Photo by Amanda Ward.
Humans try hard to control the natural world. We’ve dammed and straightened meandering rivers and filled in wetlands. We’ve transformed primordial forests into farms and turned oceans into highways. Humans and our domestic animals now account for an estimated 96 percent of all terrestrial mammal biomass. Wild mammals account for just four percent. Amid the cataclysms of the Anthropocene, we tend to think of ourselves as the primary shapers of our planet. But for all our efforts to tame, simplify, and cordon off nature, we remain just as beholden to the world’s ecological laws as we were more than 200,000 years ago when Homo Sapiens first emerged.
Like the laws of physics, paying attention to our planet’s biological laws empowers us to understand how the world works and to make predictions about the outcomes of our actions. In his latest book, A Natural History of the Future, Rob Dunn – an extraordinarily creative author and ecologist – warns that continuing to ignore these laws will cause us to fail again and again in our attempts to build a sustainable future for our species.
Dunn makes the case that the human species will survive not by simplifying and isolating, but through embracing biodiversity and living in accordance with the knowledge that we are at the mercy of the law of natural selection, the species-area law, and the diversity-stability law, to name a few examples. These laws aren’t merely fascinating phenomena. Understanding these inescapable rules of ecology is key to our survival and quality of life. Whether or not we heed them will have profound consequences for our future.
Continue reading Ep. 45 – Rob Dunn on what the laws of biology predict about our future