Love Your Monsters_ Postenvironmentalism and the Anthropocene - Michael Shellenberger [29]
While Darwin’s theory of descent with modification, for which the fossil record offered empirical evidence, explained the properties of species, Spencer’s theory postulated a “universal law of evolution” which asserted that any collection of living things over time tends to self-organize in a “dynamic equilibrium” while dissipating energy.30 This principle became a program for interpreting everything. Spencer’s theory of systems provided the critical bridge from 19th century community ecology not only forward to 20th century systems ecology but also backward to 18th century natural theology. As geographer Clarence Glacken has written, “I am convinced that modern ecological theory, so important in our attitudes towards nature and man’s interference with it, owes its origin to the design argument. The wisdom of the creator is self-evident… no living thing is useless, and all are related one to the other.”31
In 19th century America, naturalists who came of age at the time of the Civil War were educated in the tradition we associate with “intelligent design,” the idea that God’s fullness and magnificence is demonstrated in the perfect organization and replete diversity of the natural world. The 18th century English poet Alexander Pope celebrated this idea, “Where, one step broken, the great scale’s destroyed / From Nature’s chain whatever link you strike.”32 The scala natura or Great Chain of Being served as the organizing metaphor for what would become community ecology. This approach, according to historian of ideas A.O. Lovejoy, exalted the “sufficient reason” that put every species in its place and attributed self-sufficiency, self-organization, or “quietude” to natural communities — an ability to arrange and sustain themselves as God made them if left undisturbed.33 The commonplaces of modern ecology, such as “everything connects” and “save all the parts,” recall the neoplatonic view of nature as an integrated mechanism into which every species fits.
How were botanists, zoologists, entomologists, and other biologists able to reconcile their education in natural theology with their acceptance of evolutionary biology? Stephen Forbes, who headed the Department of Zoology at the University of Illinois, showed how this could be done. According to historian Sharon Kingsland, Forbes took from Herbert Spencer the belief that evolutionary forces will achieve and maintain adaptive dynamic equilibriums despite ever-changing relationships in ecological communities or systems.34
In a seminal article written in 1887, Forbes described a glacial lake in Illinois as a “system of organic interactions by which [species] influence and control each other [that] has remained substantially unchanged from a remote geological period.” What could cause this system to organize and to maintain itself for thousands or millions of years? Forbes wrote:
Out of these hard conditions, an order has been evolved which is the best conceivable… that actually accomplishes for all the parties involved the greatest good which the circumstances will at all permit…. Is there not, in this reflection, solid ground for a belief in the final beneficence of the laws of organic nature?35
In this paper, indeed, in this paragraph, Forbes performed intellectual feats that remain impressive to this day. First, he assumed that there was an order, a dynamic equilibrium, in the lake he visited. He had no empirical evidence to show that the organisms he observed were ancient and enduring, nor did he consider any necessary.36 Forbes, like Spencer, relied on deductive argument based