This is a nice systems perspective paper by John Wendt, an associate of Sam Fuhlendorf, that shows how millennia of fire and grazing across global grassland-savanna-forest ecosystems sequestered so much carbon as to inspire global cooling and ice age cycles.
From a systems perspective, based on energy hierarchy laws that supersede ecosystem behaviors, this outcome of global cooling is a fundamental hypothesis, “of course.” Earth grassland-savannas-forest ecosystems + grazing + fire = global cooling = ice ages. An endothermic earth evolved large ice sheet pulses to maintain system cooling, like any complex biological/mechanical system would evolve. Tragically, most natural resource management research is based on reductionist science that dramatically fails in complex systems over multiple scales in time and space. What makes sense to the reductionist is often the exact opposite from a higher level of analysis, thus causing a “command and control pathology in natural resource ‘man’agement” (Holling 1996), as if humans know better than nature. Much of this is likely the result of research at universities being coopted by industry, for example, the “forest industry” doesn’t want fire while the hook and bullet industry wants more wildlife to kill to satisfy their shareholders. The result is we destroy the very resource we intended to preserve.
One of the primary benefits of a systems framework is how it’s based on some of the coolest concepts in science and ecology. (E=MC2) is not taught at Universirites nor hired by agencies. We need a revolution in complex science thinking. The concepts and frameworks are there, but we need to teach it. For the curious-minded about how fire and grazing inspired global cooling and glacial cycles, see these below papers:
Retallack’s 2013 Global Cooling
Retallack’s 2025 Global Cooling
Retallack’s 2025-II Global Cooling
Retallack’s work is Holling-esque, and includes a lot of reductionist research to support his systems perspective. My UW-Mad Lab had come to the same conclusions using energy hierarchy modeling (Odum 2007, Ulanowicz 2021, etc.), and as T.F. Allen would often say, “I know there’s a paper out there somewhere…”
Retallack should be folded into our equations. His 2025 summary PDF provides a framework for soil adaptive cycles that coincide with glacial cycles. That fits Holling’s adaptive cycles (Panarchy 2002, Cross Scale Morphology 1992) and makes so much sense that any systems modeling would already come to the same conclusion. At the very least, Retallack provides a hyper-dimensional rabbit hole reference matrix.
Also see these papers on “Slow Variable/Fast Variable,” which causes a lot of confusion in what we should be researching. Typically we investigate the wrong thing, and management procedures based on the research is erroneous 95% of the time.
Carpenter
Walker
Ferrara
Scheffer
My example du jour: In the Northern Midwest, we have recently suffered multiple papers that describe how wildland fires induce nitrogen pulses (ppm) that could cause aquatic eutrophication in northern lakes, but these papers fail to acknowledge how the same fires reduced nitrogen within the watershed by 4,000 to 20,000 lbs/acre. This massive N export maintained hyper-oligotrophic lakes in the BWCAW Quetico region for 10,000 years, and we fail to understand that lake trout are fire dependent species. I suspect this research is being funded by the “forest industry”; certainly not by ecology.