Models of Nature (4)

What is special about Uta-Napishiti

• has privileged ‘view' of humanity, Nature and the causal processes which govern them.

• Granted internal life 

• has intimate association with the Gods

How did Uta-Napishiti’s gain immortality?

• for his role in saving humanity from the deluge wrought by the god Enlil

What do these characteristics allow him to do?

• Immortal: provide him with the ability to comment upon human behaviour over an extended time frame

• Gods relation: legitimizes the ‘advice’ he subsequently bestows upon Gilgamesh.

What did Voltaire invite readers to do?

• Instead of being trapped in a moment in time, you afford yourself the ability to look beyond it.

  • To look beyond your idols.

What is the knowledge we ascribe to the Lapiz Lazuli tablet?

• socio-political knowledge regarding kingship

What does the Epic of Gilgamesh tell us about forests?

• there is balance that could only be reconciled by the death of Enkido.

• Harvest forest = destroy it, Only god can keep forest safe

  • if you chop down a forest, it is unlikely you will ‘see’ a similar forest for hundreds of years.

Why are forests difficult to acquire knowledge about?

• Humans can’t see a forest through time or space (human time limit and limited abilities)

  • can’t measure processes empirically

• we have to become aware of our idols, and essentially manipulate ourselves into becoming open minded

• Science provides other perspective

How long can a forest’s life span be?

1,500 years

Who is a homo universalis?

Latin for "universal man," referring to a person with extensive knowledge and skills across a wide range of subjects, similar to a Renaissance man or polymath.

What was the vitruivan man?

• a drawing by Leonardo da Vinci around 1490.

• This picture represents a cornerstone of Leonardo's attempts to relate [hu]man to nature.

• anatomical drawings and Vitruvian Man as a cosmografia del minor mondo (cosmography of the microcosm).

• all environmental scales relate directly to humanity. —> humans are the measure of all things

What is Mayr’s four historical perspectives of time and space?

• 1) a static world of short duration (the Judeo-Christian created world);

• 2) a static world of unlimited duration;

• 3) a cyclical change in the state of the world in which periods of golden ages alternate with periods of decay and rebirth

• 4) the gradually evolving world of Lyell and Darwin (Mayr 1982).

What does the timeline in Europe at the time?

• 1) a static world of short duration (the Judeo-Christian created world);

• The size of Europe …. 7.5 to 10 million km2

• Theological writings specifically identify key events that date the earth.

What is the timeline for the Mayans?

• 1) a static world of short duration (the Judeo-Christian created world);

• The size of North and South America together …. 43 million km2. And the Mayan Long Calendar suggests a 7,885 cycle that began on August 11, 3114 BCE, and ended 21 December 2012, at 11:11 UTC

What does the different timelines show?

our conception of space and time is culturally interpreted.

What is the timeline based on a 2) a static world of unlimited duration;

• world exists forever

what is the timeline based on ; 3) a cyclical change in the state of the world in which periods of golden ages alternate with periods of decay and rebirth;?

• seasons, moon, etc.

What was considered humanities golden age?

• golden era: talking to the gods

• Feed and are at dirt now

What is the human timeline based on 4) the gradually evolving world of Lyell and Darwin?

• continually expanding back to understand universe

• Darwin: need at least 200 mil years to evolve

What was Lyell’s thesis?

• given current processes, and enough time, the development and extent of current flora and fauna might be explained

• patterns and associations in plant and animal distributions need not be maintained in local stasis, but may ‘disperse' in response to environmental changes.

• Small-scale events such as this, stretched over thousands of years would exert a powerful, cumulative force. —> evolution 

Who was Linnaeus?

• Extension of Aristotle’s Historia Animalium and the binomial method

• classified 4,400 species of animals and 7,700 species of plants —> around12,000 species (1758)

• created familiar binomials of a generic name followed by a specific epithet (lists)

What can se wee when we look through unbiased eyes?

make lists to make lists (pure knowledge without bias towards final goal)??

Who was Gilber White and what did he write?

• Naturalist

• wrote Natural History and Antiquities of Selborne (1789)

  • has been continuously in print since then, with nearly 300 editions up to 2007.

  • compilation of 44 letters nominally to Thomas Pennant, a leading British zoologist, and 66 letters to Daines Barrington, an English barrister and Fellow of the Royal Society

Why was Gilbert White important?

• His work has been seen as an early contribution to ecology and in particular to phenology.

• writings described the diversity in nature

What is considered Earth’s oldest living thing?

• Eastern california

• Great Basin bristlecone pine: Methuselah

• 4,853 years old

  • before pyrimands in Giza

Spatial dimenstion

What did scientists begin to appreacte in the 18th and 19th century?

• natural processes operated at scales which far exceeded those of familiar human experience

• environmental landscape had not formed recently, but was the result of forces that extended across immense temporal and spatial scales as evident in geological (i.e. glaciation), and biological processes (i.e. speciation)

• Direct response to: Idols of the Tribe

What did the extension of perspective cause?

• raised fundamental questions about how scientists understand and produce environmental knowledge.

• Reduction: science had generated dramatic insights by the reduction of complex processes to their elemental parts (lists of plants)

• broader perspectives appeared to require novel, inclusive, holistic explanations (how these plants interacted).

What debate around forests were created?

• whether forests could be understood as simple aggregations of species (i.e. trees), or whether forests were entities in their own right.

• Entities: seen to operate in accordance with a higher set of organizing principles which influenced component parts (i.e. individual trees) to create broader vegetational associations.

What did Cowles believe in?

