Comment by jgraham

I don't really know anyone serious who thinks that ecological systems have a single stable equilibrium state.

Indeed, even the trivial systems you learn about at school, like predator-prey relationships are dynamic equilibria rather than static ones. Experiments clearly demonstrate trophic cascades can shift ecological systems from one meta-stable state to another (e.g. remove crabs from a rockpool, and the herbivore population explodes until it runs out of seaweed, at which point it crashes).

Evolution is obviously a progression between many quasi-stable states.

I think a stronger claim is that _economics_ doesn't recognise this; local incentives and the price feedback structure aren't enough to avoid pushing natural systems out of their current quasi-equilibria state into degraded states that are long-term also poorer for humans (e.g. collapsing fish populations). This is also pretty broadly understood, and why market interventions like fishing quotas exist. But in the conflict between "extract more more now" and "long term health of the ecosystem", "extract more now" is the economic default and "long term health" requires special pleading, so unsurprisingly the former tends to win.