The balance of nature is the fallacy that nature will seek equilibrium and balance itself out if left to it’s own devices.
The Balance of Nature fallacy is pernicious and hard to root out. it appeals to our desire to make sense of our world, and unfortunately for us, when applied to Climate Change it might well be deadly.
Capella enjoys the feeling of the sunlight on her hand at 10,000 feet. In 2072 she'll be eligible for social security, will she be able to sun herself without fear of burn then? Will the same species of plant live at this elevation? Will there still be large snow drifts in June? Will she remember that June so long ago when she learned to recognize the difference between moose and elk scat? Will there be moose in the Indian Peaks Wilderness?
People can’t be split into climate deniers or climate hawks, there are shades of gray, degrees of concern. Amongst climate deniers there might well be many who away from the spotlight actually do think man is having a deleterious affect on our atmosphere, but due to economics or politics they think that if we change our habits a few years later rather than earlier this old planet will right itself eventually anyway.
Amongst those concerned with our environment no doubt are many who think the same. They are concerned with the possible loss of some species and the rise in sea level flooding Bengalis on the other side of the planet, but eventually the CO2 will be taken up and we’ll learn to live with mother nature and we’ll exist like Europeans in a home garden utopia.
Things don’t always reach equilibrium in nature. Polluted areas can remain so forever, loss of ice caps and permafrost could tip the scales to an extent where they could no longer be righted.
This common fallacy and it’s belief amongst science majors was the subject of a joint study by an ecologist and a pychologist.
http://www.miller-mccune.com/...
What caught my attention at first read wasn’t the reference to climate change, though that is the thrust of the magazine article, but rather the test question given to students at the beginning of their ecology class.
“Do you think a predator could ever drive a prey species to extinction?”
“They uniformly answer no — even though it does happen all the time,” she said.
How would Kossaks answer that question? How many believe that climate change is at worst a few decades long inconvenience until we get our act together?
We don’t have the choice of just letting nature take it’s course. What we do has an affect, it’s up to us to determine which actions are ok and which are harmful.
As public policy we are constantly making choices on which of many options that affect our environment we will choose. These choices involve everything from fighting the new mega fires now burning in our southwest to what lands to subsidize in our agricultural conservation reserve programs, which invasive species to fight tenaciously and which species to reintroduce. Whether to subsidize coal or oil or nuclear power. How much to spend saving a small insect with an over sized economic impact versus a reptile with none.
In making informed choices scientists other than ecologists need to learn that the balance of nature isn’t.
http://en.wikipedia.org/...
http://www.nytimes.com/...