkdb 5 hours ago

I agree, and I've answered the same question before much as you have. I don't disagree with the value of equilibrium.

Our bodies are in a sort of equilibrium when healthy, and cancer is an example of emergence of destabilizing phenomena in the system.

Consider the Carboniferous–Permian oxygen maximum; it probably took tens of millions of years for oxygen levels to reach troublesome concentrations for plants, then tens of millions of years to return to "equilibrium."

Our current atmospheric concerns have been produced much faster, right? And I think we hope to improve the situation somewhat faster than ten million years.

My main point is that equilibrium is inherently subjective, bringing along time scales and traits that the observer cares about.

I supposed you could develop a "equilibrium for the most species at once" approach...

toast0 7 hours ago

> We can claim that from system theory it follows that there must be an equilibrium (as somewhat of an expert, I can say that even that is not true) and that if we disrupt the system, things will eventually go back to that equilibrium. And if we don't see it, we just needed to wait longer.

Even if we do make that claim, from practice in systems theory we should know that some systems have multiple potential equilibrium. If a system is perturbed, it may come to rest at a different equilibrium that is much less desirable.

I've worked with mechanical and computer systems where the ordering and timing of applied loads makes a significant difference to observed behavior. Sometimes you have to stop and restart the whole system when it ends up at an undesired equilibrium.

In the natural environment, stopping and restarting in a controlled manner is not something entirely in our control.

stillpointlab 4 hours ago

I don't like being the "to be fair ..." guy, but if your argument is that sometimes, when perturbing a system, it may come back to rest at a different equilibrium that is much less desirable, it suggests that sometimes it may come back to rest at a different equilibrium that is much more desirable.

In fact, such a distinction might characterize the difference between pessimism and optimism.

wayeq 4 hours ago

> If a system is perturbed, it may come to rest at a different equilibrium that is much less desirable.

That's exactly how we got humans rather than the objectively better rulers of the planet, the dinosaurs.

kenferry 2 hours ago

Chickens will rise again!

3m4r 6 hours ago

This is the story of how one user spent too much time writing why he became disenchanted with Adam Curtis, how he had been a longtime fan. But eventually he saw through the same smoke and mirrors. He learned to see it all as uncharitable nonsense to convince others that technocracy is unassailable. He thought the parody was funny.

But this was a fantasy.

(Curtis's entire ouevre can be summarized in 18 seconds: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3YSwCJIpSXQ )

317070 5 hours ago

I have seen these parodies before, and while they are accurate in style, they seem to misunderstand or misrepresent Curtis' message. A message which is not that hard to understand, except that it falls comfortably outside of the Overton window:

"Driven by the seductive post-war fantasy that human beings and nature are self-regulating machines -- a cybernetic delusion shared equally by California tech-utopians, holistic ecologists, and free-market economists -- we willingly surrendered political power and moral responsibility to automated, network-driven systems, only to find ourselves trapped in a static, dehumanizing loop that cannot envision an alternative future and leaves the existing, unaccountable hierarchies of power completely intact."

3m4r 2 hours ago

No, I understand his message.

And again, this is exactly what I meant by "uncharitable nonsense to convince others that technocracy is unassailable." He regularly claims his job isn't to provide solutions or that solutions are increasingly unimaginable, yet that's the only thing that does matter.

If knowing more about how civilization got to this point suggests nothing to Curtis about how to escape from it and hasn't for three decades, despite his supposedly privileged epistemic position, why listen to him in the first place? The man obviously isn't interested in proposing or "raising awareness" of solutions, only problems.

I don't need another six hours explaining why I'm right to be dissatisfied. I already am. Tell me what you've learned that might make me less powerless, not more.

oldsklgdfth 3 hours ago

That's a good parody.

I like the Curtis stuff because it hits like old internet-core. It is entertainment that makes you think, but entertainment. Otherwise it would have been written work. But damn the guy can weave a story with some old videos and a soundtrack. As a genre, it's extremely approachable to make your own.

Sometimes it seems like shorts and tiktoks are like a bad Adam Curtis film. 30s highlights stitched together with no relation, garing transitions, ads.

Maybe I can put together a greasemonkey script to make YT shorts Adam Curtis themed. Maybe I won't feel as guilty, maybe it will all make sense.

jgraham 5 hours ago

I don't really know anyone serious who thinks that ecological systems have a single stable equilibrium state.

Indeed, even the trivial systems you learn about at school, like predator-prey relationships are dynamic equilibria rather than static ones. Experiments clearly demonstrate trophic cascades can shift ecological systems from one meta-stable state to another (e.g. remove crabs from a rockpool, and the herbivore population explodes until it runs out of seaweed, at which point it crashes).

Evolution is obviously a progression between many quasi-stable states.

