2018 Conference

Individual Paper Presentation

The notion that nature has a balance, while still figuring prominently in the lay understanding of ecology and the environment, has come into decided disrepute among professionals. Flux, drift and novelty have obviated such static conceptions of nature. Nature doesn’t hold still and we cannot make her. ‘Stop talking about balance,’ a recent piece in the Chronicle of Higher Education pleaded. But this is a mistake. Balance is still a helpful and accurate metaphor, and denouncing it is more misleading, of thought and practice, than keeping it.

Balance never has implied stasis. The bear on the unicycle is anything but still, although it seems to keep within a certain vertical range of variability. Nor does balance rule out change over time—have you seen the tightrope artist? Balance does suggest that some kinds of change would be destructive to the thing balanced, and that there is some internal inertia or resistance to such change. Balance suggests the sustaining of something, perhaps precarious, perhaps resilient.  

Rejecting talk of balance suggests the inability to distinguish between good change, bad change and neutral—to distinguish walking down the tightrope from falling off it. But we can distinguish these things plainly. A species whose range shifts along with the shifting temperature zones walks down the tightrope. A flower that blooms and withers before its pollinators emerge is out of balance, although a new pollinator might catch it. The very persistence of species across the millennia, species whose necessary conditions for existence we have learned how to violate, entails that at least those conditions were kept in the balance until now. If we are to manage, even co-create, the novel ecosystems of the anthropocene, then we are fortunate to have such a dynamic and flexible metaphor as balance.