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Are humans disturbing conditions in ecology?

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Despite Darwin, we are not, in our hearts, part of the natural process.

Lynn White Jr, The Historical Roots of Our Ecological Crisis (1967)

Abstract

In this paper I argue, first, that ecologists have routinely treated humans—or more specifically, anthropogenic causal factors—as disturbing conditions. I define disturbing conditions as exogenous variables, variables “outside” a model, that when present in a target system, inhibit the applicability or accuracy of the model. This treatment is surprising given that (1) humans play a dominant role in many ecosystems and (2) definitions of ecology contain no fundamental distinction between human and natural. Second, I argue that the treatment of humans as disturbing conditions is an idealization: since it is, and has long been, known that humans are pervasive, this treatment amounts to an intentionally introduced theoretical distortion. Finally, characterizing this treatment as idealization forces us to confront the question of its justification, and so, drawing on three different kinds of idealization, I evaluate how this treatment may be justified.

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Notes

  1. And biologists in aligned disciplines, like evolutionary biology, natural history, biogeography, conservation biology, and so on. Throughout I will simply use “ecologists” for ease of diction.

  2. I rely here on a distinction between exogenous factors—variables that are “outside” the model and whose effects are not explained by the model—and endogenous factors—variables “inside” the model and whose effects are capable of being explained by the model.

  3. See O’Neill and Kahn (2000) for a similar argument: they characterize the treatment of humans as “external” in ecology as an abstraction. Following Jones (2005) it has been common to draw a distinction between idealization and abstraction, the former being the assertion of a falsehood, the latter being merely an omission. In this paper, I follow Weisberg’s (2007) pluralist account and treat abstraction as a form of minimalist idealization, as I explain below.

  4. Although our current intellectual climate perhaps more fully embraces the presence of humans, historian Matthew Chew has shown that ecologists have long accepted that humans are pervasive (Chew 2009).

  5. Three examples: the distinction plays a well-known and contentious role in invasion biology, since human dispersal seems to render a species “invasive” or “alien”—for critical recent accounts, see Chew and Hamilton (2011) and Pearce (2015); Mark Sagoff has shown how the distinction lurks behind the absence of treating domestic, agricultural, and zoo animals as objects of study, and determines the correct application of major concepts in ecology like “habitat,” “species richness,” and “niche” (Sagoff, under review); urban biologists often lament their fight to get human-dominated ecosystems taken as seriously as “natural” ecosystems (Alberti et al. 2003).

  6. In fact, very recent articles in ecology suggest a growing trend to stop treating humans as disturbing conditions (see for example, Worm and Paine 2016). The current paper thus also speaks to this recent literature and aims to provide one way of discussing the issues involved cogently and productively.

  7. Ecologist Robert O’Neill, winner of the 1999 Robert MacArthur award, also raised this worry in 2000 (see O’Neill and Khan 2000).

  8. Thanks to an anonymous reviewer for pointing out this potential confusion.

  9. I am not claiming that treating humans as ecological disturbances is immune from criticism, only that it is not my target in this paper. One reason to be critical of treatments of humans as ecological disturbance is that humans are not external to ecosystems in the same way that earthquakes are. As O’Neill and Kahn write, “The problem with this approach is that human beings are, in fact, another biotic species within the ecosystem and not an external influence” like most other sources of ecological disturbance (O’Neill and Kahn 2000, p. 333). Why, they ask, are humans the only species exempt from being integrated into a “self-organized, self-regulated entity called the ecosystem”?

  10. Put in a different way, one might likewise say that according to those who consider humans to be disturbing conditions, anthropogenic forces are treated as giving rise to experimental artifacts (i.e., phenomena observed during an experiment that are not considered to be “naturally” occurring, but instead a result of the experimental procedure itself).

  11. Craver and Darden (2013) provide the most detailed account of this sense of disturbing condition with regard to mechanisms. What I call, by the traditional name, “disturbing condition,” would by their account fall under two other categories: “inhibiting conditions” and “nonstandard conditions.” For the present essay, I will stick with the simpler, common vocabulary of “disturbing condition.”.

  12. For a detailed discussion of the “applies to” relation, see Weisberg (2013).

  13. See Craver and Darden (2013) and Peschard and van Fraassen (2014) for recent discussions.

  14. We might alternatively put this in a related, causal vocabulary, and say that disturbing conditions are those conditions under which a generalization fails to be invariant (Woodward 2001).

  15. For example, a www.scopus.com analysis of article titles containing “in nature” from 2005–2015 shows that of 579 articles, 77.9 % of those articles were in the “life sciences.”

