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Picture a peaceful forest. Tall trees, underbrush, sun-dappled leaves, the smell of loam on the gentle breeze. A rustle in the distance. You feel at peace, and

by Kalium 8y ago

Picture a peaceful forest. Tall trees, underbrush, sun-dappled leaves, the smell of loam on the gentle breeze. A rustle in the distance. You feel at peace, and harmony surrounds you. This peaceful scene is an endless orgy of violence, death, and deceit as living things work constantly against one another. Animals stalk prey as plants wage chemical warfare against plants and animals alike. Creatures pretend to be other creatures, and plants pretend to be insects in order to attract them for selfish reasons. "Harmonious" is not a word everyone would use to describe nature red in tooth and claw.

salimmadjd 8y ago
>This peaceful scene is an endless orgy of violence, death, and deceit as living things work constantly against one another. That's part of the harmony. Harmony ends when one of these organism takes over, it destroys the entire ecology and in the process it ultimately destroys itself.
- hannasanarion 8y ago
  You mean like the untold number of bacterial and viral infections with the ability to kill their hosts? Plenty of animals and plants alter their environment to the detrinent of others. Trees are tall and shady in order to reduce the sunlight in the environment and starve nearby plants to death at absurd individual expense: it takes a lot of nutrients to make those trunks that serve no purpose other than spite. Beavers construct big dams to turn meadows into swampland, often clearing out the local plant life. I know from personal experience that operating a large farm in a wooded area is a constant battle of construction and destruction against the beavers. Yeah, humans are better at altering the environment than most everything else, but altering the environment at the expense of other life is hardly unnatural.
  - Turing_Machine 8y ago
    > Plenty of animals and plants alter their environment to the detriment of others. Definite case in point: photosynthesizing organisms (green plants, algae, etc.) We know that the Earth had a large-scale anaerobic ecosystem before the advent of photosynthesis. While anaerobic organisms still exist, they're only found in very narrow niches. >99% of them were wiped out, root and branch, apparently killed off by rising oxygen levels (oxygen is a poison to them).
- Lazeb 8y ago
  This cycle of "harmony" is futile and not a constant state that would exist without humans, unless any organism within that cycle recognises that it's simply an evolutionary race to the top as we have, with the reward being dominion over their respective territory. Only until some cosmic entity comes and ends it, or an extinction event occurs, putting the slate clean again for any traces of life left to begin the evolutionary race, repeating until that harmonious life as we see it can no longer exist. The answer is obvious conservation until we as a species are immune to single planitary extinctions, but the romanticised view of our worlds ecology as some living entity, rather than a number of organisms interacting independently and adapting doesn't give a clear objective of what we should be doing and more importantly why.
- nkrisc 8y ago
  Why must anything be harmonious? Why do you think there's any one way "nature" is supposed to be. Natural is as natural does. Everything we do is part of the natural process of the universe. Wiping out all life on Earth or increasing biodiversity and everything in between are all perfectly valid outcomes because there is no intended course or outcome.
  - orthecreedence 8y ago
    > Why must [nature] be harmonious? Because if it's not harmonius is collapses. And we all die. But yes, there's no real reason for it to be harmonius, just like there's no real reason humans (or any other life form on Earth) need to exist.
tomxor 8y ago
Nevertheless, the ecology you describe has sense of harmony in the way it is self balancing; humans are quite anomalous in that respect. In nature a species population usually self correct and balance through either becoming prey or resource depletion (their prey). We can too easily protect ourselves from any potential natural predators (technology) and have found more and more ways to exploit the earth to allow unsustainable growth (technology). Modern humans are quite unbalanced and inharmonious... This point of view is also interesting when considering our predecessors, tribes who lived in the forests, not Mayan civilisation or whatever, but tribes, they leave no trace because everything they take or make is of the forest and goes back into the ground just like every other part of the ecosystem - they were the only harmonious humans and there still are small numbers of tribes who live like this.
- taneq 8y ago
  > Nevertheless, the ecology you describe has sense of harmony in the way it is self balancing; humans are quite anomalous in that respect. I don't think so, on any long time scale. We just think it's in perfect harmonious balance because we've only been observing it for a the blink of a gnat's eye. Longer time scales are an endless succession boom and bust as some creatures fail and dying, others succeed and breed out of control until they wipe others out (and eventually themselves). The view that nature is somehow wise and benevolent is only possible for us at all because we've won the game so thoroughly that nature, almost never happens /to/ us.
  - tomxor 8y ago
    > I don't think so, on any long time scale. We just think it's in perfect harmonious balance because we've only been observing it for a the blink of a gnat's eye I didn't say it was perfect, on the contrary all of the models used to describe ecological systems exhibit some degree of chaos, but the important part is they are periodic, they all oscillate in some way and eventually recover one way or another - I suppose you could argue humans just haven't reached some tipping point yet, we haven't completed "one period", but unlike other species we keep inventing ways to escape that. This is the difference I'm pointing out, I thought it was pretty obvious. > The view that nature is somehow wise and benevolent is only possible for us at all because we've won the game so thoroughly that nature, almost never happens /to/ us. I realise that by mentioning tribes and forests I seem to have tripped some "save the world" alarms, to clarify that is what I intended to imply - i'm not an environmentalist. Your statement is not my view, I don't think nature is benevolent, nature is nature its neutral and of course we are part of it, but it's not exactly hard to argue that humans stick out like a sore thumb from the rest, we are in the position of resource depletion in classic models but we really take it up a few orders of magnitude in severity because we have so many tricks to exploit the system.
dsajames 8y ago
Maybe be "opposing forces matched in equilibrium" is more accurate than harmonious.
- throwaway8879 8y ago
  There is equilibrium in short time scales but none in longer timescales that are normal to the lifetime of a planet. Perhaps the primordial soup might've seemed like equilibrium to an non-temporal objective observer.
Pica_soO 8y ago
Even grass and trees are locked into a eternal war for ground and light. Forrest and savannash are no way for nature to show of how diverse she can be. They are warzones, showing who has one, and the creatures who dwell in those spaces are - willing or unwilling soldiers to be thrown into the fire for another small victory.

