The Ecosystems Revolution: Co-creating a Symbiotic Future is all about humanity’s relationship with the natural world, how it has shifted throughout our evolutionary journey, and how we urgently need to accelerate its evolution on a far more symbiotic basis. The book draws upon and integrates a number of themes—natural and artificial selection processes in evolution and decision-making, how revolutions are constructed and perceived, directed versus random change, and the history and necessary future trajectory of the human story—seeking guidance on achievement of a sustainable future secured by a symbiotic relationship with the ecosystems that constitute its vital underpinnings.
Chapter 2, ‘Of this Earth’, considers the integrally co-evolved and interdependent nature of all life, from microbes to humans and the workings of the entire biosphere, highlighting the indivisibility of all human activities from the rest of nature. This interdependence underlies today’s diverse and pressing sustainability challenges, including both their causes and their potential solutions. This recognition illuminates the need for an ‘ecosystems revolution’, progressively repositioning the workings of nature’s supportive processes into governance systems to build a future of greater security, wellbeing and opportunity.
Chapter 3, ‘Breakthroughs in the ascent of humanity’, plots the trajectory of human development through the lens of the materials and technologies we have harnessed to further our own prospects. These have been characterised as a series of so-called ‘revolutions’ in the manipulation of natural resources. A generally narrow focus on immediate advantages accruing from largely fortuitous ‘evolutionary’ innovations has frequently also generated multiple unintended consequences, emphasising the need for greater cognisance of systemic ramifications for people and supporting ecosystems as a basis for the next societal revolution.
Chapter 4, ‘Chance or choice?’, reviews the nature of natural selection, a primary concept in the theory of evolution, including the application of selection principles to the evolution of ideas, technologies and products. It contrasts the multi-factorial nature of natural selection with the often narrow framing of artificial selection, which externalises many of the impacts of human innovations on ecosystems. These impacts, in turn compromise the capacities of affected ecosystems to sustain human needs, as a form of natural selection process. This highlights the need for a new type of revolution in human development that is directed rather than relying on fortuitous innovations, and is also guided by a broader framework of ‘artificial selection’ principles more closely aligned to the complexity of the natural world. It also challenges current conceptions of sustainable development that implicitly assume stationarity when, in fact, the ongoing pace of ecosystem decline and the burgeoning of the human population require us to raise our vision to one that encompasses the progressive rebuilding of ecosystem capacity and resilience.
Chapter 5, ‘Reanimating the landscape’, draws upon a range of inspiring community-based projects across the developing world where restoration of degraded landscapes has regenerated ecosystems and human livelihoods in a positively reinforcing cycle. Parallels are drawn with emerging approaches to restoration of catchments and their functions for pollution control, water resource protection, flood management, and other outcomes on an increasingly integrated, nature-based way. Examples are drawn from across the world where ecosystem restoration is protecting and increasing human security, economic benefits and opportunity, highlighting the importance of investment in the natural infrastructure vital for securing human wellbeing into the future. However, the difficulties of navigating a transition to a broader, systemic paradigm are significant, threatening as this broadening of conception may appear to mind sets shaped by currently established norms and vested interests founded on more reductive perspectives.
Chapter 6, ‘A revolutionary journey’, explores how an ecosystems revolution is already under way, as evidenced by incremental modifications to the broader formal and informal policy environment of the developed world over the past century and more. The dependencies and impacts of major policy areas on ecosystems and their services are reviewed through selected examples, emphasising the need for far greater internalisation of the benefits and vulnerabilities of supporting ecosystems, integrated across policy spheres and societal sectors, if continuing human opportunity is to be secured.
Chapter 7, ‘Co-creating the Symbiocene’, recognises that human pressures will continue to exert significant influence on global ecosystems, whether we chose to direct ourselves on a progressive path or permit continuing decline through inaction. What is undoubtedly required, if sustainability becomes our guiding principle, is to achieve increasing symbiosis between natural processes, with their associated ‘natural selection’ forces, and the choices and ‘artificial selection’ criteria that humanity applies to direct it towards that chosen future. This directed revolution to achieve symbiosis between the natural processes that shaped the Holocene with the human pressures that currently, in their unreconstructed state, shape the Anthropocene, would constitute a new synergistic and sustainable epoch: the Symbiocene. A framework for decision-making is presented, backed up by a range of worked examples across policy areas, before concluding with thoughts on the unique influences we all bring to bear through our day-to-day choices and actions, all of which influence, to unpredictable degrees, the kind of future we are co-creating.
The Ecosystems Revolution: Co-creating a Symbiotic Future is packed with practical and positive examples, inspiring us that, for all the attendant negative trends, a revolution is possible. This will not be a revolution brought about by force or violence; rather, it is one that we will co-create, indeed are co-creating, through shared understanding, aspiration, and consideration of the ramifications of our incremental decisions and actions. It is about empowerment and engagement in a journey, for it is not the ecosystems that require a revolution; they have always and will always adapt and survive. It is about us co-creating a revolution that progressively embeds the multiple values and importance of thriving, regenerating ecosystems into the ways that we think, act and live lives of potentially expanding opportunity and fulfilment.
The natural world of dynamically interactive solid matter, water, gases, electromagnetic fields, and profuse living organisms upon, within, and with which we live is a sphere. This is true physically, but it is also true chemically and ecologically. There are no sharp corners where things are not joined up as endless cycles. The sun that our home planet orbits radiates energy that plant life captures to fuse simple components into complex organic matter through photosynthetic processes, powering efficient and seamless biospheric cycles of carbon, phosphorus, nitrogen, oxygen, and other substances, tuned through 3.85 billion years of evolution.
