The Nature of Nature

Rating

10/10 A masterpiece of reason, logic and genuine love for Mother Nature. This book beautifully presents all the reasons, scientific, ideological and economical, for why rewilding is the answer to many of our existential problems, including climate change, overpopulation, natural disasters, overexploitation of seas, forests, lakes, rivers and declining soil health. The answer is simple: mimic nature, it had millions of years to develop the optimal relationships between all the habitats and their inhabitants. Simple, yet incredibly hard to push through the current nature of our worldly politics and economics (pun heavily intended).

Rewilding nature, taking a piece of potentially economically viable land and helping it thrive, is labeled as costly, basically a type of charity. But this is only true if we measure the value of such an intervention in the usual economic terms (profit, returns) and usual political timelines (4, 5, 10 years). If we look at it more broadly (I would say holistically but that’s a word that probably invokes iffy associations), it turns out that protecting 50% of our planet is the easiest and least costly way to ensure both our survival and the survival of the rest of the beautiful biodiversity that this world of ours has been harboring long before we came to the main scene. Keeping 50% of our planet protected, meaning no agriculture, no hunting, no fishing, basically just gazing at the beauty and optionally helping it mature into the ecosystem it once was before out careless interventions, would have economic and social benefits beyond anything we can continue to artificially create with our current approach to being.

I loved this book precisely for this, for being so crystal clear in laying out all the arguments for and against rewilding and showing that the stack is undeniably in favor of doing so; now the question is how do we persuade all the people in power of this? How do we cut through the noise? Through five year political terms? Through end-of-the-year shareholder reports? The answer Enric provides, with which I wholeheartedly agree, is by making everyone fall in love with nature. First comes the heart, then comes the reason.

Two-ish months before reading this book I made a landing page to gather interest in hosting field workshops for teaching nature identification skills - I shared it around, a few people signed-up, but it didn’t make big rounds. Nonetheless, after reading this book, I am doubly eager to build this educational company. I believe that people cannot fall in love with nature if it’s just a massive green or blue wall; unless that wall is majestic, it gets overlooked. Very few people live near breathtaking natural spaces, where the beauty just screams at you. Most of us need to fall in love with our small apartment garden, local park, or a few hills behind the city. Having the skill to recognize an oak from a beech or a blue tit from a house sparrow makes you more likely to appreciate them since now they are no longer strangers. It also gives you a healthy confidence boost in learning a new skill, in having some knowledge, it simply feels good to be able to do something you couldn’t do before. Coupling those two, you develop a love for your natural ecosystem. And the final step of my hypothesis is that this makes you more likely to want to protect it instead of exploit it. And I think Enric agrees with my chain of thought:

“But I also know that I loved the natural world before I could understand it. In fact, I was interested in understanding it because I loved it. And now, the more I know intellectually about the natural world, the more I realize how little I know—and yet my love grows deeper.”

Synopsis

The complexity of nature is astounding and incomprehensible. Despite our best efforts over hundreds of years of scientific inquiry, we understand very little about the role and influence of each species on its natural habitat. What we understand however, are the massive impacts of diversity loss not only on the ecosystems themselves, but on our own well-being. Protecting nature and rewilding the habitats decimated by short-sighted human activity is thus not only paramount for the survival of the many species that live within them but also for the survival of our own species: homo sapiens. It is thus time to fall in love with nature and continue our trajectory of the hyper-predator we are in a more natural way; keeping the balance between ourselves and our prey more even, which at the beginning means giving back some of the energy we have been carelessly extracting from nature for so long.