  16. This also suggests to me that nature for the physicist is different from nature for the biologist, but this discussion would bring us far afield from the present analysis (see Wachbroit 1994 and Dussault 2016). Relatedly, see Brandon (1994, 1996) on why experimental (evolutionary) biologists invoke the phrase “in nature,” while physicists do not.

  17. Similarly, in their influential paper discussing the advantages of studying ecological processes in the laboratory using the flour beetle, Neyman et al. (1956) found it necessary to discuss the extent to which such experiments are artificial, since this was a common criticism. The criticism is unfounded, they argued, when “‘artificial’ is intended to imply triviality,” rather than simply refer to the study as being unrealistic, which they said was nonetheless true (1956, p. 45). In other words, they worried about their research being characterized as “artificial” because this characterization often had a normative side: it implied that such research was unimportant, rather than just unrealistic.

  18. Ecologist Jari Niemelä writes that “Traditionally, ecologists have ben reluctant to study urban ecosystems, because they have been regarded as inferior to less disturbed rural ones” (Niemelä 1999, p. 3). Niemelä doesn’t specify further the reason for their inferiority.

  19. See similar anecdotes by biologists Massimo Pigliucci and Gretchen Daily in Pennisi (2000) and Voosen (2013), respectively, and in O’Neill and Kahn (2000). See also Leonelli (2007, p. 212).

  20. The history of biology is full of examples of where things made seem to lack the reality of things found. In the eighteenth-century, the naturalist Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon wrote, referring to domesticated organisms, that “it is the duty of the naturalist […] to separate artifice from Nature; and never to confound the animal with the slave, the beast of burden with the creature of God” (Inkpen 2014). Domesticated organisms were the results of degeneration—the sheep had been “denatured” by humans—and thus both opposed to Nature, but also lacking the reality of natural species.

  21. As an anonymous reviewer helpfully pointed out, I should acknowledge here that it is the job of urban biologists to build anthropogenic factors into their models and they have been doing so since the 1990 s. So, there is a contingent of biologists who never treat humans as disturbing conditions. But it should be noted that (1) this is a small, yet growing, minority of biologists, and (2) they are very interdisciplinary, and often see themselves as such (see McDonnell 2011), drawing on, and being employed in, ecology, urban planning, architecture, geography, economics, political science, sociology, anthropology, and so on. They are not, in other words, the “pure” ecologists I have in mind in this paper, and as such, they often provide a (sometimes needed) critical perspective.

  22. This is one of the goals set for the recently funded NSF project: Dynamics of coupled natural and human systems (or CHANS). See Liu et al (2007).

  23. “Disciplinary idealization” is my own term. Minimalist and Galilean types of idealization have become standard in the modelling literature following Weisberg (2007, 2013).

  24. There are of course many conceptual problems with deciding what should count as an area’s state prior to human interaction which I have side-stepped in the present essay (Cronon 1995).

  25. For further discussion of this and related biogeographic models, see Inkpen (2016).

  26. Another interesting finding, which I haven’t discussed, is that species-area relationships were strengthened in the Caribbean. That is, although geographic isolation does not explain species richness, as the traditional model predicts, the relationship between species richness and island area is even stronger than the traditional model predicts. This is because larger islands have larger banks which have more people and thus more ports (Helmus et al. 2014, p. 546). Again, it is economically influenced trade that matters to Anole species richness.

  27. Island biogeography theory has long been used to inform environmental policy decisions about the size of nature preserves and biodiversity; see Diamond (1975) for a seminal paper.

  28. Obviously this also presupposes some meaningful notion of the “natural state of an area.”

  29. Thanks to Adrian Currie for pointing out the similarity to me.

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Acknowledgments

I would like to thank the following people for their comments on the many earlier drafts of this essay: John Beatty, Tyler DesRoches, Mark Sagoff, Matt Chew, Miriam Rich, Jim Lennox, Adrian Currie, Danielle Hallet, Chris Stephens, fellows at the Center for Philosophy of Science at Pittsburgh (Agnes Bolinksa, Mike Stuart, Maël Pegny, Carol Cleland, Leonardo Bich, Matthias Unterhuber, Nancy Nersessian, and the director, John Norton), two anonymous reviewers, and the Editor in Chief, Kim Sterelny. This research was made possible by a SSHRC Postdoctoral Research Fellowship at the University of Pittsburgh.

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    S. Andrew Inkpen

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Andrew Inkpen, S. Are humans disturbing conditions in ecology?. Biol Philos 32, 51–71 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10539-016-9537-z

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