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essay—footprints on a changing landscape

some ways to think about natural systems

I recently found myself talking about conservation over a meal. After the standard dinner party pleasantries had been dispatched, the conversation turned to the protection of fish in Yosemite National Park. Our host—a dedicated fisherman—complained about the limitations and rules imposed on anglers in the park. The regulations are numerous, and I could see his frustration.

We soon found the root of his confusion: what is so important about leaving certain fish in the rivers? We pointed out that Chytrid fungus was causing massive amphibian death all over the US, and perhaps that could be a reason for strict rules (among many others), but our conversation reflected something more deeply rooted, a sort of unconscious incompetence—in other words, we don’t know what we don’t know. It occurred to me that if outdoor recreationalists struggle to make sense of our impact on the landscape, how could we expect anyone else to apply some sort of sustainability lens?

I think that most people lack understanding of natural systems, even those of us who find ourselves standing in the middle of them, attracting fish.

Despite the dinner party fungus talk, my point is not that recreationalists are ignorant about the devices of their chosen sport’s home ecosystem—I’ll spare you that one. Instead, I think there’s something about our perception of change (or lack of it) that limits an intuitive knowledge of changing ecosystems. One explanation is that we don’t see the connectedness of natural systems because our experience of time is so different from the movement of the landscape. We think, act, and even exist at the wrong speed to balance our consumption with the mechanisms of natural systems.

In so many ways, time is not on our side.

Ecosystem services typically occur at the same speed as the landscape. As it happens, our landscape is mostly geologic and occasionally biological. Some of these processes occur in deep time, a geologic unit of time that is so inscrutable it verges on unimaginable. There is nothing in a million-year stratum of time that we might anchor our minds to; herein lies the problem. When we extract from our landscape by fishing, mining, or farming, the effects are often not apparent on human timeframes. We use and transform natural resources differently than the biogeochemical cycling of resources. This makes sustainable consumption in all forms a blurry target.

The jungle of Anchorage, AK.

Consider the nitrogen, carbon, or water cycle. These are the motors that allow life to persist, all finding some way to convert solar energy into the renewal and transformation of essential life-giving molecules.

How might it be possible that we could effect change to such intrinsic and slow moving systems systems?

The atmosphere and oceans are the link between humans and the landscape; fluids mobilize things like organic material in water, or particulates in the atmosphere. The movement of air and water is nearly always the catalyst for change in this Earth-sized experiment. These two reservoirs bring about change to the biosphere, for good and bad.

If we’re looking at the clock (and we should be) natural disasters are sometimes the closest analog to human impacts. The rise of greenhouse gas emissions is more similar in duration to an event like the dinosaur-cancelling meteor strike, than say, variations in climate due to Milankovitch cycles. The explosion of carbon dioxide in our atmosphere might as well be a literal bomb in the context of the Earth’s ability to buffer such change. It’s much too fast.

Beyond climate, I like to think about a larger context of change, specifically contrasting natural systems with human “systems”.

There is growing concern about the effects of our global plastic addiction. The plastics in our clothes (mostly polyester) are shed during washing and enter natural systems as microscopic fibers. As with fossil fuels, the issue is happening fast (human-time) and is wide-spread (we all wear clothes). We don’t yet know effect what the plastic-explosion has had, but we do know that they are ingested by most living things, including us. In my day job, I collect samples from an atmospheric monitoring site that has confirmed the near ubiquitous presence of airborne plastics (which also happen to include rubber particles from vehicle tires). These are the externalities we need to think carefully about, especially given the resistance of plastic to degradation. We don’t yet know what effects the explosion of plastic will have.

Greenhouse gas emissions and plastic pollution are emblematic of a larger structure of unknown or ignored externalities. What if we could slow down, matching the ability of natural systems to reach an equilibrium state?

Rather than subjects of the Earth’s connected systems, we are participants. But it doesn’t always feel so. When crops fail or a hurricane strikes, it reinforces our notion of being victims in some cruel sun-archy. The power of natural phenomena inspire and scare us, but only when we are unlucky enough to be exposed to them.

Millions, perhaps billions of people live in regions where the collapse of one species of fish, in a single fishery, could spell disaster. Very few or no Americans live in such circumstances. I suspect that if anyone was curious enough to enquire, they would be hard pressed to find a climate-denier among those whose lives so closely depend on their local food chain. Instead, we find ourselves insulated by global supply chains—and skeptical of climate science.

And yet, powerful and random-seeming acts of nature seem to tell us that we are not under control. This is in opposition to how we should think about natural resources. That pumping groundwater for irrigation could have such direct consequences contradicts the powerlessness of a city in the face of an approaching tornado. A thunderstorm rolling through the desert occurs in human-time, but the effects of running water carve the Grand Canyon in deep time. A forest moves slowly, the classic “war of attrition”. The benefits of such a strategy are now plainly obvious; fast growth exhausts resources in all systems, big and small.

A deep-time landscape. They all are.

This is not really a flaw; awareness of deep-time offers no evolutionary advantage to primates like us. But a heuristic failure easily becomes a cultural failure. Of course we can’t deal with an issue in a context that most of us actively try to avoid (nature). The success and development of commercial chemical processing led us to believe that the natural world was easily controlled. These biogeochemical drivers of modern society are now so far removed from our lives that many people are fooled into thinking that perhaps we don’t truly rely on them.

To be clear: all natural engines are susceptible to human interference under the right perturbation or timeline, just as they are susceptible to all other forces of the universe. It is not hubris to look down from the wing of an airplane and understand that the dominant impression upon our landscape is that of humanity. We have to see the world for what it is: a pale, blue, sometimes vulnerable dot.

Consider the alternative; a static world. A planet absent of iterative change is one in which essential nutrients for life are never freed up and made available to new creatures. Without the push of water flowing over rocks, or the random distribution of seeds in the wind, life would be very hard to come upon.

Deep time is the means by which a weak force can impart such a vision on the landscape. Our own nudging of the land is yet another force of nature. The chemical externalities of modern life change our landscape, much like “natural” processes, but in a much more accelerated way. Instead of a weak force coupled with deep time, we are a strong force coupled with human time. Thinking in these terms is one way to build context for understand the way we impart change on our landscape. Such comparisons are a tool to think past the limitations of human time.

In the words of Jonathan Safran Foer: “The environment is not a context, it is everything”.

This post has no citations and many dubious arguments, being largely a stream-of-consciousness rant. It was inspired many interactions and several books including: A Short History of Everything by Bill Bryson, We are the Weather by Jonathan Safran Foer, and Underland by Robert Macfarlane.