Notes

• “In the modern era, the sense of awe and wonder in the face of the works of Nature has been abandoned in favour of monetary value. Therefore, being able to show the economic value of Nature, of healthy ecosystems, is paramount.”
  • Sad but serves the means to achieve the ends (in a good way in this case) - show the economic value, achieve more rewilding. Later in the book he cites research that shows how higher ecosystem diversity leads to higher crop yields and higher fishing yields.
• “..we need to phase out fossil fuels, change the way we produce food and protect more of Nature.”
  • #FACTS
• Biosphere 2: from September 26, 1991, to September 26, 1993 eight people attempted to live in a fully enclosed research facility in Arizona where their goal was to recreate a fully functioning ecosystem that can supply them both with enough oxygen and nutrients. The project lasted for two years at which point it was terminated due to inadequate calorie production, dangerously low levels of oxygen, dangerously high levels of Co2 and deteriorating team morale. Despite this, the project was a success in terms of providing us with knowledge about ecosystem complexity, human dynamics and biodiverse agriculture.
• “It all started with my being able to tell species apart, to know who all my new friends were. Then came observing who lives next to whom, how, and where. Then who eats whom. And, more recently, recognizing the impact of human activity on the natural world.”
  • I’m at the beginning :)
• “an ecological community in an environment that is more stable over time—a deeper reef, where wave action is less noticeable, for example—will require a longer time to form. That is because deep corals take a longer time to grow. Only a stable environment without major disturbances would allow for old coral colonies to develop.”
• “The growth of a forest is pure magic, a natural alchemy that we take for granted but that is unbelievable when one thinks about it” … “plants use sunlight to turn an invisible gas in the air into growth. The invisible gas is carbon dioxide (CO2), which is found naturally in Earth’s atmosphere. Plants use the energy contained in sunlight to break the CO2 into its constituent parts: carbon (C) and oxygen (O). They use the carbon to make sugars and grow, with the help of water, which brings essential nutrients such as nitrogen and phosphorus from the soil via the roots. They release the oxygen back into the atmosphere.”
• “Thus, an old forest won’t necessarily be a full canopy of ancient trees, but a mosaic of patches at different successional stages: here old canopy, a patch of forest at its climax, there a just opened clearing, a younger canopy in a clearing that opened up a few decades ago somewhere else, and so on.”
  • So a truly healthy ecosystem is one that is diverse. A diversity of its inhabitants creates diversity in its habitats and vice versa - a beautiful reciprocal relationship. Why don’t we build cities in the same way? Heck, why don’t we build humanity with same principles in mind?
• “The deer eat the meadow plants before they can grow much, hence grazing keeps the meadows in immature stages of the ecological succession. The energy produced by the grasses in the meadows cannot be used for the meadow community to advance along succession, but that energy is exported—via deer feces—to the forest, and there it serves as fertilizer and helps maintain the forest’s mature state. The meadow produces new grass biomass equivalent to several times its standing biomass and respires (or burns energy) much less than the energy it produces. In contrast, a mature forest may respire all of its production and thus yield no excess productivity. In this case, the forest exploits the meadow.”
  • the forest exploits the meadow, how cool is that? One inanimate habitat exploits another by implicitly employing its inhabitants (deer) to go graze elsewhere and bring fertilizer back to where the forest offers them protection. Anthropomorphism? Maybe. But it’s undeniably happening precisely this way.
• “Boundaries between natural systems can be symmetrical—with smooth changes from one ecological community to another—or asymmetrical—when the change between communities is sharp. Asymmetrical boundaries can be maintained by physical barriers—such as the banks of a river—or because the ecosystem on one side of the boundary exploits the other one. The exploiter tends to be the more mature ecosystem, and there is a net flow of energy from exploited to exploiter”
• Why GPD isn’t a good measure of progress or human activity:
  • “For instance, if a flood destroys a town, reconstruction activities will make GDP grow—even though the flood itself could have been prevented with healthier ecosystems, which retain rainwater. Second, it assumes that the only value of a society is what can be measured as part of an official, organized market. Forest protection by an indigenous tribe would not be included in the GDP—but clear-cutting the forest for timber to be sold to another country would.”
• Why is the natural world so green? You may answer because of chlorophyl but really it’s because “herbivores don’t consume all plant material, since predators keep the herbivores in check.” - so the whole world actually can’t go vegan :)
• two types of species are especially important for biodiversity of any ecosystem: keystone species and foundation species. Keystone species are usually the top predator that keep all other species in constant fear, thus controlling their proliferation and never eating so many as to run them to extinction (and thus itself). Foundation species, on the other hand, are the habitat builders. The kelp in the ocean’s algal forest where all the vertebrates and invertebrates find refuge from sharks or the oak tree in the forest where everything from tiny fungi to deer can feel safe. They provide the needed structure of ecosystems.
• “When the predators are there, their prey is less numerous and more scared. It’s a landscape of fear, but the community is more diverse. Remove the top predators, and the ecosystem collapses.”
• “The conclusion is unavoidable: If we want a diverse and rich world, we need to keep the predators there. Keystone predators are particularly important, and most fragile. They are the fewest in number and yet the species with the strongest impact on their ecological communities.”
• the higher the diversity, the healthier the ecosystem, the higher the biomass. Apply this logic to agriculture and voila, you have the solution for our Earthly problems.
