Seminal Papers in Complexity

[Paul Paryski]

Can complexity/emergence theory be used to address this issue?  cheers  Paul
 
 
Editorial Observer  
Millions of Missing Birds, Vanishing in  Plain Sight
 
 






By VERLYN KLINKENBORG, OpEd/NYT
Published: June 19, 2007
 
Last week, the Audubon Society released a new report describing the sharp and
 startling population decline of some of the most familiar and common birds
in  America: several kinds of sparrows, the Northern bobwhite, the Eastern  
meadowlark, the common grackle and the common tern. The average decline of the  
20 species in the Audubon Society?s report is 68 percent.  
Forty years ago, there were an estimated 31 million bobwhites. Now there are  
5.5 million. Compared to the hundred-some condors presently in the wild, 5.5  
million bobwhites sounds like a lot of birds. But what matters is the 25.5  
million missing and the troubles that brought them down ? and are all too
likely  to bring down the rest of them, too. So this is not extinction, but it is
how  things look before extinction happens.  
The word ?extinct? somehow brings to mind the birds that seem like special  
cases to us, the dodo or the great auk or the passenger pigeon. Most people  
would never have had a chance to see dodos and great auks on their remote  
islands before they were decimated in the 17th and 19th centuries. What is hard  
to remember about passenger pigeons isn?t merely their once enormous numbers.  
It?s the enormous numbers of humans to whom their comings and goings were a  
common sight and who supposed, erroneously, that such unending clouds of birds  
were indestructible. We recognize the extraordinary distinctness of the  
passenger pigeon now because we know its fate, killed off largely by humans. But  
we have moralized it thoroughly without ever really taking it to heart.  
The question is whether we will see the distinctness of the field sparrow ?  
its number is down from 18 million 40 years ago to 5.8 million ? only when the
 last pair is being kept alive in a zoo somewhere. We love to finally care
when  the death watch is on. It makes us feel so very human.
Like you, I?ve been reading dire reports of declining species for many years  
now. They have the value of causing us to pay attention to species in
trouble,  and the sad fact is that the only species likely to endure are the ones we  
humans manage to pay attention to. There was a time when it was better, if
you  were a nonhuman species, to be ignored by humans because we trapped, shot
or  otherwise exploited all of the ones that got our attention. But in the past
40  years, we have killed all those millions of birds or, let us say,  
unintentionally caused a dramatic population loss, simply by going about  business
as usual.
Agriculture has intensified. So has development. Open space has been sharply  
reduced. We have simply pursued our livelihoods. We knew it was inimical to  
wolves and mountain lions. But we somehow trusted that all the innocent little
 birds were here to stay. What they actually need to survive, it turns out,
is a  landscape that is less intensely human.
The Audubon Society portrait of common bird species in decline is really a  
report on who humans are. Let me offer a proposition about Homo sapiens. We are
 the only species on earth capable of an ethical awareness of other species
and,  thus, the only species capable of happily ignoring that awareness. So
far, our  economic interests have proved to be completely incompatible with all
but a very  few forms of life. It?s not that we believe that other species don?
t matter.  It?s that, historically speaking, it hasn?t been worth believing
one way or  another. I don?t suppose that most Americans would actively kill a
whippoorwill  if they had the chance. Yet in the past 40 years its number has
dropped by 1.6  million.
In our everyday economic behavior, we seem determined to discover whether we  
can live alone on earth. E.O. Wilson has argued eloquently and persuasively
that  we cannot, that who we are depends as much on the richness and diversity
of the  biological life around us as it does on any inherent quality in our
genes.  Environmentalists of every stripe argue that we must somehow begin to
correlate  our economic behavior ? by which I mean every aspect of it:
production,  consumption, habitation ? with the welfare of other species.  
This is the premise of sustainability. But the very foundation of our  
economic interests is self-interest, and in the survival of other species we see  
way too little self to care.
The trouble with humans is that even the smallest changes in our behavior  
require an epiphany. And yet compared to the fixity of other species, the  
narrowness of their habitats, the strictness of their diets, the precision of  the
niches they occupy, we are flexibility itself.  
We look around us, expecting the rest of the world?s occupants to adapt to  
the changes that we have caused, when, in fact, we have the right to expect  
adaptation only from ourselves.




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