Chapter 28 6.1 Equilibrium is death

Tonight is the traditional Chinese Mid-Autumn Festival.In the downtown area of ​​Chinatown in San Francisco, overseas Chinese gave each other moon cakes while telling the story of Chang'e flying to the moon.My house is 12 miles away on the back of a steep embankment.The heavy fog in Kinmen accumulated over the embankment behind my house, covering the surrounding area in a thick mist.I went out for a walk under the moonlight at midnight, like walking in the clouds. The white ryegrass rose to the chest and murmured in the wind.I trekked through it, taking a closer look at California's rugged coast.It was an unorganized land, mostly mountainous desert, bordered by a sea that, though plentiful, could not provide rain.The ocean spreads its fog at night, secretly carrying the water of life.When morning comes, the mist condenses into water droplets that attach to the twigs and leaves, and fall to the ground.Most of the water is carried in this way throughout the summer, and in other places it is the job of thunderclouds.The behemoth of life, the redwood tree, thrives under the nourishment of this rainwater substitute.

The rain is a blessing, covering all things, all-encompassing and all-encompassing.In contrast, the mist can only wander between square acres.It relies on the weak convection of the air to float to the most accessible place, and then settles in a suitable and peaceful depression among the hills.In this way terrain controls water vapor and, indirectly, life.The right topography of the hills can trap thick fog, or drip condensation into canyons.Hills that face south and face the sun will lose more of their precious water through evaporation than the shady northern slopes.And some surface soils hold water better.When these variables are superimposed on each other, many small pieces of animal and plant habitats are formed to form a collage-like landscape.In the desert area, water determines the survival of life.And when the transmission of water in a desert area cannot achieve universal grace, its reach is limited and capricious, then it is the land itself that determines whether life will be or not.

The result is a collage-like landscape.The hill behind my house is clad in a patchwork of three distinct "stuffs," and on one slope is a creeping grass community, inhabited by mice, owls, thistles, and poppies—all the way to the sea.On the top of the hill thick juniper and cypress held a separate clump of deer and fox and moss.On the high ground on the other side, the endless thick poison ivy and evergreen bushes hide quail and other members of the population. These "small federations" maintain a dynamic balance, and their mutual self-sustaining attitudes continue to maintain a state of not falling, just like standing waves in a spring stream.When a large number of natural creatures push each other into the embrace of co-evolution, their interaction prevents them from gathering together in an unbalanced landform and climate environment, so they become isolated patches. Plants depend on each other.The location of these plaques also shifted over time.

Winds and spring floods erode the soil, exposing the subsurface, and new humus and mineral components emerging to the surface.While the soil mixture is stirring up and down, the animals and plants that are closely related to it are also stirring and changing.Lush cacti groves, such as Giant Tree Saguaro Grove, can move in and out of small desert patches in the Southwest in as little as 100 years.If you show it at a normal speed after the time-lapse shooting, you will find that the process of the giant tree cactus jungle spreading in the desert landscape is like mercury pouring into the ground.It's not just cactus bushes that can swim.In the same time-lapse shot, the wildflowers of the midwestern savannah overflow around the oak bushes, like a flood, sometimes, the bushes are completely lost in the vast grassland; sometimes, after the wildfire, the tide of flowers and plants It will retreat again, reappearing the spreading and expanding oak forest.Ecologist Dan Bowken once described forests as “slowly moving through the landscape in time with the changing climate.”

"Without change, the desert will degenerate," asserts Tony Boggs.He's a burly, red-bearded ecologist who loves the desert.He devoted himself to learning and researching knowledge and materials related to the desert.Near Tucson, Arizona, Boggs has been monitoring a stretch of desert in sweltering heat.Generations of scientists have been measuring and photographing here for 80 years.Observations on this land were the longest of all uninterrupted ecological observations.By studying the data on desert changes over the past 80 years, Boggs concluded that "variable rainfall is the key to the desert's survival. The rainfall is slightly different every year, so that each species can be slightly out of equilibrium. If the rainfall If there is a lot of variability, then the mixed population of species will increase by two or three orders of magnitude. Conversely, if the amount of rainfall remains constant relative to the annual temperature cycle, the beautiful desert ecology will almost always collapse towards monotony."

"Equilibrium is death," Boggs stated.This view has not been popular in ecological science circles for very long. "Until the mid-1970s, we were all working under the guidance of our predecessors, that biomes were moving towards constant equilibrium, forming climax communities. Today, we see that it is the disorder and variability that It really gives nature a rich color." Ecologists prefer states of equilibrium in nature for the same reason that economists prefer states of equilibrium in the economy: an equilibrium state can be represented by a mathematical model, and you can write equations for a process that you can solve .But if you say that the system is always in a non-equilibrium state, you are saying that its model cannot be solved, and there is no way to explore it.That would be the equivalent of saying almost nothing at all.It is no accident that the understanding of ecology (and economics) has changed dramatically in this day and age, since cheap computers can be easily programmed to solve non-equilibrium and nonlinear equations.Modeling a chaotic co-evolving ecosystem on a personal computer is suddenly not a problem.You see, how much this resembles the strange behavior of a marching giant tree cactus jungle or savannah.

In recent years, scholars have proposed thousands of non-equilibrium models; in fact, there is now a small circle dedicated to the study of chaotic nonlinear mathematics, differential equations, and complexity theory, all of which contribute to changing such old There is a concept: both nature and economic activities will converge to an equilibrium steady state.This new view—flow as normal—reinterprets historical data.Boggs was able to show people old photos of the desert that showed that the ecological massif of the giant tree-cactus forest was drifting within the Tucson Basin over a relatively short period of time—a few decades. "What we've seen in the desert zones we've monitored," Boggs said, "is that the development of these zones is not synchronized. And because of this, the entire desert zone is richer in species, and if a natural disaster completely wipes out the species in a field, it will be in danger." Plots at another stage of development can export organisms and seeds to the strip. Even in ecosystems with no rainfall variability, such as tropical rainforests, such patches exist due to periodic storms and downed trees Ecodynamics (patchdynamics)."

"Equilibrium doesn't just mean death, it's itself a state of death," Boggs emphasized. "For a system to become rich, you need changes in time and space. But too much change is not enough. You go from ecological gradients to ecological transitions in one fell swoop" According to Boggs, nature's dependence on disturbance and change is a real problem. "In nature, it's fine if crops (including vegetables, seeds, or meat) vary widely from year to year in terms of harvest. Nature actually increases its abundance in this variance. But when people depend on an ecosystem Subsistence crops in, say, a desert system driven by change, what they can do is reduce this system to what we call agriculture—providing a fixed product according to a changing environment.” Boggs hopes that desert changes will Teach us how to live with changing environments without simplifying the system.It's not an entirely silly dream.What an information-driven economic model provides us with is an adaptive infrastructure that can flexibly correct around irregular output; this provides the basis for flexible "just-in-time" manufacturing.In theory, we can use information networks to adjust inputs to highly irregular outputs of rich and variable ecosystems that provide food and organic resources.But, as Boggs admits, “Right now, we don’t have a change-driven industrial economic model other than gambling.”