• 1899

• ecologist must study ‘the order of succession' of ‘plant societies' in a region, and uncover the laws which govern these changes

• Plant societies were the product of past and present environmental conditions, 

  • ‘ecology' was the study of these historically centered dynamics.

• assumed that vegetational changes occurring over time in a particular region, could also be perceived as changes in spatial patterning.

  • idea is that you can ‘see’ natural, or successional processes by simply walking through a forest.

  • instead of waiting decades or centuries to observe how plant communities change through time in one place, you could study different areas that are at different stages of succession right now.
    → In other words, space can represent time.

• laid the theoretical groundwork for successional dynamics

What is the order of forest succession?

1. bare rock

2. mosses, grasses

3. grasses perenials

4. woody pioneers

5. fast growing trees

6. climax forest

Who was F. Clements?

• developed it into the dominant theory of "dynamic ecology”

• Advocated progressive development

• natural vegetative 'formations', (i.e. assemblages, associations or communities) developed in a well structured, predictable sequence

• end 'climax' or final stage of a successional trajectory, was a 'single homogeneous 'matrix of plant and animal life'

• "the universe is also an organism, the solar system, and the sugar molecule ... are all organized wholes"

What does it mean by saying that the end 'climax' or final stage of a successional trajectory, was a 'single homogeneous 'matrix of plant and animal life'?

• CLIMAX FOREST explains everything else.

• climax community as a "super-organism" that would work together to maintain a stable composition,

  • for any given climate, only one climax community was possible

• climax forests were the final, stable stage of plant succession, determined by climate, which all plant communities would eventually return to after a disturbance

• ‘Organisation' was purposeful, interdependent; members acting as single organism

• Integration of plants and environment through co-evolution

• climax formation si the adult organisms

  • all inital stages and medial stages are just stages of devolpment

  • the climax community of a succession that terminates in the highest life-form possible in the climate concerned

  • no variation in pattern

What did Clements think about everyhitng else?

• history and geological conditions were irreleveant (noise)

• dynamic change acknowledged, but replaced by stability at a higher level of organisation.

What is holism?

• regards natural objects as wholes

• nature consisting of discrete bodies and things not entirely resolvable into parts

What did J smuts believe?

• Riter (1919): introduced to him introduced by Ritter (1919) to express a higher level of organisation

• more than the sum of their parts, and the mechanical putting together of their parts will not produce them or account for their characters and behaviour

• employed the terms "organismal" & organicism to show higher level of organisation

• suggested that holism is the fundamental factor operating towards the creation of 'wholes' in the universe

  • circular?

Who was Henry A. Gleason?

• 1882-1975

• ‘Individualist Theory’

• continuous vegetational change across landscape

• fluctuating environmental conditions associated with a particular place and time, produced correspondingly unique associations of plants

• plant communities are not fixed units but are the result of individual species' unique distributions based on their own characteristics and environmental conditions

• Rejected notion of a complex, highly integrated community organized along organismic lines.

What is individualist theory?

• communities were largely a coincidence of individualistic species characteristics, continuously varying environments and different probabilities of a species arriving on a given site

• each community is unique, having arisen randomly by environmental selection of those reproductive parts of plants which happen to enter the area in question

• An inherent variability in the environment

What explains possible interactions in env. according to Gleason?

• Unique traits determine and explain possible interactions with environment.

  • genetic traits

  • physiological

  • morphological

  • life-cycle characteristics

What did Tansley believe?

• 1871-1955

• ‘Ecosystems' came in various kinds and sizes:

  • multitudinous physical systems of the universe

  • range from the universe as a whole down to the atom.

• Not isolated: included as parts of larger systems, overlap, interlock and interact with one another

• a single physical system where living organisms and their physical environment are inseparable and interdependent

How was isolation of the systems viewed?

• partially artificial

• only possible way in which we can proceed and produce positive knowledge.

What did Tansley open up?

• opened up their complexity to analysis.

• expanded the potential number of factors, and interactions that could be taken into account.

• close the door on the certainty of the knowledge produced.

What happened to knowledge on ecosystems?

became conditional with respect to the initial assumptions associated with its’ production, including how the ‘ecosystem’ was itself was defined.

What is paleoecology?

the study of past ecosystems, including the interactions between ancient organisms and their environments

Who was Braun?

• 1950

• argued deciduous forests would remain intact in terms of composition during glaciation, retreating as a complete unit to southern refugia

• Organized 'communities' would respond as an evolving unit

• Same forests moved around together and remerged

What happened to Braun’s thoughts?

• proved wrong by Developments in pollen analysis

• Migration occurred at the individual plant level

What did Palaeoecology show about forests?

• Plant communities are 'temporary aggregations', at most lasting between 1000 and 10,000 years

• lack of modern analogues for many of the pollen assemblages seen in the fossil record

• Fluid composition of plant 'communities' leaves insufficient opportunities for co-evolutionary adaptations implicit in Clement's plant 'formation'

• no progression to a specific point —> continue indefinanlty

• Never reaches stable point

What are there no trends in for forests through time?

• biomass constancy,

• diversification of species,

• cohesiveness of plant and animal communities

• biotic control of inorganic environment

What does this image show?

• humans cut down trees

What is the impacts of human land use?

• more space for agriculture = less forests

• increase in production = linked to consumption changes

• land-use change + land-use intensification + climate change = desertification and land degredation

What marks the beginning of human attempts to ameliorate (make something bad better.) negative ecological impacts through intervention? 

• John Evelyn's Silva (1664)

• Colbert's French Forest Ordinance (1669).

What were forests used for in in the 1600s?

• extensively exploited for energy

• construction demands as for mining and metallurgy,

• shipbuilding

• agriculture

• continually cleared for agricultural expansion