by Kalium 8y ago

salimmadjd 8y ago

>This peaceful scene is an endless orgy of violence, death, and deceit as living things work constantly against one another. That's part of the harmony. Harmony ends when one of these organism takes over, it destroys the entire ecology and in the process it ultimately destroys itself.

hannasanarion 8y ago
You mean like the untold number of bacterial and viral infections with the ability to kill their hosts? Plenty of animals and plants alter their environment to the detrinent of others. Trees are tall and shady in order to reduce the sunlight in the environment and starve nearby plants to death at absurd individual expense: it takes a lot of nutrients to make those trunks that serve no purpose other than spite. Beavers construct big dams to turn meadows into swampland, often clearing out the local plant life. I know from personal experience that operating a large farm in a wooded area is a constant battle of construction and destruction against the beavers. Yeah, humans are better at altering the environment than most everything else, but altering the environment at the expense of other life is hardly unnatural.
- Turing_Machine 8y ago
  > Plenty of animals and plants alter their environment to the detriment of others. Definite case in point: photosynthesizing organisms (green plants, algae, etc.) We know that the Earth had a large-scale anaerobic ecosystem before the advent of photosynthesis. While anaerobic organisms still exist, they're only found in very narrow niches. >99% of them were wiped out, root and branch, apparently killed off by rising oxygen levels (oxygen is a poison to them).
Lazeb 8y ago
This cycle of "harmony" is futile and not a constant state that would exist without humans, unless any organism within that cycle recognises that it's simply an evolutionary race to the top as we have, with the reward being dominion over their respective territory. Only until some cosmic entity comes and ends it, or an extinction event occurs, putting the slate clean again for any traces of life left to begin the evolutionary race, repeating until that harmonious life as we see it can no longer exist. The answer is obvious conservation until we as a species are immune to single planitary extinctions, but the romanticised view of our worlds ecology as some living entity, rather than a number of organisms interacting independently and adapting doesn't give a clear objective of what we should be doing and more importantly why.
nkrisc 8y ago
Why must anything be harmonious? Why do you think there's any one way "nature" is supposed to be. Natural is as natural does. Everything we do is part of the natural process of the universe. Wiping out all life on Earth or increasing biodiversity and everything in between are all perfectly valid outcomes because there is no intended course or outcome.
- orthecreedence 8y ago
  > Why must [nature] be harmonious? Because if it's not harmonius is collapses. And we all die. But yes, there's no real reason for it to be harmonius, just like there's no real reason humans (or any other life form on Earth) need to exist.

tomxor 8y ago

Nevertheless, the ecology you describe has sense of harmony in the way it is self balancing; humans are quite anomalous in that respect. In nature a species population usually self correct and balance through either becoming prey or resource depletion (their prey). We can too easily protect ourselves from any potential natural predators (technology) and have found more and more ways to exploit the earth to allow unsustainable growth (technology). Modern humans are quite unbalanced and inharmonious... This point of view is also interesting when considering our predecessors, tribes who lived in the forests, not Mayan civilisation or whatever, but tribes, they leave no trace because everything they take or make is of the forest and goes back into the ground just like every other part of the ecosystem - they were the only harmonious humans and there still are small numbers of tribes who live like this.

taneq 8y ago
> Nevertheless, the ecology you describe has sense of harmony in the way it is self balancing; humans are quite anomalous in that respect. I don't think so, on any long time scale. We just think it's in perfect harmonious balance because we've only been observing it for a the blink of a gnat's eye. Longer time scales are an endless succession boom and bust as some creatures fail and dying, others succeed and breed out of control until they wipe others out (and eventually themselves). The view that nature is somehow wise and benevolent is only possible for us at all because we've won the game so thoroughly that nature, almost never happens /to/ us.
- tomxor 8y ago
  > I don't think so, on any long time scale. We just think it's in perfect harmonious balance because we've only been observing it for a the blink of a gnat's eye I didn't say it was perfect, on the contrary all of the models used to describe ecological systems exhibit some degree of chaos, but the important part is they are periodic, they all oscillate in some way and eventually recover one way or another - I suppose you could argue humans just haven't reached some tipping point yet, we haven't completed "one period", but unlike other species we keep inventing ways to escape that. This is the difference I'm pointing out, I thought it was pretty obvious. > The view that nature is somehow wise and benevolent is only possible for us at all because we've won the game so thoroughly that nature, almost never happens /to/ us. I realise that by mentioning tribes and forests I seem to have tripped some "save the world" alarms, to clarify that is what I intended to imply - i'm not an environmentalist. Your statement is not my view, I don't think nature is benevolent, nature is nature its neutral and of course we are part of it, but it's not exactly hard to argue that humans stick out like a sore thumb from the rest, we are in the position of resource depletion in classic models but we really take it up a few orders of magnitude in severity because we have so many tricks to exploit the system.

dsajames 8y ago

Maybe be "opposing forces matched in equilibrium" is more accurate than harmonious.

throwaway8879 8y ago
There is equilibrium in short time scales but none in longer timescales that are normal to the lifetime of a planet. Perhaps the primordial soup might've seemed like equilibrium to an non-temporal objective observer.

Pica_soO 8y ago

Even grass and trees are locked into a eternal war for ground and light. Forrest and savannash are no way for nature to show of how diverse she can be. They are warzones, showing who has one, and the creatures who dwell in those spaces are - willing or unwilling soldiers to be thrown into the fire for another small victory.