[Note: tomorrow I will add another chapter to the novel, "Hurricane River" found in the website under that name. With that, I will erase all but the latest two chapter, to fashion a weekly serial. If the reader wants to get in on the beginning, today is the day to do it.]
For the last few days, the Milwaukee Journal has been running a series on the ecology of fish in the Great Lakes. They have used up nearly all their front section space with it, and it was a good decision: the story is fascinating as well as frightening, a real page-turner. It starts with the opening of the canal that allowed ocean liners to steam directly up the St Lawrence River into the Great Lakes system. With that, a host of invaders came on the hull and ballast of the ships, most notorious among them in the 50's and 60's being the lamprey eel and the small, sardine like alewife. I remember the eel well from my Weekly Reader, for that is a gruesome tale of a monster that attaches itself to a fish and slowly sucks out its blood - and guts if it can, like an ET horror film. Much worse, though, were the innocent looking alewives. They have an enzyme in them that keeps the native lake trout from reproducing, and with the collapse of the native big fish because of the this and the lamprey, the alewives were left with no predators. Their population mushroomed to such an extent that net fishermen caught them to use as fertilizer and animal food; beaches were overwhelmed with their rotting carcasses; and clots of the dead fish, so overcrowded, reached miles in extant, like algae blooms.
Enter the biologists. Convinced that they could not mess up the eco system any more than it was, one man thought to stock coho, and then Chinook salmon. They thrived on the alewives, and for the next 20 years a great new fishing tradition - along with a great new money generator for the lakes - was born. But the salmon soon reduced the alewives, and with the addition of new invasive species like the zebra muscle, the food source of both alewives and (by extension) salmon became scarce. In Lake Huron, the salmon population collapsed; in Lake Michigan, it is barely hanging on.
And yet - a new small invasive fish, the gobe, also entered the system. They have molars and are able to eat the zebra muscles (they both come from the same region of the Caspian Sea). The remaining larger native fish learned to eat the gobe, and suddenly, without planning, Lake Huron, and to a lesser extent, Lake Michigan, came nearer to their natural ecological balance than they had been in decades.
What is mind-numbing about this is that marine biologists still wish to keep the salmon populations up in Michigan, because of its popularity with the fishermen. Fishermen, they say, bring in the fishing fees and support Great Lakes efforts to maintain its waters. But what could be better for the lakes than a natural balance once again achieved? Is it possible they fear more for their jobs and salaries than the lakes?
I can't really answer that question, and it is not to the larger point. Rather, I wonder at this: how is it that humans, as we are now, are so capable of destroying ecological systems that, for the most part, are not really that delicate? They are, after all, made from a rough and changing planet. I also wonder at this: does the Gaia hypothesis really work? Is the planet like an organism, with self-correcting mechanisms?
Many authors, mostly ecologists, have dealt with the first issue, condemning mechanized man for his blindness to the natural processes. But this condemnation is unjust; all species exploit the environment they have to the fullest, without moral compunction. Deer, when too dense, will destroy forests by eating saplings; locusts are infamous for their devastation; and rodents of various species have a boom and bust cycle that deeply effects the environment. It is true, however, that the Great Lakes did not fall because of the alewife and lamprey, but because humans made it possible for species that were not part of the balanced system to enter. Nature, like American politics, does not count on moral restraint; it has built-in checks and balances, the greed of one, if we can call it that, limiting the greed of the other. Introduce one species into a novel environment and it may run roughshod, until it, too, is discovered by other species which cancel its destructive hegemony.
On to humans: we exhibit the same elemental greed to expand and consume as other species. What sets us apart is not our fundamentally different level of greed, but our ingenuity at expanding our grasp with technology. This is possible because of our ability for abstract thought (and, of course, hands to carry out this thought into action). But it is this same mental quality that allows us to erect moral systems that might ameliorate our natural rapaciousness. On cue, the very ability to cause massive destruction to the world is coupled with the ability of self-restraint. Our god-like powers over nature, then, are held in check (or can be) by our ability to conceive of gods or God, who have justified the moral imperative for thousands of years. Not by chance, this ability and these beliefs lead into the reality of supernatural power itself, and to the idea of Gaia, the self-sustaining earth.
