What pops up in your mind when you hear the word "conservation"? For many it means setting aside lands for the benefit of wildlife. For some it implies cleaning up our environment. For others it speaks to reducing fossil fuel use and for some it means having less impact on the climate system.
Have you ever heard the phrase "Zero-sum-game" bandied about? Its popular with political pundits and others concerned with influencing the human system. It means that there is a certain, set amount of stuff out there and whenever someone gets more, then someone else gets less. Oddly enough, that is the literal meaning of the word "conservation".
Conservation:- constancy over time. The amount doesn't change. Its that simple.
So here's the question: Is conservation a good goal for ecosystems, wildlife, and the land's productivity? Should we keep the same amount of wildlife, productive capacity, and all the clean air and water, soils, biodiversity, that comes with them, in the future, as we have now? Can we afford to have less? Should we get more? Instead of promoting "conservation", should we instead advocate for INCREASED natural production?
These ideas are worth considering! Before reading on may I suggest stopping here and re-reading the above, then reading it again, and really thinking about these concepts before continuing?
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There's only one way to make sense out of the bewildering complexity of ecosystems with millions of plants and animals of all sizes and types--thats to go back to the basic principles that have taken thousands of years to learn and have stood the test of time.
First Principles:
1. The First Law: Energy and Matter are conserved. In other words, they can't be created or destroyed, only changed in form. Unlike in Jay Leno's Doritos ad, you can't make more, and likewise, you can't get rid of any.
Q. But what exactly IS energy? Matter is simple, you can see it, touch it, taste it, but not so with energy. You can't see it, or touch it, you can't directly feel it, you can't smell it or taste it. How do we know it even exists?
A. We only know energy exists by indirect inference. We see what it does, not what it is. What it does, is make things happen, or make stuff go. Any movement, any change, anything at all that happens, is caused by energy. Rain falls, rivers rush, wind blows, clouds form, waves crash, people run, moles dig, bugs buzz, birds fly, fish swim, stars burn, planets revolve, volcanoes erupt, black holes collapse, all using up energy, happening because of energy, and showing us that energy is there.
So the First Law says that Energy cannot be destroyed, the total amount is constant. Wait, can that possibly be right? I mean, the last time you drove your car, didn't you come home with less gas than you started out with? What happened to all that energy if it wasn't destroyed? Can you get it back? That's where the Second Law comes in.
2. The Second Law: Energy is lost, whenever anything happens.
Wait, what? What does that mean? Is that a real law? Sadly, yes, in any real action, energy loses some of its ability to "make stuff go". The energy in the gas for your car still exists, but now is dispersed as waste heat that can never again make a car go. It has changed form from concentrated useful chemical energy to diluted waste heat which has joined all the rest of the heat on earth making atoms vibrate. It is impossible to collect that energy again.
So now you're thinking, "Hold on a second, what does this scientific mumbo-jumbo have to do with conservation, wildlife, and me? This "mumbo-jumbo" is the foundation of all knowledge and without it we are blind. Without it we haven't a leg to stand on. It will be the basis for all our further investigations, as in the next paragraph.
Ecosystems: Energy Use and Material Cycles:
This is what ecosystems do: use up energy and cycle materials.
Examples:
1. Leaves use up the sun's light energy, turning a little bit into chemical energy of sugar, and most into waste heat (2nd Law-Energy Lost). In doing so, they take CO2 from the air, and water from the soil, and cycle them into sugar and oxygen (1st Law--Materials conserved).
2. Herbivores use up the chemical energy in leaves, turning a little bit glycogen, and most into waste heat (2nd Law-Energy Lost) . In doing so, they process all the matter through digestion and deposit the resultant materials as dung (1st Law--Materials conserved).
3. Soil organisms, such as dung beetles, bury the dung and make it available to plants roots again (1st Law--Materials conserved).
4. Soil voles eat the dung beetles, turning a little of their biomass into vole biomass, most into waste heat(2nd Law-Energy Lost) and recycling their materials again to the soil (1st Law--Materials conserved) .
So let's throw away our cultural and evolutionary biases, emotional mechanisms for social survival, and see ecosystems for what they really are and what they do. Then maybe we can better manage them.