There have been many blind evolutionary alleys, the price of which has been extinction. There have been catastrophes too, including meteoric collisions such as the best-known one that ended the age of the dinosaurs. Amongst other catastrophes is the evolution of photosynthetic processes some 2.5 billion years ago that, whilst expunging virtually all pre-existing life forms evolved in the absence of highly reactive atmospheric oxygen, culminated in more energetic and diverse ecosystems powered by respiratory oxidation of organic matter. It also enabled life to populate shallow waters and land surfaces, shielded from destructive wavelengths of radiation from the sun by stratospheric ozone formed from those raised atmospheric oxygen levels.
Gaia Theory likens the tight co-evolution and co-dependence of life forms operating homeostatically as a contiguous whole to a form of super-organism within which each living component not only interacts intimately with all others, but does so in ways that contribute to conditions favourable for maintaining the endless planetary cycles and processes essential for the protection and sustenance of all life. 1
Microbial Planet
We know more about, and have invested substantially more in exploration of, the surface of the moon nearly a quarter-million miles distant across the vacuum of space than the ocean's abyss of our home planet. But even these dark depths, with their crushing pressures of up to 1100 atmospheres (at the bottom of the 10,994 metres deep Mariana Trench) and temperatures at or below 0 °C, are well understood compared to the ecology of the most fundamental life support systems sustaining our health, prospects for wealth creation, quality of life, and future resilience.
We have, at least in the more accessible and populated parts of the world, charted much of the macroscopic flora and fauna responsible for a great deal of primary production, herbivory, carnivory, and remobilisation of energy and matter from dead organisms. As they are well documented, we will not relate what is already known about the contribution of the diversity of more conspicuous life forms to planetary cycles. By contrast, the microbial ‘foot soldiers’ responsible for the bulk of nature’s great biogeochemical cycles remain barely recognised, characterised, and understood. This hidden treasure of life, obscured from our gaze by its microscopic dimensions, is not merely vital but also staggeringly diverse and of great cumulative mass. So it is worth spending a little time getting to know it, all the better to understand the complexity and integrated nature of the ecosystems of our home planet.
It is to this largely unrecognised and unloved microbial bestiary that we owe virtually everything. Some of its constituents, including various prokaryotic (lacking a discrete nucleus) bacteria and archaea, barely differ from what we believe to be the first life forms to evolve on Earth some 3.85 billion years ago. Yet still they, and the complex processes they perform as tightly co-evolved players with countless viruses, fungi, protozoa, algae, and diverse other life forms far smaller than the acuity of the human eye, remain essential cogs in the great planetary machinery upon which all of life not only depends but from which it arose.
Bacteria may typically only be around 1 μm (micrometre) in size, some longer but not wider. However, a teaspoon of productive soil generally contains between 100 million and 1 billion bacteria, the equivalent in biomass to two cows per acre. 2 These soil bacteria perform a wide range of important roles, simplistically categorised into four functional groups. First of all, most bacteria are decomposers, consuming organic compounds such as metabolic waste and dead matter, releasing nutrients and converting energy into forms useful to other organisms. A second group of bacteria, referred to as mutualists, form partnerships with plants. These include nitrogen-fixing bacteria that associate with the roots of some plants, benefitting from the habitat that the plants provide and some substances which they release into the soil and, in exchange, converting inert atmospheric nitrogen into forms available to the host plant. A third group of bacteria comprises pathogens that make their living by attacking other organisms, and include a number of disease-causing microorganisms. A fourth group, known as lithotrophs or chemoautotrophs, obtain their energy by metabolising chemical compounds other than those based on carbon, including, for example, nitrogen, sulphur, iron, or hydrogen, and so contribute directly to the recycling and bioavailability of these elements. The collective actions of these soil bacteria have major implications for waste breakdown including pollutant decontamination, the cycling of matter and energy, the movement of water through soils, soil structure, as well as wider services including control of plant and other diseases. In soils, the greatest concentrations of bacteria are close to the root systems of plants, known as the rhizosphere. Bacteria also pervade all terrestrial and aquatic habitats as well as being present in the atmosphere. Across these media, they perform a bewildering diversity of functions, unseen, yet vital to the fundamental cycles of nature.
Other vital, yet substantially underappreciated constituents of the complex microbial ecology of our world are the fungi, a hugely varied group of organisms comprising around 1.5 million (estimates ranging from 0.7 to 5 million) species globally. This is more than six times as diverse as all groups of flowering plants combined. Fungi do not build organic matter like plants, but release enzymes outside of their bodies, breaking down matter to release constituent substances that can then be absorbed and metabolised. They comprise a diverse range of organisms from single cellular forms, including yeasts such as what we use in brewing and baking, through to better-known larger organisms built from masses of tiny filaments including edible fungi such as mushrooms and some types of toadstools. The fungi have varying medicinal and other applications, as well as being agents of disease such as crop-destroying rusts and smuts. Since 1969, fungi have been recognised as belonging to their own kingdom of organisms discrete from plants and animals. Many fungi form intimate relationships with plants that range from the harmful to the beneficial and the symbiotic. Amongst these symbionts are the ‘ectomycorrhiza’—around 5000 species of fungi that form sheathes around the root tips of approximately 10 % of known plant species—the fungi receiving sugars from the plant in return for greatly enhancing the plant’s ability to take up water and nutrients from the soil. It is thought that root-associated fungi enabled the initial colonisation of land by plants nearly 600 million years ago. Other benefits to host plants include protecti...