I think a stronger claim is that _economics_ doesn't recognise this; local incentives and the price feedback structure aren't enough to avoid pushing natural systems out of their current quasi-equilibria state into degraded states that are long-term also poorer for humans (e.g. collapsing fish populations). This is also pretty broadly understood, and why market interventions like fishing quotas exist. But in the conflict between "extract more more now" and "long term health of the ecosystem", "extract more now" is the economic default and "long term health" requires special pleading, so unsurprisingly the former tends to win.

autoexec 4 hours ago

Rather than the first two minutes, here's the whole thing: https://archive.org/download/BBC.All.Watched.Over.by.Machine...

U4E4 4 hours ago

The “natural equilibrium” model originated in physics. It’s well applied and tractable in chemistry. It was then brought into economics and ecology (much more stochastic domains) as familiar metaphor from more deterministic systems.

bawolff 4 hours ago

umm, that is not what the word equilibrium means. Obviously no system is stable to every and all disruption.

tim333 4 hours ago

Curtis's stuff is all good fun but I'm skeptical that:

>The concept of "natural equilibrium" is a 1950s cybernetic machine fantasy

Looking at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Balance_of_nature :

>The concept that nature maintains its condition is of ancient provenance. Herodotus asserted that predators never excessively consume prey populations and described this balance as "wonderful". Two of Plato's dialogues, the Timaeus and Protagoras myths, support the balance of nature concept...

kenferry 2 hours ago

This isn't me being pedantic, actual question:

Are we talking about whether nature is ever at equilibrium, or about how stable that equilibrium is?

A ball on the crest of a saddle is at equilibrium, but it isn't a very stable equilibrium.

Basically, are you saying the reality is that nature is always in flux, or that it doesn't take much to knock it toward a different stable state.

comrade1234 9 hours ago

I think what happened to the cod fishery off North America is really interesting. They overfished the cod then decided to regulate the fishery to let the population come back. But it never recovered - the cod population is stable but at a much lower number. Other 'stuff' (other fish species, jellyfish, etc) had moved into the environmental niche that the cod were in.

bpodgursky 9 hours ago

They never actually stopped fishing it though. It's regulated at a level to prevent 100% collapse, there was never political support to let it truly recover by banning fishing for a decade or two.

msandford 9 hours ago

You don't even have to ban fishing entirely, just reduce the fishing to a point where fish populations increase. It might mean that fishing has to be at half the level it is now which still isn't great for the people impacted but you don't have to go 100% outright ban.

barbazoo 8 hours ago

I wish us humans adapted quicker to the realization that our food systems aren't sustainable for the planet.

b3lvedere 9 hours ago

Example regarding clams: https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/pearl-buttons-muscatin...

lithocarpus 7 hours ago

There are often other factors too, than just the direct fishing, that keep a population low.

In the west of North America, like most places, almost all of the old growth forest was logged.

Some places where the soil and subsoil was particularly vulnerable to erosion and landsliding or just didn't have a lot of water capacity in the first place like on dry mountains, after these trees were removed and most of the soil washed away from rain, the forest simply has not come back a hundred years later. There are little trees gradaually getting started, and lots of mostly bare soil or rock still where erosion from rain is able to outpace the vegetation growth. It will likely take many thousand years for trees to get to the size they were before, and to build up the capacity for holding water like it had been.

In more abundant forests, trees regrow faster. But even there, a hundred years later, the total biomass per acre is often 10% of what it was as old growth forest, and the capacity for holding water on the land similarly much reduced. The old growth forests were the result of nature doing its thing often with help from humans for thousands of years and continually becoming richer. Eventually a major disturbance sets it back, but this might only happen ever 5 or 10 thousand years. This time humans did it.

SoftTalker 7 hours ago

Due to our very short lifespan, "thousands of years" seems like a big deal to us, but it's quite a short time to the earth. Forest recovery in a couple of thousand years would be "bouncing back" in that perspective.

gwerbin 7 hours ago

Yes but people seem to expect recovery around the order of decades, not millennia.

SoftTalker 6 hours ago

Right. Even currently-living trees can live for many multiples of a human lifespan. We just have trouble thinking about time spans more than a hundred years or so. We're also all accustomed to the contemporary pace of technological and social change, but for most of human history things changed very little from one generation to the next, and most of nature is still that way (except when humans interfere).

gblargg 6 hours ago

It's because they care not about the ecosystem, but their own enjoyment of its fruits. Nothing wrong with that, but it tends to be couched in language as if this is for the good of the planet or animals or something. No, it's good for us.

lithocarpus 6 hours ago

Sure, from a deep time perspective it's maybe no big deal, but the loss of the forest affects all of us including future generations significantly in the meantime.

pessimizer 2 hours ago

But it only matters to us. The Earth is a hunk of iron in a carbon candy shell that has no particular affection for the state it is in now.

