cultures as power began to be centralized, the powerful created a discourse—in religion, philosophy, science, economics—that rationalized injustice and institutionalized it into a group projection. At first the powerless might not have believed in this discourse, but by now, many thousands of years later, we’re all deluded to some extent and believe that these differentials in power are natural. Some of us may want to change the agenda a little bit, but there’s no seeing through the whole matrix. Power, like property, like land and water, has become privatized and concentrated. And it’s been that way for so long and we believe it to such an extent that we think that’s the natural order of things.”
It’s not.
Just today I came across an article in Nature magazine with the title “Catastrophic Shifts in Ecosystems.” Conventional scientific thought, it seems, has generally held that ecosystems—natural communities like lakes, oceans, coral reefs, forests, deserts, and so on—respond slowly and steadily to climate change, nutrient pollution, habitat degradation, and the many other environmental impacts of industrial civilization. A new study suggests that instead, stressors like these can cause natural communities to shift almost overnight from apparently stable conditions to very different, diminished conditions. The lead author of the study, Marten Scheffer, an ecologist at the University of Wageningen in the Netherlands, said, “Models have predicted this, but only in recent years has enough evidence accumulated to tell us that resilience of many important ecosystems has become undermined to the point that even the slightest disturbance can make them collapse.”
It’s pretty scary. A co-author of the study, Jonathan Foley, a climatologist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, added, “In approaching questions about deforestation or endangered species or global climate change, we work on the premise that an ounce of pollution equals an ounce of damage. It turns out that assumption is entirely incorrect. Ecosystems may go on for years exposed to pollution or climate changes without showing any change at all and then suddenly they may flip into an entirely different condition, with little warning or none at all.”
For example, six thousand years ago, great parts of what is now the Sahara Desert were wet, featuring lakes and swamps that teemed with crocodiles, hippos, and fish. Foley said: “The lines of geologic evidence and evidence from computer models shows that it suddenly went from a pretty wet place to a pretty dry place. Nature isn’t linear. Sometimes you can push on a system and push on a system and, finally, you have the straw that breaks the camel’s back.”
Once the camel’s back is broken, it often cannot or will not heal the way it was before.
Another co-author, limnologist Stephen Carpenter, past president of the Ecological Society of America, said that this understanding—of the discontinuous nature of ecological change—is beginning to suffuse the scientific community, and then he continued, “We realize that there is a common pattern we’re seeing in ecosystems around the world. Gradual changes in vulnerability accumulate and
eventually you get a shock to the system, a flood or a drought, and boom, you’re over into another regime. It becomes a self-sustaining collapse.” 40
After I read the article, I received a call from a friend, Roianne Ahn, a woman smart and persistent enough that even a Ph.D. in psychology hasn’t clouded her insight into how people think and act. “It never ceases to amaze me,” she said, “that it takes experts to convince us of what we already know.”
That wasn’t the response I’d been expecting.
She continued, “That’s one of my roles as a therapist. I just listen and reflect back to clients things they know, but don’t have the confidence to believe until they hear an outside expert say them.”
“Do you think people will
It’s not.
Just today I came across an article in Nature magazine with the title “Catastrophic Shifts in Ecosystems.” Conventional scientific thought, it seems, has generally held that ecosystems—natural communities like lakes, oceans, coral reefs, forests, deserts, and so on—respond slowly and steadily to climate change, nutrient pollution, habitat degradation, and the many other environmental impacts of industrial civilization. A new study suggests that instead, stressors like these can cause natural communities to shift almost overnight from apparently stable conditions to very different, diminished conditions. The lead author of the study, Marten Scheffer, an ecologist at the University of Wageningen in the Netherlands, said, “Models have predicted this, but only in recent years has enough evidence accumulated to tell us that resilience of many important ecosystems has become undermined to the point that even the slightest disturbance can make them collapse.”
It’s pretty scary. A co-author of the study, Jonathan Foley, a climatologist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, added, “In approaching questions about deforestation or endangered species or global climate change, we work on the premise that an ounce of pollution equals an ounce of damage. It turns out that assumption is entirely incorrect. Ecosystems may go on for years exposed to pollution or climate changes without showing any change at all and then suddenly they may flip into an entirely different condition, with little warning or none at all.”
For example, six thousand years ago, great parts of what is now the Sahara Desert were wet, featuring lakes and swamps that teemed with crocodiles, hippos, and fish. Foley said: “The lines of geologic evidence and evidence from computer models shows that it suddenly went from a pretty wet place to a pretty dry place. Nature isn’t linear. Sometimes you can push on a system and push on a system and, finally, you have the straw that breaks the camel’s back.”
Once the camel’s back is broken, it often cannot or will not heal the way it was before.
Another co-author, limnologist Stephen Carpenter, past president of the Ecological Society of America, said that this understanding—of the discontinuous nature of ecological change—is beginning to suffuse the scientific community, and then he continued, “We realize that there is a common pattern we’re seeing in ecosystems around the world. Gradual changes in vulnerability accumulate and
eventually you get a shock to the system, a flood or a drought, and boom, you’re over into another regime. It becomes a self-sustaining collapse.” 40
After I read the article, I received a call from a friend, Roianne Ahn, a woman smart and persistent enough that even a Ph.D. in psychology hasn’t clouded her insight into how people think and act. “It never ceases to amaze me,” she said, “that it takes experts to convince us of what we already know.”
That wasn’t the response I’d been expecting.
She continued, “That’s one of my roles as a therapist. I just listen and reflect back to clients things they know, but don’t have the confidence to believe until they hear an outside expert say them.”
“Do you think people will
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