This table teaches us more about ecosystem attributes than any ecology class I took in undergrad. This table allows us to compare attributes between developed and undeveloped, intact and compromised, functional and dysfunctional ecosystems.
An interim professor from Dartmouth handed this table out to us Ecology 101 students and said, “Put this on your kitchen table and look at it for 5 minutes each day until it makes sense.” By week 2, a light bulb went on in my head, and changed the way I perceive land forever. Leopold suggested we see this way when we are born, it’s in our DNA, but natural resource education kills real insight for the sake of commodified ecology.
In this case I contrast the highly evolved earth savannas to the devolved catastrophic afforested condition. Some people suggest this is merely a new type of ecosystem, but it’s not. Instead, the current state is analogous to a trainwreck, 100% dysfunctional, reverse nutrient flows, sick land that is sickening adjacent communities.
The illness is due to our arrogance, and command and control of resources, from behind green curtains pulling levers for more of species X and less of species Y, while the system collapses. This is how we train resource man-agers. In this case, the dangerous narrative of “preservation,” nature will take care of herself, even after removal of 95% of historic species. Only the oaks are left. The longest-lived organisms are always the last to go.
We owe it to the land, the water, the biota, our Indigenous Cultures, and future generations to restore this land back to a functional condition with intact keystone processes and feedbacks. It will not look like 1491, but it must be functional.
Perhaps the most critical component of restoring keystone processes is restoring human-nature relationships. This is the ultimate form of restoration.