Even if the Earth has emotions, who are we to assume it would prefer to be covered in throbbing life rather than to have a surface that was burnt to a cinder? Maybe we itch. What we're doing when we talk about a long-term forest recovery is projecting our fantasies about how we would feel if we were the Earth. If we destroy it for ourselves, we've simply destroyed it. We were the ones who assigned value to it.

This is us burning our own house down. The ground that the house is on does not care that we are obviously suicidal.

Nicholas_C 5 hours ago

From an ecological standpoint how is logging different than a naturally occurring forest fire? Or perhaps the forest fires never get strong enough to burn the old growth trees since they would happen more frequently via lightning strikes or natives clearing the brush/hunting?

Faelon 4 hours ago

Forest fires don't replace America's forests with ecologically dead pasture, for one. Forest fires don't usually strip out the roots preventing the erosion, and they naturally lead to succession from plants which opportunize these events. There are even entire bird species which are dependent on these reliable forest fires like Kirtland's Warbler. The real issue is the scale. 99% of America's old growth forest was logged, and much of it was replaced with farm and pasture. We could more effectively encourage mass rewilding if we had collective action to rewild pasture and replace the lost nutrition with plant foods, which require a dramatically smaller land and water footprint.

lithocarpus 4 hours ago

Exactly, forest fires usually don't kill most of the trees in an old growth forest. The trees are much bigger, hold a lot more water, and have much thicker fire-resistant bark. This is why you usually see charred parts on the bottom of living old growth trees - they survived fire.

Because the old growth was logged, the fires we have now are often able to kill 100% of the trees in an area because the trees are all small and young and vulnerable. And this is self perpetuating, because after such a fire the soil often erodes, and sun hits the ground directly keeping it dry - it takes a really long time to recover from in some places.

Each cycle of logging removes even more soil and makes the landscape drier, and resets the timer on how long it will be before the forest is able to survive a wildfire. It's a short term thing.

I'm not saying no one should ever cut a tree or use wood - and it can be done in better and worse ways, it's really complex. But in general, the repeated clearcutting of the pacific northwest is steadily degrading that landscape the same way repeated intensive till farming of the prairies is degrading that landscape - it's a relatively short term thing with diminishing returns.

anthonypasq 4 hours ago

What exactly was the benefit of old growth forest to humans? I understand completely what happened, i just struggle with the downstream moral implication these sorts of stories are supposed to tug at.

Is the point that people moving into the American west should have froze to death rather than chop down trees for fire and shelter? The trees had much more utility to humans as fuel than it did as a forest at that moment, and unless you think biomass is an intrinsic good regardless of whether it helps humans, i dont see anything wrong with what happened.

snapcaster 4 hours ago

The takeaway for me is that reality and systems in general are incredibly complex, and often doing something has second or third order effects that are almost impossible to know about ahead of time

Timon3 2 hours ago

I think this perspective is too generous. We obviously can't prevent unforeseen consequences, but we should learn from them and change our behavior.

Instead, we're depleting resources faster and faster primarily because the people directing most of the world's economic resources want to accumulate even more money even faster. They just don't give a damn about what comes after.

dpe82 4 hours ago

A simple thing would be: those areas can no longer produce lumber. So what should have been a renewable resource was depleted after a single use.

lithocarpus 4 hours ago

Old growth forest continually grows becoming richer and richer, until one of those major setbacks which often are many thousand years in between.

Old growth forest creates more wood per year per acre than second or third growth after the old growth is cut. It also produces more food for humans and habitat for wildlife. It literally stabilizes the weather and pumps moisture inland by storing water and then releasing it. It holds water in the ground so that streams don't go dry and can support fish. It is much more resilient to wildfire.

In the redwood forest for example, 95% of it was clear cut, for a short term benefit. 90% of this wood that had been accumulated by the forest over thousands of years has now burned or rotted away within 100 years, and is gone.

What we're doing now is rapidly consuming everything, and these resources are steadily declining, and will run out and the human population will crash.

But yes, I do think more abundance and diversity of life is an intrinsic good, both for its own sake and for the long term thriving of humans on earth. Like any population of animals, if we consume everything that we live on and undermine the capacity of earth to support us, we will collapse.

That said humans can figure out how to help ecosystems recover and be more abundant. So it's not all over. But clearing the old growth forest is one of the worst things we do - up there with reckless mining that contaminates water.

anthonypasq 2 hours ago

would you trade the old growth forests for Seattle? I would. I quite like people and cities. But it feels like all these arguments end up running towards some misanthropic dead end about how humans are a blight on the planet.

