Now with a new foreword by ecologist and writer Cristina Eisenberg, this penetrating study of ecosystems and animal populations is more relevant than ever. What accounts for the many different species of insect? Why does the robin population stay relatively steady year after year, despite the fact that their nests contain several chicks at once?
He brings to the subject both profound knowledge and an enthusiasm that will encourage a greater understanding of the environment and of the efforts of those who seek to preserve it. The local species, like those of the arctic, have opportunist life-strategies designed to cope with boom and bust. Their numbers fluctuate. They can be hit by freak accidents. Every individual of every species in the community is working its hardest to secure food and to prevent others taking it.
The information theory description of a food web sees each individual as a channel at a crossroads through which food freely passes, but real individuals are in fact road-blocks through which food gets with difficulty. It is this fact that makes the model not only unreal, but absurd. But now the first systems models are being made on assumptions that the units in the systems behave as we know animals behave, where the feedback between one event and another is resisted or delayed.
For these models, there is no simple relationship between complexity of species list and stability in the lives of populations. Indeed, a common result is quite the reverse.
There is actually a resonance, with the original fluctuation being amplified as the shock travels through a complex community. It includes all the troubles of overcrowding that broke the empires of the past, but without the aggressive wars in which crowded peoples have often found relief.
In this sense the resources of a broad niche can be made to grow in step with the population. But other resources cannot be stretched much further. These resources provide space, privacy, some taste of adventure for the young, and the right to do sometimes as one pleases.
These resources will have to be rationed. To do this will require more government and more bureaucracy. In countries with good government, fair shares will be had by all; in other countries, satisfying shares will be won by the few and subsistence for the rest. We can feed them, clothe them, and shelter them. For a time at least we are going to deny them the right to aggressive war or free them from it depending on your point of view.
But we are surely going to force very many of them to live in niches that are not congenial to them. If we really would know what the future will be like, we need, therefore, some satisfactory definition of the kind of human niche we are about to deny to so many.
I suggest that the work of philosophers for centuries has given us an understanding of what a desirable human niche must be. It was written down most clearly for us two hundred years ago in America by a group of literate men who thought profoundly about it, even as they fought for the right of their people to have it.
We may say that a satisfying human niche is bounded by a set of unalienable rights, among which are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Our technology will continue to grant life. It is the other parameters of our niche that will be denied as our populations slowly crowd. We will not be able to live as our fathers lived, and our traditional ways of doing things will seem like poems of the past. Nor will we be able to thrill to the voices of Great Captains urging us to take up our weapons in quest of liberty outside our borders.
Liberty will fall progressively as the numbers rise, and obedient compliance with the majority will must take the place of individual initiative. Better World Books. Uploaded by Tracey Gutierres on August 10, Internet Archive's 25th Anniversary Logo. Search icon An illustration of a magnifying glass. User icon An illustration of a person's head and chest. Sign up Log in. Web icon An illustration of a computer application window Wayback Machine Texts icon An illustration of an open book.
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