SOS Forests

Blogs, Peers, and Watching the Paradigm Shift

Within hours after posting a blurb about a research paper on ancient Amazon earthworks [here], our vast network of science adepts sent in the paper itself.

Martti Parssinen, Denise Schaan, and Alceu Ranzi. 2009. Pre-Columbian geometric earthworks in the upper Pur’us: a complex society in western Amazonia. Antiquity 83 (2009): 1084–1095 is now posted in the W.I.S.E. Colloquium: History of Western Landscapes [here].

So you need not rely on the interpretation of journalists; you can read the paper and make your own interpretations.

That’s nothing new for W.I.S.E. Almost all the reference works in our Library [here] have been supplied by our readers. This blogistic endeavor is an exercise in participatory science. And that is true of many other blogs as well (climate science blogs are a good example).

Something wonderful is happening to science today. Thanks to the Internet, science has been freed from the shackles of the Ivory Tower. No longer is science an esoteric and exclusive practice — now we all get to participate. We are all peers now.

But what is even more rewarding is that the research papers and books suggested by our science-adept contributors are uniformly excellent and cutting edge in this respect: they are representative of a paradigm shift in ecology.

A paradigm shift is a change in the fundamental structure of a scientific field, from one way of thinking to another. In this case the shift is from old ecological ideas about natural development to new ones that include the recognition of human influences.

We have posted book reviews and whole research papers that present evidence of profound historical human impacts in Amazonia, the Pacific Northwest, California, the Mississippi Valley, Manhattan, Idaho, Nevada, New Mexico, Arizona, British Columbia, Alberta, Australia, and many more locales and regions.

The implications are more than a refinement of history — they affect the way we understand ecological change and dynamics, and by extension, how we might practice sustainable stewardship today.

That is because ecology is at its heart an historical science. Ecology is the study of the interactions between organisms and their environment. Those interactions, and the dynamic changes in plant and animal populations, play out across time. Ecological processes can take hundreds of years and even longer to mature and cover broad geographic areas. Hence history is essential to ecology.

The new understanding, of human influences on ecological processes across time, is as significant a change in thinking as plate tectonics was for geology. Alfred Wegener first proposed the idea of continental drift in his 1915 book The Origin of Continents and Oceans, but it took almost 50 years before Wegener’s theory was generally accepted. Improved seafloor mapping in the 1950’s, including of rift zones and spreading plates whose movements were calibrated by the magnetic pole reversal signatures in rocks, provided overwhelming evidence, so that in the early 1960’s plate tectonics became the paradigm, supplanting the old theories that assumed the Earth’s geologic features were fixed in place.

Similarly, the new theories of ecological development, including recognition of historical human influences, are supplanting the old ones.

That shift in ecological thinking is happening today, and you have a ringside seat. We all do, thanks to the contributors to W.I.S.E., who are often the leading scientists themselves. We are witness to a major advancement in scientific understanding.

That’s pretty exciting — I think it is, anyway. And it is hugely gratifying to be a part of it, too, and to be a conduit to you, the scientific peers in our new age of digital communication.

It is easy to get caught up in the forest, fire, and wildlife policy issues of the moment, and it is also our duty, as we see it, to be involved in those issues. But the real joy for those of us most closely associated with W.I.S.E. is to witness and be a part of the new paradigm in ecology.

We don’t express our gratitude enough, so here’s a loud THANK YOU to the courageous researchers who brave uncharted waters, and who generously share with us the tales of their voyages of exploration.