We tolerate extracting resources from the biosphere because it supports a higher human population. Barring actions that will lead to extinction events, I think we should continue to extract resources from the planet that support human flourishing.

californical 2 hours ago

I sort of agree, but there is a balance. Destroying a small portion of old growth to develop humans? Great!

Destroying millions of acres of old growth for cattle farming, which is essentially a luxury for human food, meh.. maybe we’re better off growing cattle in other places that are more suited to it, and eating less beef so that nature in those forests can continue nourishing those parts of the earth.

Some uses of the earth are good for both humans and their environment, and some are good for humans in the short term but at the cost of long-term sustainability.

And if we do things that aren’t sustainable then we use up valuable resources, when doing things in a more balanced way could support and benefit humans indefinitely.

throwaway_2494 2 hours ago

The parent comment is constructed in a way that maximises moral provocation while minimising engagement with the all possible environmental arguments.

Move on...

eikenberry 4 hours ago

That is a story about nature bouncing back. Just not the way the people doing it thought it would as it turned out other 'stuff' was a lot bouncier than the Cod were.

willpearse 28 minutes ago

Senior author here, any questions please ask! As a long-time lurker, it's wonderful to see biodiversity is so popular here!

zhivota 10 hours ago

I had always assumed this, and my idea of nature bouncing back was more on the millions of years time scale as evolution would result in the refilling of empty ecological niches.

All that said I still think we should just extinct disease carrying mosquitoes.

Kichererbsen 10 hours ago

> All that said I still think we should just extinct disease carrying mosquitoes.

The modern version of Carthage should be destroyed.

poncho_romero 9 hours ago

Carthage MUST be destroyed.

NoHedgeAllBets 9 hours ago

> All that said I still think we should just extinct disease carrying mosquitoes.

I'm doing my part

b3lvedere 9 hours ago

Spaceship Trooper or Helldiver? :)

Joel_Mckay 9 hours ago

"Saving the Planet" (George Carlin)

https://youtu.be/7W33HRc1A6c?si=HqyW8mys0uNBuFdW&t=147

Humorous, but not inaccurate about what climate change means to primates. =3

chrisweekly 7 hours ago

what is "=3"?

Joel_Mckay 7 hours ago

Don't worry about it =3

throw1234567891 2 hours ago

cat face long eyes, an amused cat, the person has some disassociation issues

Fricken 9 hours ago

Nature is not harmonious, it is in constant flux. Saying it can bounce back implies there some state of equilibrium for it to bounce back to. I guess there's no reason why it can't bounce forward.

micromacrofoot 9 hours ago

Right, we know deserts weren't always deserts, systems collapse.

bcjdjsndon 8 hours ago

The earth isn't split up into separate "ecosystems" split by continent and land mass you realise? It's one big system that isn't even sealed off from outer space. And in terms of a truly barren planet, the Sahara is teeming with life

micromacrofoot 8 hours ago

The earth is a system of many systems, individual systems within it can collapse and desertification is one of the ways it happens. Runaway collapse of smaller systems can lead to primary system collapse.

The Sahara is teeming with life compared to Mars, but we also know it once hosted significantly more life before it was a desert. That old system collapsed.

s08148692 9 hours ago

Yeah the news for me here is that people thought nature could "bounce back" on a human timescale. Any human lifespan is just the blink of an eye to nature

themaninthedark 9 hours ago

There are differing views on evolution, between slow and gradual and punctual equilibrium( a sudden breakthrough that triggers a biological arms race), this article is looking more at the very short term and saying if a species goes extinct another species does not immediately or fully occupy the space...which I guess needs to be stated but I would think that it was already understood...

The article is more focused on oceanic and coastal diversity but I agree about the mosquitoes.

micromacrofoot 9 hours ago

Yes, we often see the history of earth's ecosystem through a geological timescale... human scale is almost light speed by comparison.

sarreph 9 hours ago

I always find the silver fox domestication experiment[0] an interesting point about how much smaller evolutionary timescales can be than expected.

[0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domesticated_silver_fox

Avicebron 9 hours ago

Sure we should get rid of the diseases, but what about the niche mosquitos serve as food for birds, bats, etc?

bcjdjsndon 8 hours ago

Details, bro. Just kill stuff until we feel better about our situation

croes 7 hours ago

What about the animals that feed on those mosquitoes

chasil 7 hours ago

Mentioned recently was the use of the wolbachia parasite that reduces the ability of a mosquito to transmit disease.

It's an invasive pathogen to a mosquito population, but it benefits humans.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wolbachia#Disease_prevention

throw1234567891 2 hours ago

There are more than 3000 mosquitoes species. I assume the answer is: nothing.

