Hacker News Reader

Comment by Lutger | Hacker News Reader

Well, yes and no. Yes, in the sense that 'nature' is what organisms learned in millions of years and the emergent processes of the ecosystems in which they 'learned' things. And because this is so vastly complex, we often don't understand it and our interventions will have unintended consequences.

No, in the sense that humans are actually part of these ecosystems and it is possible for us to understand these processes and work with them. And this is the point of the research posted here: planting native seedlings is superior for restoration than 'just leaving things to nature'.

There's a technical side to this and a 'worldview' side, where there are two competing concepts of 'nature': one defines it as 'everything except humans' and the other includes humans as being part of nature, a useful part even.

View on HN

"No, in the sense that humans are actually part of these ecosystems and it is possible for us to understand these processes and work with them. And this is the point of the research posted here: planting native seedlings is superior for restoration than 'just leaving things to nature'."

I agree with what you're saying - but I think this point is slightly misleading. Planting native seedlings is exactly what nature would do - we are just accelerating nature's own process - not changing it for another process.

> we are just accelerating nature's own process

That is well put and also exactly my point. However, you are accelerating something, so there is an intervention. For some people this doesn't count as natural! The word 'just' in your sentence does a lot of work.

The line is, in fact, not always obvious. Would those seedlings have come there naturally? Or would it have been a different mix? If so, is the end result actually the same as would have happened without human intervention, or would it have been different? Maybe there are actually 50 or more species that could and would find a place in this biome.

You can say the same about exotic species, eventually most (or at least some) of them would have come here anyway - via birds for example, but its the pace at which they are introduced which makes all the difference. Well, is it a good thing then to introduce exotic species, after all its just accelerating nature's processes, or is it not? Evidently this one is not always only beneficial, so it depends.

Again, I agree entirely with you (yet still feel the need to respond) :-)

To some extent, who can say what exact mix of seedlings would arise if nature were left entirely to it's own devices. But one can imagine the basin of attraction for arriving at such a stable state is somewhat large (perhaps this is the crux of your point - such a basin cannot be mapped, and therefore one never knows if one is in it or not). Nevertheless - I feel able to draw a distinction between something that plausibly may have happened naturally, and, say, a vast grid of identically aged, undifferentiated pine trees. Though who knows, perhaps there is no distinction to be made - other than that of intention.

I agree too. That distinction is clear and useful.

I'm interested in creating a plausible-natural agricultural ecosystem, aka a food forest. Such a system draws more criticism from ecologists, probably because where I live almost all of the desirable species aren't native.

On the one hand, this clearly isn't a normal agricultural system and often looks more like nature, on the other hand 'nature people' often do not really understand its ecological value. So thats where I'm coming from, maybe that clears it up a bit.

There's a weird aside to this story though, because what we (Netherlands) generally consider to be desirable nature is often a landscape created by old agricultural practices.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com