The notion of Gaia to a scientific mind seems silly on the surface of it - what mind, what brain does the Earth have that may direct such a complex process, such as living beings have? We may look to the natural balances of nature, after all, and claim they came about by natural selection and resource competition, and there are many diagrams made by naturalists to show how this can or did happen. But if we look at humans, we see something strange: a new ability to destroy the earth as no other creature can, coupled with the ability to regulate his own behavior by choice. The choice not to destroy is seldom couched only in practical terms, either, but in more compelling moral ones: it is the right thing to do. We have beauty to consider, after all, and this is something we all need - and beauty depends in part on the balance of nature. What other creature thinks like that? And how fortunate that our ability to destroy can be balanced with our ability to not destroy because of such abstractions as beauty?
There, then, is where we find the mind of Gaia - not in the core of the earth like an ancient god, but in all things according to their abilities. For where raw nature no longer rules, as in human behavior, another abides or can abide, one that also restrains and leaves us capable of fitting in to the ecology of the world. Where, one might ask, is the mechanistic selection process of classical Darwinism here? To have a species that can rise above standard species competition, only to be subdued by a moral consciousness that no other creature before, as far as we know, has possessed? This seems far more than coincidence.
The mind, then, of Gaia, is no only in all things, but beyond all things, a hidden thing found in an exquisite order that not only reacts but anticipates. Human morality, after all, was well in place long before bulldozers and bombs made the human such a dangerous species. Yes, everything co-evolved with society, but all so neatly, so elegantly, that one cannot help but look to Occam's Razor and conclude that a design, not just a print but an evolving one, does exist. As Fr. Teilhard de Chardin said, we are not pushed by evolution so much as pulled by it. It is a system with meaning, and we are being pulled towards its source in the strange drama of Gaia. FK
For the last few days, the Milwaukee Journal has been running a series on the ecology of fish in the Great Lakes. They have used up nearly all their front section space with it, and it was a good decision: the story is fascinating as well as frightening, a real page-turner. It starts with the opening of the canal that allowed ocean liners to steam directly up the St Lawrence River into the Great Lakes system. With that, a host of invaders came on the hull and ballast of the ships, most notorious among them in the 50's and 60's being the lamprey eel and the small, sardine like alewife. I remember the eel well from my Weekly Reader, for that is a gruesome tale of a monster that attaches itself to a fish and slowly sucks out its blood - and guts if it can, like an ET horror film. Much worse, though, were the innocent looking alewives. They have an enzyme in them that keeps the native lake trout from reproducing, and with the collapse of the native big fish because of the this and the lamprey, the alewives were left with no predators. Their population mushroomed to such an extent that net fishermen caught them to use as fertilizer and animal food; beaches were overwhelmed with their rotting carcasses; and clots of the dead fish, so overcrowded, reached miles in extant, like algae blooms.
Enter the biologists. Convinced that they could not mess up the eco system any more than it was, one man thought to stock coho, and then Chinook salmon. They thrived on the alewives, and for the next 20 years a great new fishing tradition - along with a great new money generator for the lakes - was born. But the salmon soon reduced the alewives, and with the addition of new invasive species like the zebra muscle, the food source of both alewives and (by extension) salmon became scarce. In Lake Huron, the salmon population collapsed; in Lake Michigan, it is barely hanging on.
And yet - a new small invasive fish, the gobe, also entered the system. They have molars and are able to eat the zebra muscles (they both come from the same region of the Caspian Sea). The remaining larger native fish learned to eat the gobe, and suddenly, without planning, Lake Huron, and to a lesser extent, Lake Michigan, came nearer to their natural ecological balance than they had been in decades.