MiguelVieira 7 hours ago

Here's a study from the southern Appalachian Mountains that found that even in forests that were logged over 100 years ago, species richness and abundance was still lower than in forests that had never been logged:

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/248428489_Centuries...

fsckboy 6 hours ago

if we're doing analogies to other complex systems, forests which have been patched and patched by different maintainers over the year are likely to have a lot of built up cruft, overlapping APIs, bloat, and of course a rewrite results in cleaned up code.

oldsklgdfth 3 hours ago

It'll bounce back, it just doesn't care how we define "back".

Down the line there is a state nature will be in. More/less plants and animals. Who knows. It might not be a pleasant state for people.

The concern seems to be that it will change faster than we can change. What happens if the climate of an agricultural area changes in a lifetime? or a generation? or a decade?

lelandfe 2 hours ago

> Down the line there is a state nature will be in

Nature is in a state at every point of time. This not-especially-useful perspective means there’s nothing to bounce back from.

It reminds me of clever people tut-tutting when talking about an apocalypse. “Ah, but the planet will still be here!”

pessimizer 2 hours ago

This is exactly the point that the comment you are replying to is making.

Whether "nature recovers" is silly talk that makes you want to capitalize "nature" because you're anthropomorphizing so hard. The question is whether nature will recover for us, or on the other hand whether we will be able to adjust to the permanent changes we have imposed on nature.

oldsklgdfth 2 hours ago

It has the same sentiment, but is not in the same vain. I use this perspective to see how insignificant we are in this process. That we use arbitrary labels and draw lines in the sand. But they don't always map with reality. The environment is the ultimate "fuck you" to human plans and models. Like when a hurricane model is off and it whips out a coastal town. The environment is, we might not be.

Prefacing this by saying that I am constantly saddened by the scale of human activities and impact. It hard to find places that are untouched by human. But I sometimes ask what conservationism is trying to conserve. The parts that we find pretty and meaningful. It's not saving the planet, it's saving the insta background. That last one felt really cynical to me.

themaninthedark 9 hours ago

I feel like we should do our best to not destroy the environment, for altruistic reasons but also for the very selfish reason that I have children and relatives with children so I want to leave them with a place they can live in and enjoy not a mess they have to deal with.

I think we have made great strides at saving some near extinct species, the kakapo for example, but we can do better.

Reading the title, I was ready to come in with arguments about the Cambrian explosion and different timescales, the article it's self however is not really talking about things along those lines, it is talking about the short(or very short) term where we assume that once species will easily take up a niche that was occupied by another if one goes extinct. Which I believe is looking at things on the wrong timescale, even if we assume punctuated equilibrium rather than gradual evolution.

kakacik 9 hours ago

Nature itself ain't in no long term stasis, its just us humans projecting our wishful thinking on our environment. Planet is warming since last ice age (ie all glaciers in the Alps are provably receding since 1850 when measurements started, and ie vineyard region where I live was provably under huge glacier some 25k years ago).

Often cited mosquito eradication (at least those transmitting malaria, dengue, yellow fever, zika and so on) would change few things even though most folks would not even notice... and I couldn't welcome it more intensively. These academic discussions in the west would quickly die off when people around you start dying frequently from these (especially small children, but also grandparents or just weaker / more unlucky folks).

Massive droughts this summer still continuing here where I live wreaked way more havoc not only in insect world than any such engineering would do, yet I see no violent mass protests all around the world about banning cars, huge transport ships or commercial & private jet flying for example, or some other big pollutants. Literal frog in boiling water situation.

themaninthedark 6 hours ago

Agreed, we(collectively) do seem to assume and teach that the environment is/was in homeostasis before modern man when that is very much not the case.

However we do have measurable effects on the environment i.e. acid rain on the east coast due to the iron and steel foundries. We eliminated/reduced that heavily by implementing controls, same with the hole in the ozone.

I don't think that the path forward for repairing(if assuming all manmade)/changing what is going on is banning things as that is difficult to implement on the world wide scale that it would need to happen.

Case in point, China is one of the largest GHG emitters in terms of number but when it is brought up, the argument is they are smaller per capita and most of the emissions are due to them selling to the west anyway. If we said "Ok, let's stop manufacturing there", now you have the free trade people upset. Also the people who believe that you need trade in order to prevent war. Also everyone really likes cheap stuff, the man on the street may not care about who their senator is but they really like it when they can get very big TV for cheap. So it's politically untenable.

I think that we could do some Geo-engineering to reverse/fix the situation; carbon sequestration in the ocean, greening the Sahara. But then you have people worried about the second order effect, it costs money and who will pay and you may be doing it on someone else's land...Europe doing a big push to green the Sahara would be bad optics because of colonialism.

I think we will take action but unfortunately it will have to be after things get a lot worse because that is really the only way to get people aligned.

braj0 an hour ago

"I think we will take action but unfortunately it will have to be after things get a lot worse because that is really the only way to get people aligned."

