Comment by crazygringo
2 years ago
That's not true over short-to-medium timeframes though.
There absolutely are equilibria in nature, all over the place. The idea of that "constant imbalance" is always the rule is simply false.
Now, as a rule at some point in time either an external force will interrupt things, or an energy source that was maintaining the equilibrium will run out. So no equilibrium will last indefinitely.
But an equilibrium can be maintained for an awfully long time -- much, much, much longer than you or I will be alive. It's not like populations are always either growing or shrinking. Absent man, they're generally extremely constant (allowing for seasonal oscillations and similar).
And to answer your question: when we seek to restore something, it's generally to as close as we can to the state of equilibirum it would be at without the industrial effects of man -- a level of rich biodiversity. We're almost never completely successful, but we can still do our best.
> The idea of that "constant imbalance" is always the rule is simply false.
Modern ecology would like a word: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4188511/
A natural balance is the actual myth.
None of that paper contradicts anything I said.
That paper is about the often religious belief in a long-term, divinely ordained balance of nature, that is often considered "universal" or some kind of "law". And of course that's a myth.
I went out of my way to point out that equilibria can absolutely exist over the short and medium term. And I never used the term "balance of nature".
And the paper is even very clear that mathematically, equilibria absolutely do exist, obviously:
> ...it is still arbitrary just how much temporal variation can be accommodated within a process or phenomenon for it still to be termed equilibrial. Often the decision on whether to perceive an ecological process as equilibrial seems to be based on whether there is some sort of homeostatic regulation of the numbers, such as density-dependence, which A. J. Nicholson suggested as an argument against Elton's skepticism of the existence of a balance.
It merely points out that there is an "arbitrary" line that must be drawn between statistical fluctuation and the equilibrium. But if a population of a certain species in a certain area is always between, say, 400 and 600, while other species maintain their own ranges, I think we'd all agree that an equilibrium exists. It's a complete strawman to say that it has to be precisely 523 every year just because a range of 500 to 600 is "arbitrary".
The paper is describing that there is no long-term, worldwide, fixed balance of nature, which of course there's not. But nowhere does it suggest that a local ecosystem can't remain in a state of equilibrium over a short- and medium-term.