Imagine these two distinct aesthetic cohorts, one temperate and one tempestuous, on display at an exhibit. The first wall holds representations of nature as an old-growth forest, a fanning coral reef, an entangled riverbank. Subject to simple natural laws, its delicate balance emerges from biodiversity, and its changes are gradual and tend to articulate favorable adaptations. The nature of the balance paradigm is readily degraded by human impacts, and our life sciences investigate ways to tinker with imbalance to restore an original ideal, or climax, state. Balanced nature is also the landscape of human stewardship and dominion, hearkening back to Eden.
The second wall presents portraits of an atoll drowned by a hurricane surge, the fluorescent cascade of a lava flow, a plume of oil and gas rising from a pipe on the sea floor. Predictable only through probabilistic calculus, changes are rapid, nonteleological, and subject to the impact of chance events. These portraits of chaotic nature are sensational and awe-inspiring. They partake of the aesthetics of the sublime by making the observer feel small and powerless. Ironically, these sublime forces of change that make humans feel small within the shadow of rioting nature are, in postmodern ecology, now projecting our own activities onto the canvas. Homo sapiens have gone from being the observers of sublime chaos in nature to being co-authors of it. “Natural disaster” and “act of God” will never have that simple sense of passive innocence they had before the Industrial Revolution and consequential climate change. Even though we know that climate is not the same as weather, a shift in consciousness in the twenty-first century makes every flood, drought, hurricane, extinction, famine, disease, and invasive species potentially traceable to our balance sheet. The paradigms of classic balanced nature and postmodern chaotic nature are two ways of portraying an immensely diverse and complex natural world. Ecological paradigms are never strictly objective; they are colored by the cultural conditions of their emergence.
Within the past half century, ecological science has critiqued the balance paradigm as a misleading, quasi-mystical construct that forces economic and mechanical models on the obscure dynamics of ecological interconnection. A major trend in ecology today identifies at least three important departures from this classic paradigm, in effect navigating between models of balance and cataclysm. These ideas are not universally accepted by ecologists, but they have become mainstream theories of natural patterns.1
The first finding is that ecological communities are shaped by chaotic and random forces. Population dynamics and species distribution must be understood through stochastic processes that make changes in environments difficult to predict. Landscapes are thought to be composed predominantly of species mosaics wrought by chaos and chance rather than communities united by synergy and mutualism.
Second, evolution is not only based on adaptation but, at least as significantly, reacts to environmental contingency. Extinctions and rapid shifts in morphology can be explained more effectively through a rubric of catastrophe and random drift than through the gradual and intelligible articulation of superior adaptations over deep time. Extinction tends not to be the result of interspecies competition, with the superior form winning out, as Darwin claimed. Instead, most extinction is due to random environmental disturbances on many scales, from regional ripples to global cataclysms. As a consequence, adaptation is itself radically contingent upon circumstances, and most evolution takes place only after disturbance. This theory of evolution by punctuated equilibrium is a revision of Darwinian gradualism in the era of chaos ecology.
Finally, human impacts are the most important factor in ecological disturbance as we move into the twenty-first century. The interscalar impacts in our era include greenhouse gas emissions, habitat appropriation, deforestation, chemical changes in oceans and fresh water, intense harvesting of fisheries, and industrial agriculture driven by petrochemicals. Ecology’s most pressing questions come from the exigencies of human impacts on the biosphere; these impacts are superadded to the scientific proposal that the background character of nature is itself chaotic. Chaos ecology revolutionizes classical views of a balanced natural world that have dictated scientific perceptions since at least the Enlightenment. For better and worse, it is the new creative principle in ecology, and its roots reach down into Romantic-era soil. This study explores literary expressions of ecological chaos starting in the Romantic period. It claims that nineteenth-century literary narratives played a seminal role in sketching out the postmodern view of chaotic nature that would emerge in ecological science of the late twentieth century.
The microcosm, another scientific concept with Romantic precedents, works in this study as the counterpoint to chaos ecology. Microcosm is an empiricist’s tool for modeling ecological processes that often relies upon the ideal of a balanced nature. The physical and theoretical constructs available in microcosms helped ecology become an experimental science in the twentieth century, moving past the methods, based upon observation and cataloguing, of earlier natural historians. Microcosm experiments propose that ecologists can build, maintain, and manipulate small systems in order to shed light on the complex dynamics of nature in larger, real-life scales. Ecological microcosms are domesticated, simplified ecosystems: mechanistic models that serve as proxies for natural environments. They are particularly useful in the study of disturbance because they can be used to model pollution, extinction, and other stress gradients that ecologists would not want or be able to manipulate in real environments.
Still, microcosms are ideal constructs that assume that there are discrete environments in nature, such as ecosystems with closed communities, rather than a continuum of greater and lesser similarity of form that ranges across the globe. The circumscription of discrete small worlds is itself a conceptual convenience that is imperfectly reflected in the biosphere. By experimenting with species composition and with chemical and energetic balances in the model, ecologists hope to discover what causes underlie disturbance and degradation in larger environments that had once been stable. These two figures of thought, chaos and the microcosm, have a theoretical role in the debate over nature’s character as chaotic, balanced, or some combination of the two, as well as an applied basis in the actual methods of experimental ecology.
I propose that the seed of imagination that would enable a scientist to study a lake as a microcosm at the formal, empirical level was sown by poets of the nineteenth century who consciously drew a sphere around small-scale nature in order to make sense of spots of time and place amid the increasingly chaotic, global, industrial modern world. This book interrogates the literary origins of the two tropes, and how they have been transcribed into the sciences of nature. It proposes that innovative nineteenth-century narratives of ecological disturbance foresaw chaos ecology at a time when gradualism and balance were paradigms of natural history. It also proposes that nineteenth-century poets helped scientists conceive of ways to simplify nature in microcosm without dismembering its complex structures. Scientific reductionism tends toward atomies and dismantled systems, but the microcosm attempts to reduce organic systems without dissecting them. Microcosm experiments are akin to a particular kind of poetic lyrical holism, in both image and prosody. These two tropes, the chaotic narrative and the microcosm model, effectively align disparate portraits of nature in nineteenth-century literature, and bring the nascent ecological sciences into a dialogue with literary prophecy. They make ecological theory interdisciplinary in the distinct arenas of narrative (natural history) and the structured complex poetic image (empirical design).
From this study of literature and ecological science, we may draw the conclusion that the imagination at play in literature provides an alternative, perhaps richer, form of modeling ecological change, especially the nonlinear change seen in chaos ecology. Although the various forms of scientific modeling are essential to predicting how impacted systems will change, the constraints of artificial and reductive design can also cause problems when the models stand in for natural systems and become the major focus of the science. Perhaps literary microcosms represent a more organic form of conceiving ecological systems that is valuable to theories of natural dynamics currently dominated by the scientific model. Because literary models are dedicated neither to reducing complex systems to their barest minimum, nor to abstracting them to accommodate millions of variables, they may remain expansive and fluid, they may preserve historical memories of ecosystems, and, by their articulate poetic form, they may