Isn't this accelerationism?

flowerthoughts 9 hours ago

That was a pointless source. Which 23 categories? How do I know if I care about them?

Fig. 2 [1] lists them. Fig. 3 I think indicates that 20 of them have positive effect size on biodiversity, which I think was the point. "Learning and inspiration" is an interesting category. Carbon sequestration ranks high, with Terrestrial (as opposed to the larger Oceanic) having quite a few studies behind it.

1. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41559-026-03200-4

delichon 5 hours ago

> But what this model gives us is a precise, global picture: We can now predict the benefits biodiversity provides anywhere, making it even easier to recognize and take advantage of those benefits."

Shouldn't they simultaneously study the costs of biodiversity? For example, our species left highly biodiverse jungles for less diverse plains, and our bodies are designed to follow and prey on large herbivores that don't do jungle. Less biodiversity creates niches for new diversity. It isn't possible to understand the benefits without the costs.

kurthr 5 hours ago

Are you arguing that Grey Goo is only a local and not global optimum?

slibhb 8 hours ago

This doesn't seem like serious science. They just looked at correlation between biodiversity and a few dozen things.

Of course, for many reasons, we should try not to drive species to extinction. That's not really science; it's just basic moral intuition. People seem embarrassed to admit that their motivations are perfectly reasonable things like "I like living things and we shouldn't kill them off".

lioeters 7 hours ago

> serious science

It could be argued that some serious science starts with "just looking at correlations", guided by intangible drives like imagination and moral intuition. I wouldn't dismiss it as "not really science", and may even lean toward saying that it's important for the scientific process, or even the development of mathematics, to listen to your moral intuition and follow your nose. It's often driven by asking questions and posing theories.

slibhb 5 hours ago

Sure, intution is necessary, but they just took a bunch of data from all over the world and fit it to curves. This particular appoach hasn't born a lot of fruit; at least give us some natural experiments.

Just feels like makework. And even if the data show that, e.g., killing off all hummingbirds would improve pollination rates, no one would be like "yee-haw let's do it", right?

joshheitzman 3 hours ago

> It could be argued that some serious science starts with "just looking at correlations"

Sure, but it can't end with "just looking at correlations". The rigorous experimental follow through has to be there otherwise its just data analytics not science. Sure analyzing data is a key part of science but its not even close to all of it.

braj0 an hour ago

"Of course, for many reasons, we should try not to drive species to extinction."

I disagree with your statement that "it's just basic moral intuition." You really think that we shouldn't be trying to extinct the Guinea worm? You might want to do some protesting as humanity is actively on a mission to drive the population of that species to 0.

The more interesting question is why are some species OK for humans to extinct and others are not? What makes humans such great arbiters of these things and why does "morality" only seem to apply when convenient? Who says a Guinea worm has less right to exist then your pet dog? Who decides what is good biodiversity and what is bad biodiversity?

meander_water 8 hours ago

For anyone curious about what can be done about this, see the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework (GBF) adopted during COP15 by 188 countries - https://www.cbd.int/gbf

Push your leaders to stay the course

contingencies 3 hours ago

TARGET 2: Ensure that by 2030 at least 30 per cent of areas of degraded terrestrial, inland water, and marine and coastal ecosystems are under effective restoration, in order to enhance biodiversity and ecosystem functions and services, ecological integrity and connectivity.

Uhh, yeah, I think that one was certainly known to be a non-starter when drafted in 2022. Most of the targets are vague and subject to interpretation. Some of them are loaded with overly effusive language. Not an agreement, it seems, that will garner much in the way of political support. It was clearly designed as idealism rather than policy.

tkdb 8 hours ago

I'm reminded of Ian Malcom's monologue in Jurassic Park (the book).

Paraphrased: "Nature will be fine, it's humanity we should be worried about."

Bounce back can take millions of years.

esarbe 7 hours ago

I think that's be best argument one can make for environmental protections. Forget the warm-and-fuzzy-koombaya altruistic argument and appeals on mother nature or whatever.

In the end this is about protecting and preserving our own ecosystem without which we will perish.

OroPla 8 hours ago

The "natural" state of the universe is having no life at all. And once our sun implodes this region of the universe will cease to be an exception.

Instead of trying to perform a balancing act with nature we should just continue to shape things into things that are more convenient to us. Like redirecting water into a desert.

corps_and_code 8 hours ago

There must be myriad unintended consequences that would come with dumping a whole bunch of water into a desert though? It feels like there's an awful lot of hubris in thinking we could accurately predict all the changes that would cause and know it would have a net positive outcome.

dylan604 8 hours ago

If the Sahara wasn't dry, what would be the knock on effects of losing the dust from it that lands in South America?

corps_and_code 6 hours ago

The dust, sand, and soil from the Sahara that lands in South American is an enormous source of nutrients and fertilizer for the Amazon rainforest. It would certainly cause vast changes in how that whole ecosystem operates and the impact it makes in other parts of the world.

