Ecology: The Basics

Nature presents discreet entities yet each is completely connected in an endless exchange of energy.  While a beetle or red tailed hawk are separate creatures with their own agendas, they act within a broader system with clear laws and limits.  Humans use technologies founded on fossils fuels to skirt nature’s limiting factors, but we are simply spending a loan against future diversity.  Payment will be demanded soon enough by nature’s clock.  In the meantime, all living organisms make exchange with the surrounding environment using and giving up energy as they transit the arc of their lives.  Their experience of, and exchange with, the environment is direct and local.  In mature ecologies, the entire metabolism is a net benefit to the system as a whole.  Processes work on varying scales from the microscopic to the apex of the food web.  Ecosystems are identified with broad patterns such as forest, prairie, savannah, dune, and wetland.  Nature is resilient.  Nowhere is this more evident than in places where an existing system is destroyed.  Ecosystems experience a process called succession.  Life immediately fills in the newly desolate place and then, if allowed to continue undisturbed by humans or other intervention, continues a process of generating successively greater complexity.  Early systems are fast growing with high energy usage and short life cycles.  Mature or climax systems are characterized by high diversity, long life cycles and low energy usage.  These changes occur in a steady rhythm spanning hundreds or even thousands of years.