Chapter 22 4.5 The arduous "scramble eggshell" Task

You may have heard a touching story - "The Tree Planter Planted Happiness", which tells the story of how to create a forest and happiness from barrenness.Here is a story told by a young European who trekked deep in the Alps in 1910: The young man wandered to a windy, treeless, barren mountain area.The only remaining inhabitants there are miserly, poor, disgruntled charcoal burners, crowded into a run-down village or two.The only truly happy resident the young man saw in the place was a lonely shepherd hermit.The young man watched in amazement as the hermit remained silent all day, poking acorns into the moon-like barren hills like an idiot.The silent hermit plants 100 acorns per day.Young people can't wait to leave this desolate land.Many years later, when the First World War broke out, young people came back here unexpectedly.This time, he found that the old village was so lush that it was almost unrecognizable.There are lush trees and plants growing on the mountain, flowing streams, wild birds and animals everywhere, and a group of satisfied new villagers.The hermit planted 90 square miles of dense oak, beech, and birch over a period of thirty years.Seemingly helpless in the face of nature, his actions of shaking trees with mayflies have reshaped the local climate and brought hope to hundreds of people.

Too bad this story is fabricated.Although it is passed around the world as a true story, it is actually a fantasy written by a Frenchman for a fashion magazine.However, there are stories of idealists rebuilding forests by planting thousands of trees.Their results confirmed the French intuition: large-scale growth of plants can promote the local ecosystem into a virtuous cycle. There is a real example: in the early 1960s, Wendy Campbell-Purty, a British woman, traveled to North Africa to resist the invasion of sand dunes by planting trees in the desert.She planted 2,000 trees to form a "green wall" on forty-five acres of sandy land in Tiznit province, Morocco.Over a period of six years, the trees did a great job.Wendy set up another fund to provide funds for planting 130,000 more trees on 260 acres of desert wasteland in Busada, Algeria.The work has also borne fruit, resulting in a small new field suitable for growing citrus, vegetables and grains.

Given even a small foothold, the enormous potential hidden within those interconnected greenery triggers the law of increasing returns: "The owner gets more." Living things promote the growth of the environment and the growth of more living things.On Wingate's island, the presence of herons allows the sedges to reappear.In Packard's prairies, fire clears the way for wildflowers, which in turn allow butterflies to survive.In Busada, Algeria, some trees have altered the climate and soil to make it suitable for more trees to grow.More trees create habitat for animals, insects, and birds, which prepares habitat for more trees.From a few acorns, nature works like a machine, building luxurious homes for humans, animals, and plants.

The stories of Nansatch and other forests of increasing returns, as well as data from Stuart Pym's microcosm, illustrate an important lesson that Pym calls "the eggshell effect."Can we put the lost ecosystem back together?Yes, we can restore it as long as all the fragments are still there.Just, don't know if we can still get all the pieces.Perhaps some species that accompanied the early development of the ecosystem—like the thumb that fueled the development of intelligence—are no longer around.Or, in a true catastrophe, important auxiliary species become extinct globally.It is entirely possible that a hypothetical, ubiquitous grass that was once crucial to the formation of the North American prairies was wiped out during the last ice age.With its passing, the eggshell is impossible to restore. "Remember, there is not always a path between two points," Pym said.

Packard once had this depressing thought. "One reason the savannah can never fully recover is that some components are lost forever. Perhaps without large herbivores, such as mastodons in ancient times, or even bison in the past, the savannah will not come back." Pym and Drake His work has an even more dire conclusion: not only do the right species appear in the right order, but the right species disappear at the right time.A mature ecosystem may easily tolerate species X, but the presence of species X during its assembly will turn the system on other paths, leading it to a different ecosystem."That's why it often takes millions of years to create an ecosystem," sighs Packard. Which species, now entrenched on Nansatchie Island or resident in the Chicago suburbs, could push a reappearing savannah ecosystem forward? From the original destination?

When it comes to machines, there is a counterintuitive but clear rule: complex machines must be perfected gradually and often indirectly.Don't expect an entire functional system to be completed in one flashy assembly.You must first make a working system that serves as a working platform for the system you really want to accomplish.To form a mechanical mind, you need to make a mechanical "thumb"—a devious way few appreciate.In assembling complex machinery, increasing returns are achieved through trial and error—a process often referred to as "growing." Ecosystems and organisms grow all the time, as do today's computer networks and complex silicon chips.Even if we had all the key technologies of the existing phone system, we would not be able to assemble a replacement as large and reliable as the existing phone system without growing from many small networks to one global network.

Building extremely complex machines, like futuristic robots or software programs, is like restoring a savannah or a tropical island, and it takes time to complete, and that's the only way to ensure they're fully functional.Mechanical systems that are not fully developed or fully adapted to the diversity of the outside world will inevitably be criticized by everyone.Before long, it won't be funny to hear "the time is right to bring our hardware to market" again.