The knock on effects of those changes to one of the most important and diverse ecosystems on the planet cannot possibly be completely predicted beforehand.

OroPla 2 hours ago

If there are, we should have figured them out by now, since that is the story of California during the 1840s. People redirected a bunch of water to turn the desert into a treasure. Kinda literally, since shortly after they found gold, which destroyed all the positive economic change that was brought.

Or take the Netherlands, that used to be a lot of water and now it is a lot of flat land.

jna_sh 8 hours ago

The article clearly spells out why this wouldn’t be in our favour: functional ecosystems provide services to humanity that we need, and those ecosystems need biodiversity to effectively provide those services. The idea that destroying these systems is “more convenient to us” is very flawed

barbazoo 8 hours ago

The behavior you're describing has already brought us close to the planetary boundaries of our own existence in the last century or two. Plenty of second order effects to our actions.

esarbe 7 hours ago

That's conjecture.

For all we know the universe could be teeming with life, in whatever shape or form. And since we see the first signs of life about 500 million years after the plant was formed, there's a good argument to be made that life doesn't need much more than a stable energy gradient and some basic building blocks to get started.

mtlmtlmtlmtl 7 hours ago

Agreed. There are just too many unknowns. Certainly about how life started here(if indeed it did start here). But even more so about what's out there. There's so much we don't know even about the planets and moons in our own solar system, let alone other star systems. It's only recently we've become able to detect exoplanets in significant quantities at all, and we've still only scratched the surface really. And what we know about those planets is very limited. For most of them we don't know much except their distance to the star and estimated size. For a handful we have some information about their atmospheres, usually only enough to narrow it down to a couple of equally plausible models. It's hard for me to imagine us being able to conclusively detect life on an exoplanet. I think the best we'll be able to do in the next several decades is say we're pretty sure a planet's atmosphere contains chemical compounds for which there's no known abiotic origin. But there will be so much uncertainty there in terms of possible unknown abiotic origins that it would never feel conclusive.

arbitrary_name 6 hours ago

i think this is a dumb take that does not withstand any scrutiny whatsoever.

rwyinuse an hour ago

It would be highly convenient for us to stop pumping so much greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, to keep climate stable for food production. But we're incapable of even that, even though technology to get rid of most fossil fuel use exists.

When this is the status quo, I'm not very hopeful of humankind's general capability to control the nature in ways that ultimately benefit us.

gausswho 7 hours ago

Maybe someone here can help me come up with a plan where I do my (futile?) part to mitigate this, if only temporarily.

Nearby me is a cloud forest in central America. The last time we had a strong El Nino, substantial amounts of endemic amphibians that live up in those forests lost the mist-melt puddles they depended on. If the drought we're experiencing continues as long as expected from this cycle, we're going to lose a lot of beautiful frogs forever.

Can I do anything about this? Find my favorite frog community on my favorite mountain and regularly lug a backpack of water up there? Run up a sprinkler system? Will it make a difference?

mohamedkoubaa 7 hours ago

The political will to save a species only spikes after or during its extinction. If you could keep a small population alive in a greenhouse it could be used to revive them when they suffer an event and people start to care.

octol 8 hours ago

This is what gives me pause about “killing all the mosquitoes”.

barbazoo 8 hours ago

"killing all", can't imagine anything going wrong here at all, nope.

Danox 6 hours ago

Without man/humankind nature would bounce back very well but it would take time.

goda90 9 hours ago

This doesn't mean we shouldn't make every effort to re-wild places. It'll slow or even prevent the loss of at-risk species and introduce resilience to ecosystems against the onslaught of climate change.

bcjdjsndon 8 hours ago

I guarantee trying to save dying species is just an emotional reaction with very little logic behind it. I know it feels sad to see them go, but that's life. We like nothing to suffer, but somebody's gotta be eaten alive from head to toe, right? THATS LIFE

goatlover 7 hours ago

If the species are dying because of us then it's not just life, it's our behavior driving their extinction. Logic doesn't tell you what to value. You value whatever, then you reason about what you value, how to preserve it, etc.

anthonypasq 4 hours ago

> If the species are dying because of us then it's not just life, it's our behavior driving their extinction.

call me crazy but i think human behavior is in fact a subset of "life"

djent 2 hours ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder

goda90 7 hours ago

There's plenty of logic to it, but it depends on your values. What do you value? If you care about your descendants or humanity in general, then undoing some of our destruction of habitats and the outsized impact of our predation/invasive species introduction is a benefit.

bordercases 7 hours ago

Somebody's gotta be eaten alive. So why not you, bcjdjsndon?