  • “recent study suggests that a global shift to regenerative agriculture—practices designed to produce and restore the life of the soil—would have the ability to sequester most of the excess carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.”
• “humans exploit terrestrial herbivores—mostly even-toed ungulates such as wild pigs, peccaries, hippopotamuses, llamas, deer, giraffes, antelopes, and wild sheep and goats—at a level similar to that of other predators. What distinguishes us from other predators, however, is that we exploit terrestrial carnivores and top predators—wolves, lynxes, lions, and tigers, for example—at rates four to 10 times higher than other species. Even more shocking, we exploit prey in the ocean at rates 11 to 15 times greater than those of other species. No matter where in the food web those marine species are found—from the humble sardine to the mighty white shark—humans kill all marine species at disproportionately higher rates than any of their other predators.”
  • someone eco-ignorant would read this and say something like “aNd tHaT’S whY wE aRe thE BeST” but I ask myself “could we get where we are without all this exploitation?” - I bet we could have but we weren’t aware of what we were doing, we were building with horse blinkers on our heads
• “Every hour and a half, the sun strikes Earth’s surface with enough energy to power human civilization for a year.”
  • WHAT?!?!?!!? Why the heck isn’t the world covered in solar panels and all kinds of ingenious battery designs?
• “Plants produce organic material at an average rate of 0.21 watt per square meter—on average, only 0.13 percent of the solar energy available to them (although individual plants can have efficiencies of up to 4 percent).”
  • So in fact plants are extremely inefficient users of the sun’s free power - again, I bet we can do much better
• “key difference between human-built and other ecosystems: Other species don’t produce and accumulate waste. Everything is reused or repurposed in nonhuman ecosystems. The natural world is the perfect circular economy, where everything, even after its lifetime, becomes a source for something else.”
  • ;(
• the key differentiator between humans and other top predators is that only humans figured out how to use the sun’s energy stored deep inside the soil - oil, gas
  • “Other forms of life use the recent necrosphere, but only humans have learned to use the ancient one.”
• WHY WE NEED DIVERSE REGENERATIVE AGRICULTURE AND REWILDING!!!
  • “Their experiments showed that the plots containing more species accumulated more plant biomass and more nitrogen—a key nutrient.”
  • “Experiments elsewhere showed that experimental plots with more biodiversity at all levels (from number of species to genetic diversity to number of ecological functions) were more stable and more resilient, able to withstand perturbations and bounce back afterward.”
  • “The results were clear. The more biodiversity, the more benefits a marine ecosystem provides for us: better and more resilient fisheries, flood protection, cleaner coastal water, less incidence of disease because of contaminated fish and shellfish, and so on and so forth. Therefore, when human activities reduce biodiversity, they also reduce the ability of the ocean to provide for us”
  • “to recover lost biodiversity, and that such recovery will likely be followed by increased productivity and more stability, which in turns means better fish catches around reserves and higher non-extractive revenue (tourism) within them.”
• Already just mixing two species of rice has massive benefits over monocultural rice fields
  • “The results were very clear: Twenty percent of the sticky rice in the monoculture fields contracted blast disease, but only one percent of the sticky rice plants in the mixed fields were affected. But there is more: Grain production rates of sticky rice in the mixed fields were on average 89 percent greater than those in monoculture.”
• In the times of Columbus’s voyages the world was a much more wonderful place when it comes to biodiversity. Our baselines are already massively misjudged by what our grandparents and great-grandparents tell us about the ecosystems when they were kids. But what about the state of the world of their great-grandparents, and great-grandparents of their great-grandparents?
  • “Loren McClenachan, a student of Jeremy’s, later analyzed historical sources and estimated that back then there were up to 91 million adult green turtles in the Caribbean—some 300 times more than the current estimate of fewer than 300,000 green turtles there today.”
• “Second, size matters. For example, to fully protect the greater ecosystem, Yellowstone National Park would need to designate at minimum an area that encompasses the home range of the region’s keystone species (the wolf) or its moving prey (the elk), whichever is larger.”
  • So size does matter in the end, wink wink. But it makes sense, an ecosystem is only an ecosystem if the system works; and by design (evolution) the system has minimum size requirements implied by its inhabitants
• “A 2019 study compiled data on 87,000 children representing more than 60,000 households in 34 developing countries. Some lived near protected areas; others lived far from them. The authors found that households near protected areas that fostered ecotourism enjoyed 17 percent higher wealth levels and 16 percent less susceptibility to poverty.”
  • Among other positive outcomes they found. They also found no negative externalities of living close to wild nature. Facts don’t lie.
• “…as I am writing these lines, only 7 percent of the ocean has been designated or proposed as protected, only 2.4 percent is fully protected from fishing, and only 15 percent of the land is protected. We need much more.”
• “In a protected area where everything is missing except the keystone predator, its reintroduction can accelerate ecological succession and restore the complexity and maturity of the ecosystem. Even in a degraded area, like a moribund industrial farm, the right species can restart progress“… “The introduction of non-native species can on the other hand wreak havoc within an ecosystem. Inside a protected area, introducing the wrong species can actually reverse the gains accumulated by protection.”
  • I am just saving all these snippets as bits to come back to when I get my hands dirty in a rewilding project of my own - one day, one day…
