Another example that supports this conclusion involves the Eskimo people of Alaska. There is a body of ethnographic and other studies suggesting that the Eskimo have acquired traditional knowledge that they use to avoid diseases, such as botulism and trichinosis, that could be transmitted by unsafe handling of foraged meat, and otherwise to cope with the challenges of the Arctic environment. All of this knowledge, however, was inadequate to handle the discovery of a radioactive nuclear waste dump that had been buried beneath the ground in northwest Alaska by the Atomic Energy Commission in the 1950s. People expressed uncertainty, confusion, and worry (Cassady 2007) knowing that the dump site was crossed by caribou harvested by Eskimo hunters. In fact, Cassady (2007, p. 91) notes that it was impossible for her to express “the magnitude of the vulnerability, resentment and confusion” that circulated in local communities. But despite this concern, the people Caasady interviewed expressed problematic ideas such as the belief that you can cook radiation out of contaminated meat or remove it by aging the meat. In short, there are dangers in treating indigenous understandings of the world as if they are unobjective and do not matter, but there are also dangers in assuming that there are not wider forces at work beyond local or self‐interested understandings. Moreover, the involvement of communities and the utilization of local environmental knowledge have been shown to expand scientific understanding in a number of studies, including one on fish contamination in Brazil (Silvano & Begossi 2016) and one on changes in marine environments in the Canadian Arctic (Berkes et al. 2007). But, as Caron‐Beaudoin & Armstrong (2019, p. 59) state, “there is a remarkable lack of meaningful consultation” regarding industrial development with affected indigenous communities.
2.3 Modern ecology
As noted, the modern science of ecology is one of the key fields concerned with developing an objective understanding of the complex interconnections that make up the environment. Of no less interest are the limits of interconnection. As the urban ecologist Liam Heneghan (2015), using the classic “butterfly effect” illustration of connectedness, states: “if the dominoes line‐up and the circumstances are just so, a butterfly’s wing beat over the Pacific may hurl a typhoon against its shores, but more often than not such lepidopterous catastrophes do not come to pass.” Still, a lesson of ecology is that small changes in initial conditions can, at a certain point, lead to drastic outcomes—an issue taken up in Chapter 10.
Ecology’s immediate scholastic roots lie in the efforts of 19th‐century biologists to understand the number of species, their distribution around the planet, and the nature of relations among them. Questions about such issues motivated wide‐eyed and curious naturalists of the era like Henry Walter Bates, Alfred Russel Wallace, and Charles Darwin (Fig. 2.2) to venture out and witness the species of the world in their local habitats. During his nearly 5‐year voyage as ship’s naturalist aboard the HMS Beagle, Darwin filled many notebooks and letters home with careful observations on animals, plants, and geology. His record of the distribution of species in the various places he visited in South America, including the Galápagos Islands, would provide him with the insights he used for the rest of his life in framing his understanding of biological evolution.
Over the years since Darwin and his peers carried out their groundbreaking studies, ecology has developed several core concepts to help frame this understanding.
Fig. 2.2 Charles Darwin.
Source: National Portrait Gallery.
2.3.1 Ecosystems
Central to the conceptual repertoire of ecology is the notion that the natural biotic/abiotic world is organized into overlapping ecosystems. While it is useful in building an understanding of the environment to demarcate and even label ecosystems, like all natural systems they actually “are open systems without clear boundaries” (Langmuir & Broecker 2012, p. 6). A tide pool, for example, can be described as an intertidal ecosystem consisting of animals (e.g., sea anemones, starfish, crabs, sponges, fish, mussels, barnacles, limpets), plants (e.g., seaweed, sea grass, rockweed, sea palm, sea lettuce), water, rocks, and sand (Fig. 2.3). However, tide pools are not isolated from the ebb and flow of the ocean, the gases of the atmosphere, or the rays of the sun.
Fig. 2.3 Tide pool.
Source: rreeths/Pixabay.
The term “ecosystem” is used specifically to refer to a community of directly interacting living organisms and nonliving elements such as air, water, rocks, and soil. In an ecosystem, interactions occur among organisms (across all phyla) and between organisms and other environment components. Central to the relationships among these ecosystem components is the flow of matter and energy. A food chain, for example, involves the flow of matter and energy from autotrophs (e.g., plants) to heterotrophs (e.g., herbivores and carnivores) and, eventually, to decomposers—a flow that occurs in all ecosystems.
2.3.1.1 Ecosystem synergy
The biotic and abiotic components of an ecosystem are synergistic and reinforcing. Acreman et al. (2011) provide a good illustration of these kinds of interactions based on research on Somerset Levels and Moors (SLM), a coastal plain and wetlands located in the county of Somerset in southwest England. The SLM contains a rich biodiversity of invertebrates, plants, migratory and local birds, fish, amphibians, reptiles, and several mammalian species. Archeological remains indicate human presence since the Paleolithic. The area has been mined for its rich peat soils of decomposing organic material—used for fuel and fertilizer—at least since Roman times, but intensely so since the industrialization of extraction in the 1950s. The result is considerable ecosystem damage and peat loss.
Freshwater is ever‐present in the SLM because of its location near the outlet of a river basin, low‐lying topography, permeable peat soils, underlying aquafer, and rainfall. The resulting wet environment “supports bird [and other animal] life that maintains biological diversity, attracts tourists, protects archaeological artefacts and reduces CO2 emissions; raising water levels to or above the ground leads to net greenhouse gas uptake by the wetland” (Acreman et al. 2011, p. 1543). In light of climate change, it is notable that peat is the largest and most efficient terrestrial store of CO2. On average, peat wetlands sequester 10 times more CO2 per acre than any other ecosystem. When peat is mined, however, it is exposed to air. Carbon contained within it (from decomposed biota) combines with oxygen in the air to produce CO2, which is emitted into the atmosphere (Dunn & Freeman 2011). In this way, peatlands can be transformed by human actions from a CO2 sink (or storage site) to a CO2 source; that is, from a resource that restricts global warming to a source that drives it.
Another