What is mind-numbing about this is that marine biologists still wish to keep the salmon populations up in Michigan, because of its popularity with the fishermen. Fishermen, they say, bring in the fishing fees and support Great Lakes efforts to maintain its waters. But what could be better for the lakes than a natural balance once again achieved? Is it possible they fear more for their jobs and salaries than the lakes?
I can't really answer that question, and it is not to the larger point. Rather, I wonder at this: how is it that humans, as we are now, are so capable of destroying ecological systems that, for the most part, are not really that delicate? They are, after all, made from a rough and changing planet. I also wonder at this: does the Gaia hypothesis really work? Is the planet like an organism, with self-correcting mechanisms?
Many authors, mostly ecologists, have dealt with the first issue, condemning mechanized man for his blindness to the natural processes. But this condemnation is unjust; all species exploit the environment they have to the fullest, without moral compunction. Deer, when too dense, will destroy forests by eating saplings; locusts are infamous for their devastation; and rodents of various species have a boom and bust cycle that deeply effects the environment. It is true, however, that the Great Lakes did not fall because of the alewife and lamprey, but because humans made it possible for species that were not part of the balanced system to enter. Nature, like American politics, does not count on moral restraint; it has built-in checks and balances, the greed of one, if we can call it that, limiting the greed of the other. Introduce one species into a novel environment and it may run roughshod, until it, too, is discovered by other species which cancel its destructive hegemony.
On to humans: we exhibit the same elemental greed to expand and consume as other species. What sets us apart is not our fundamentally different level of greed, but our ingenuity at expanding our grasp with technology. This is possible because of our ability for abstract thought (and, of course, hands to carry out this thought into action). But it is this same mental quality that allows us to erect moral systems that might ameliorate our natural rapaciousness. On cue, the very ability to cause massive destruction to the world is coupled with the ability of self-restraint. Our god-like powers over nature, then, are held in check (or can be) by our ability to conceive of gods or God, who have justified the moral imperative for thousands of years. Not by chance, this ability and these beliefs lead into the reality of supernatural power itself, and to the idea of Gaia, the self-sustaining earth.
The notion of Gaia to a scientific mind seems silly on the surface of it - what mind, what brain does the Earth have that may direct such a complex process, such as living beings have? We may look to the natural balances of nature, after all, and claim they came about by natural selection and resource competition, and there are many diagrams made by naturalists to show how this can or did happen. But if we look at humans, we see something strange: a new ability to destroy the earth as no other creature can, coupled with the ability to regulate his own behavior by choice. The choice not to destroy is seldom couched only in practical terms, either, but in more compelling moral ones: it is the right thing to do. We have beauty to consider, after all, and this is something we all need - and beauty depends in part on the balance of nature. What other creature thinks like that? And how fortunate that our ability to destroy can be balanced with our ability to not destroy because of such abstractions as beauty?
There, then, is where we find the mind of Gaia - not in the core of the earth like an ancient god, but in all things according to their abilities. For where raw nature no longer rules, as in human behavior, another abides or can abide, one that also restrains and leaves us capable of fitting in to the ecology of the world. Where, one might ask, is the mechanistic selection process of classical Darwinism here? To have a species that can rise above standard species competition, only to be subdued by a moral consciousness that no other creature before, as far as we know, has possessed? This seems far more than coincidence.
The mind, then, of Gaia, is no only in all things, but beyond all things, a hidden thing found in an exquisite order that not only reacts but anticipates. Human morality, after all, was well in place long before bulldozers and bombs made the human such a dangerous species. Yes, everything co-evolved with society, but all so neatly, so elegantly, that one cannot help but look to Occam's Razor and conclude that a design, not just a print but an evolving one, does exist. As Fr. Teilhard de Chardin said, we are not pushed by evolution so much as pulled by it. It is a system with meaning, and we are being pulled towards its source in the strange drama of Gaia. FK
RSS Feed