Chapter 21 4.4 How to do everything well at the same time

Steve Packard's original intention was to continue the authentic North American prairie habitat.In the process, he revives a defunct ecosystem and maybe gets a synthetic guide to the savannah.Thirty years ago, David Wingate was guarding a rare shore bird from extinction in an ocean in Bermuda, not a sea-like meadow.In the process, he reproduced the complete ecological environment of a subtropical island, further elucidating the principles of combining large-scale functional systems. The story of Bermuda is that of an island ravaged by a sick, unplanned artificial ecosystem.At the end of World War II, Bermuda was overrun by housing developers, exotic pests, and native plants were wiped out by imported garden species. In 1951, the discovery of the Bermuda fulmar - a sea bird the size of a seagull - on the cliffs of the archipelago's outer islands shocked local residents and the global scientific community as the Bermuda fulmar was thought to be extinct for centuries.They were last seen in the seventeenth century, around the time of the dodo's extinction.By a small miracle, pairs of fulmars brood for generations on distant sea cliffs in Bermuda.They spend most of their lives above water, only coming ashore to build their underground nests, so no one noticed them for four centuries.

David Wingate has had an avid interest in birds since he was a middle school student. He was there in 1951 when a naturalist in Bermuda succeeded in extracting the first fulmar from its nest deep in the crevasse.Later, Gewinter was involved in an attempt to relocate the fulmar on a small, uninhabited island called Nansatchie, near Bermuda.He was so enamored with the job that he, newlywed, moved into an abandoned building on the uninhabited, phoneless outer island. It soon became clear to Wingate that it was impossible to restore the fulmar to flourish without restoring the entire ecosystem here.Nansatchee and Bermuda were originally covered with dense cedar forests, but in just three years between 1948 and 1952, the cedars were completely wiped out by introduced pests, leaving only huge white trunks.In its place are many exotic plants.Wingate believes that the tall ornamental trees on the main island must not escape the once-in-50-year hurricane.

Wingate faced a conundrum that all total system builders face: Where to start?Everything requires everything else to be in place, but you can't pick up and dance the whole thing at once.Some things have to be done first, and in the right order. From studying the fulmar, Wingate concluded that their underground nesting sites had been reduced by sprawl, before tropical white-tailed birds came to snatch up the few remaining suitable sites.Aggressive tropical birds peck dead fulmar juveniles before occupying their nests.Dire situations call for drastic measures.Therefore, Wingate developed a "government settlement plan" for the fulmar.He made artificial nests—a type of underground bird nest.Assuming the Nansatchi forest can recover, the trees tilted slightly under the hurricane, their roots uprooted to form a decent-sized gap.Tropical birds are too big to get in, but for a fulmar it's perfect.But Wingate couldn't wait for that day, so he built artificial nests as a first step toward solving the mystery.

Needing the forest, he planted 8,000 cedars, hoping some of them would survive the blight.Some cedars did survive the disease, but were killed by the wind.So Wingate planted another helper species—the fast-growing, non-native evergreen casuarina—as a windbreak around the island.The rapid growth of the casuarinas allowed the cedars to grow slowly, and after a few years the better adapted cedars replaced the casuarinas.The replanted forest has created the perfect home for a species of night heron that has not been seen in Bermuda for hundreds of years, and the night heron devours land crabs.Without night herons, these land crabs would be a pest on the island.Exploding numbers of land crabs have been feasting on the juicy shoots of wetland plants.Fewer crabs now allow the rare Bermuda sedge to grow and, in recent years, to set seed.This is like the fable of "Lose the nail, the kingdom is lost."The other way around: find the nail, and the kingdom wins.Wingate reorganized the lost ecosystem step by step.

Ecosystems and other functional systems are like empires, easy to destroy but difficult to build.Nature needs time to develop a forest or wetland because even nature can't do everything at the same time.The kind of help Wingate offered was not against the laws of nature.Nature generally uses temporary scaffolding for many of her accomplishments.Artificial intelligence expert Danny Hillis sees a similar story in the human thumb.With the grip of the thumb, the dexterous hand takes human intelligence a step further and enables the ability to make tools.But once intelligence is established, hands are not so important.Hillis claims that building a huge system does require many stages that are not necessary for the system itself to work. "There are far more aids to honing and evolving intelligence than simply staying at a certain level of intelligence," Hillis wrote. "While people are convinced of the necessity of the thumb as opposed to the other four fingers in the development of intelligence, there is no doubt that humans can now think without their thumbs."

We encounter nature's "thumbless thinking" when we lie on a meadow hidden in a mountain ridge or wade into the dirty water of a tidal marsh.The intermediate species needed to update the model pasture to the world of flowers are now gone.What is left to us is only the "thoughts of flowers", but the "thumb" to watch them take shape is missing.