I refuse to believe that humanity on a whole is that incapable. Or at least unwilling to try to do something different.

bcjdjsndon 8 hours ago

Isn't an ecosystem an arbitrary area somewhere on the planet? Weather is a massive effect on these so called ecosystems and it is global. You might say there is only one single global ecosystem

bordercases 7 hours ago

Maybe you could ask an ecologist this question.

imchillyb 7 hours ago

The system may return, but less diversity means less resiliency. The 'return' isn't a return to baseline. That system return is an attempt to attain a state of function that is no longer available. That leaves this returned system in a constant state of stress. Stress on any system reduces function, increases failure rates, and extends repair times greatly. When a stressed system attempts to heal, many factors inhibit or outright prevent healing from occuring.

That's all observation, reasoning, and logic. Merely observing what occurs in a system that loses or gains is enough data to make fairly striking conclusions. The systems never return to baseline. Not once. Not ever. We've never observed a return to baseline after a species is destroyed, nor if an invasive species enters the system.

Once balance is lost, it cannot be attained again. Will not be. Has not been. Observed data is clear about this pattern. There is no equilibrium. There is a system that is functioning and then there is a system that no longer functions. There are no return to function systems in nature. Humans have not observed a mechanism that would bring that about, nor observed the occurrence of such.

One failure leads to another, and to another. Cascading. That's what we observe over generations of data collection.

ram1500natrluvr 5 hours ago

I recommend listening to Gerry Wilhelm (co-author of Flora of the Chicago Region) in this video by Crime Pays But Botany Doesn't:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HDVcfSYcxc0

> (11:55) ...of our 500 native bees... the most... found... in a restoration... is under a hundred. So, more than 80% of our bees are confined to remnants. And... a garden... [only] 16 different species of bees... in the best prairie garden... If you look in our book under [a specific plant species], we have... well over a hundred insects listed for that plant... but only in remnants... You could plant [species] in your garden, you get the same old 15 bees... they're not as agile as we think.

> (21:00) (Comparing his 'restored' prairie to 'old-growth' remnant prairie) This isn't a remnant, never will be. Once a prairie is gone, it's gone.

> (34:15) (Again comparing his 'restored' prairie compared to 'old-growth' remnant prairie) It'll never have the insects that a remnant does, not even close. The insects require a whole lot more things, so if we don't save the remnants, the home of all of our remnant biodiversity... what was it, the guy going on telling everybody 'if you plant nature in your yard, it'll come back'... it's assuming that the insects are just going to come there. It doesn't happen. You have to save the remnants... Our generation needs to deploy great armies to identifying and preserving what little remnants we have left. Otherwise, there'll be no germ material out of which to build a tomorrow. It'll all be gone.

> (49:40) Our culture is so out of phase with reality... we just don't have any sense of the cascade of consequences that flow from... things that we think are just fine.

> (52:55) The average person today in Illinois can get born, can live, and die, and not see anything that was not made by man.

mempko 9 hours ago

We are in the 6th mass extinction event. Want to feel bad? Look at the numbers of decline in the last 40 years, it's dramatic. Even in my lifetime it's been dramatic.

jdh76 8 hours ago

I dont think its a big loss to the universe if humans go extinct. Humans didnt engineer the biochemistry of life or produce the atmosphere or the over rated buggy brain.

gls2ro 8 hours ago

I fail to understand this line of thinking.

Even letting aside any survival mechanism we have there are two rational posibilities:

1. We are alone in the universe => super huge loss of complexity and consciousness

2. We are not alone but at Universe scale intelligent life seems rather scarce => still huge loss in diversity

OroPla 8 hours ago

Welcome to nihilism, where nothing matters. On a grand enough scale, is there a difference between our universe existing and our universe not existing?

esarbe 7 hours ago

Nope. Nothing will last. Everything is chance. Entropy will eat us all.

That's why it's important to find joy in the moment and ways to share that joy and happiness with those around you.

goatlover 7 hours ago

On a cosmic scale independent of human activity, sure. But things do matter to us every day. And things matter to other life forms we share the planet with.

Razengan 2 hours ago

I mean, it 'bounced back' after a literal ASTEROID..

recursive-call an hour ago

Yes, but not with the same species…

hncbw02z5a 9 hours ago

Did stream restoration for a few years and the thing that stuck with me is you can put the habitat back and the species still don't return. Some of them just have nowhere left to come from.

dylan604 8 hours ago

Yeah, at some point, natural restoration can only do so much. If humans cause nature to go out of balance, it gets to a point where it'll take human intervention to come close to getting it back. That might mean manually reintroducing livestock predator and prey.