Love Your Monsters_ Postenvironmentalism and the Anthropocene - Michael Shellenberger [30]
Second, Forbes, like Spencer, called the dynamic force or universal law that organizes nature in ascending levels or scales of complexity not God, but Evolution. This substitution of nomenclature turned 18th century Great Chain of Being theodicy — with its emphasis on pattern, scale, process, mechanism, hierarchy, resilience, and plenitude — into ecology as it was studied throughout the 20th century.
Frederic Clements, the most influential plant ecologist of the early 20th century, who was also influenced by Spencer, agreed with Forbes that nature is progressive and beneficent. According to ecologist S. P. Hubbell,
Clements believed that the community was literally a ‘superorganism,’ and that species were its organs and succession its ontogeny. He argued that each species had an essential role to play in preparing the way for the next serial stage in the succession toward the equilibrium or ‘climax’ plant community.38
Because Spencer’s theory of adaptation applied not just to species, but also to ecological communities, it allowed community ecology to hold on to its theological roots while it embraced a concept of evolution. By assuming that anything God could do, evolution did better, biologists leapt from 18th century natural theology to 20th century community ecology without missing a beat. But for the mantle of mathematics that ecologists had draped over it, mid-20th century community and ecosystems ecology could not be distinguished from the more openly theological framework that Forbes had adapted from Spencer and presented 80 years earlier.
4.
Ecological economists drew on the study of ecological systems — systems ecology — that developed after World War II in the context of Big Science and postulated that ecological systems or communities are unified or governed by a set of organizing principles. Nature itself, however, seems scandalously indifferent to this philosophy. Ecologists who engaged in empirical research found that the mathematical models devised by community and systems theorists were not supported by observation other than by examples cherry picked for the purpose.39 Had theoretical ecologists been interested in empirical evidence, according to ecologist John Lawton, they would have easily falsified any principle they tested; there are “painfully few fuzzy generalisations, let alone rules or laws.”40
As early as 1917, however, American botanist Henry Gleason (1882-1975) had challenged the assumption that the living world is organized under enduring principles or by powerful forces. He argued instead that each association of plants and animals is unique, ephemeral, spontaneous, idiosyncratic, extemporaneous, and a law unto itself.41 The sites that ecologists study, he believed, should be seen as path-dependent histories rather than as rule-governed communities. From this point of view ecosystems do not evolve; they just change.
Gleason argued that no general law, principle, model, or theory gets any predictive traction on the comings and goings of species. In a recent article, Daniel Simberloff, a leading contemporary ecologist, refers to the “longstanding controversy stemming back to Clements, Gleason, and their contemporaries, over whether a plant community is anything other than the assemblage of populations co-occurring in a specific place at a specific time: that is, to what extent are communities integrated, discrete entities, and, if they are, what is the nature of the integration?” Underlying this controversy is “the question of whether community ecology itself actually has generalizations beyond trivial ones like the laws of thermodynamics, and whether seeking such generalizations advances the study of ecology at the community level.”42 Simberloff concedes that there are no nontrivial laws, principles, or generalizations that predict events at the “system” or the “community” level or that explain the integration these