• “Losing these wild places, we have lost most benefits they provide for us as well, such as flood protection, water security, water filtration, clean air, and naturally fertile soil.”
  • These are the benefits that are usually not accounted for financially since they aren’t as direct as getting millions of dollars from some real-estate development on the same land…
• “‘biophilia’—from the Greek for ‘love of life’—which he defines as ‘the urge to affiliate with other forms of life.’”
  • maybe this is what I should name my nature education company - BIOPHILIA
• “When we first meet with country leaders, we make sure we never get into the brainy weeds. We never show them data or refer to scholarly debates in academic journals, splitting hairs to the infinitesimal degree. We never start with the head. We go straight to the heart, and taking a leader to the field is the best recipe for doing so.”
  • And this is the way to get anyone excited about anything. Many people care about the numbers and data, but if the subject isn’t interesting to them in the first place, then the data is doubly uninteresting. Hence start with the heart, light the little fire of excitement and then feed it reason to make it stronger.
• “That’s the main reason why we don’t have more protected areas: Not because there is no scientific justification and not because there is no public demand for them, but because there is a perceived cost that will be felt by economically important extractive activities, whether it’s logging in a forest, agriculture in the plains,”
  • “Because it is always about the bottom line. In my experience, there is a 95 percent probability that the first question a finance minister will ask when discussing creating a protected area is, “How much is this going to cost?””
• “There is a clear moral argument for protecting more of the natural world. There is an even stronger human survival argument, because the loss of all ecosystem services would mean global human extinction. Thus, the value of the natural world must be infinite. Yet the traditional economic argument, win-lose in its assumptions, is prevalent in policymaking today. One reason is that political cycles are much shorter than ecological cycles. Because the first law of politics is to be reelected, short-term gain typically trumps long-term benefits. “Shareholder value” is the mantra of public corporations, in particular those driving decisions affecting the ecological and climate crisis, and those assessments are also short term. Quarterly financial returns for companies and investors, annual GDP growth for countries: Those are our modern golden idols. Everything else, including our well-being, is subservient to them.”
• “It has been estimated that every year, the environment—our natural capital—provides $125 trillion in free support to human society and the global economy. That’s almost twice the global GDP in 2011, when these estimates were obtained. Yet these are underestimates of the natural capital, because some ecosystem services were not included.”
  • So any wild place is implicitly more valuable to us int the longrun than anything we would build in its place…
  • “Supporting a system of well-managed protected areas over a third of our planet, land and sea, could cost between $103 billion and $171 billion a year. The economic benefits would outweigh the costs; GDP would rise. That’s a cheap investment to maintain a $125 trillion life-support system! But some people—including finance ministers—will still say that this is impossible, that it’s too expensive and we don’t have the money.”
    • So the problem is still the lack of education but more importantly the lack of love for nature. In modern world we are too far removed from it to appreciate it.
• “The irony is that the fate of all the species on which our very existence depends is in our hands. And we are squeezing them off the planet at a rate second only to the asteroid that killed the dinosaurs. We have become the asteroid.”
• “First, it turns out that we already produce food for 10 billion people. We just waste a third of it, from the field to the table.”
  • So we can truly afford to rewild and keep wild 50% of the planet. We just need to optimize our food logistics. And optimize not for max profit but for a combination of profit and minimum food losses!
• “regenerative agriculture, a conservation and restoration approach to food production. Soil can be regenerated through, among other practices, reduced tilling, planting cover crops, rotating crops, and using farm waste—compost—instead of synthetic fertilizers. These age-old practices were lost when humanity shifted to industrial and chemical agricultural practices.”
  • we don’t even need to reinvent the wheel to improve our agricultural production, just use what worked in the past. But I think an even better solution is to combine the old with the new - we now have crazy capabilities when it comes to modelling and optimizing processes, we can just go back to using compost, rotating crops, planting cover crops and optimizing that process instead of optimizing fertilizer volume.
• “…he found that by responding to global heating, we would be shaving 1 to 2 percent from the world’s GDP growth rate per year, whereas doing nothing would cost at least 5 percent of GDP per year.”
  • how is this not more well known research?
  • Never mind, wiki claims it did rounds when it came out in 2006
• “Studies suggest that half of the planet should be protected—both for the preservation of most creatures on Earth and also for us to obtain maximum benefits from the natural world. We are far from that goal. To date, only 15 percent of the land on Earth is protected, and only 7 percent of the ocean has been designated or proposed for protection.”
• “The planetary ethic moves humans away from a self-proclaimed center of the world and into a humble and respectful membership in the greater biosphere. It moves us from a position over the natural world to a place within it. Because of our higher intelligence, we also carry a great deal of responsibility—but that is not the same as dominion over all creatures.”
• “Biodiversity provides a natural shield that absorbs the fallout from pathogens, and all this happens without our interference. A healthy natural world is our best antivirus.”
  • so high biodiversity, well functioning ecosystems can even protect us from things like another global pandemic
• “We need to build for stability and resilience instead of unfettered growth.”
  • amen