“These libraries have improved the general conversation of the Americans, made the common tradesmen and farmers as intelligent as most gentlemen from other countries, and perhaps contributed in some degree to the stand so generally made throughout the colonies in defense of their privileges.” — Benjamin Franklin, from The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin [Buisson, Paris (French edition), 1791;
J. Parson's, London (First English reprint), 1793]
The last several posts have explored fear as a driving influence between predators and prey, with an emphasis on humans as a self-described apex predator presuming to intentionally engineer populations and habitats for all other life forms. I’ll end this series with a look at another ecological concept, that of top-down vs. bottom-up forcing. A multi-year study in a dryland habitat east of the Sierra Mountains documented that mule deer numbers were more affected by the quality and abundance of nutrients than by mountain lion predation, which mainly slowed deer population growth during an abundant nutrient cycle. After a severe, 4 year-long drought depleted the deer to 15% of their former population, increased winter snow-packs during the 1990s fed a slowly increasing herd, even as mountain lion numbers continued to decrease, possibly the result of an increase in mountain lion hunting by humans as deer numbers declined in the late 1980s. Based on the figures in this case study, the authors conclude that bottom-up abundance in the habitat is a more powerful force than top-down pressure from predation. By this assessment, a predator ‘successful’ enough to decimate its food sources can become powerless to save its own population, a lesson best heeded by a species functioning as a planetary ‘super-predator’. Here’s a graphic that essentially reverses the perspective from an energy pyramid with humans at the top:
A View From the Top:
I was born into relative abundance. My earliest memories feature a mountain peak shining with new snow, jutting over forested foothills to over 14,000 feet above sea level. Not many years later, I crept through meadow grasses to the edge of a nearby creek, caught a first trout with a worm dug from the backyard that morning. We killed, cleaned and consumed that trout and several more caught by my brothers and father. In a camp warmed by a fire built from dead limbs gathered in the forest, my mother rolled the trout in a special blend of cornmeal, flour, and spices learned from her grandmother, cooked them in a pan propped over the campfire. The trout were indigenous to the mountain range, as was the venison my dad had brought home the previous autumn. Through informal examples such as this, I learned to kill and harvest only what I would eat, and to ramble the hills and mountainsides with confidence and caution. I don’t recall being counseled to allow fear or arrogance to guide my steps. In later years, I learned to disappear from the awareness of other wildland denizens, and to quietly observe their interactions and learn their ways. What I’ve seen through these decades has saddened me with an awareness of habitat losses unlikely to be regained in this century, while assuring me of a resilience inherent to our planet’s many life forms. In this lifetime, my home state has sextupled it’s human population, ecological science has formulated the trophic pyramid system that has guided this series on navigating an ecosystem of fear, and I have come to acknowledge that all humans — whether self-describing as travelers or natives, rich or poor, immigrant or indigenous, elites or commoners, stewards or tourists — function as super-predators striving to engineer our planet’s life systems from the top of a pyramid.
Bottom-up Resilience
As Benjamin Franklin drily noted in his late-life remembrance of helping start one of the first lending libraries in North America, knowledge formerly reserved to an elite economic class can improve the ‘general conversation of the Americans’. With the spread of free-to-use lending libraries in the late 1800s, this knowledge has become available to an even broader economic/social range of the human population. I’m a scion of lightly schooled shirt-tail ranchers, rail-workers, sawyers — a pretty common post-WWII, pre-ski industry boom-time upbringing in the Rocky Mountains. To educate, challenge and inspire my rambles, I’ve often carried books from my own small collection, or borrowed from a branch of the finest learning institution I’ve encountered, a public library. I also realized that once away from media-filtered ‘infotainment', other humans encountered along these trails and rivers are more likely to refer to books and stories they’ve read when we’re discussing the lives and cultures we were passing among.
In recent years, digital versions of books and scientific research reports have supplemented or replaced printed materials, a phenomenon I commonly exploit with links and references in these essays. These links are an attempt to provide access to some of my research sources, as are the links to digital versions of book excerpts that often lead the posts. My hope is to encourage you to inform, inspire and challenge yourself and others to engage with the ecosystems we all inhabit, regardless of our various ethnic, cultural, economic and educational backgrounds, not as engineers but as attentive participants.
Though the advantages of world-wide access to what began as a research library among scientific institutions are undeniable, there are dangers and losses to note. As book-printing costs rise, many libraries are reducing their selection of in-print books, in favor of lending online versions controlled by distributors contracted to different publishers. Rather than owning a physical copy of the book you have borrowed as a patron, the library has contracted access to a digital version still controlled by the publisher. A recent court decision has declared that even if a library has a physical copy of a copyrighted work, it may not copy and lend digital versions without contractual permission from the publishing house, unless the work is eligible to be in the public domain. The defendant in the court case is a digital library I often link to on these pages, and the article goes on to note two other library-related stories. One describes a publisher re-writing digital editions of well-known authors’ books to match current perceived norms of language — as guided by a ‘sensitivity reader’, the other is a story of a city requiring homeowners to remove a street-side ‘Free Library’ box, or pay an ‘encroachment fee’ to the city. Each of these cases falls within the top-down power model of a pyramid, in which an apex power (or predator) forces actions and exchanges among lesser consumers (prey). A quick search turned up this graphic of a subject ripe for discussion another day…
Using a range of languages and values to exchange knowledge is a widely used technique of all ecosystems, from the underground chemistry of roots and fungi, to the ringing calls of prairie dogs and birds, to conversations among an informed human citizenry. Supplanting fear and arrogance with knowledge and informed actions can allow navigation of dangers and problems for us all.
As I roam the diminished, still vibrant landscapes of the drylands these coming weeks, I’ll be sharing stories that feature resilient forces at work in these once familiar ecosystems, despite myriad schemes to further exploit (or save) them for ourselves. Please comment or link below, or contact me at: BFrank.WaterIntoStone@yahoo.com. Up next, Road Trippin’: On Potholes, Pitfalls and Parlous Turns — until then, let’s help all of us enjoy this beautiful planet we inhabit. - B
Here’s a short list of online lending libraries, each offering free access to a range of books: Digital Public Library of America; Internet Archive; Project Gutenberg — plus, a search engine to help you locate your nearest public library, from the Institute of Museum and Library Services.
I encourage you to buy books for yourself and others — this is the best way to support authors, and preserve access for future readers. Find your nearest independent local bookstore at Indiebound.org.
Even ecosystems in the midst of rapid change can be nudged into alternative, stable states. Here’s some further reading: Alternative stable states in inherently unstable systems; Alternative stable states and the sustainability of forests, grasslands, and agriculture
Finally, one more biological interpretation of the energy pyramid: Bottom-up processes drive reproductive success in an apex predator