Of course, Paul. Things do change over time - humans, natural disasters, e=
tc.
Here's what the late ecologist, Paul Shepard (The Others: How Animals
Made Us Human) responded to the same question at a lecture given 12
years ago.
"Well, there are two things to be said about this: One is, that if
you look at a history of ecology in that way, what you wind up with,
then, is the discovery at the end of all of it, that there is, in
fact, no so-called balance of nature. You know, I've been hearing
that there was no balance of nature ever since I was an undergraduate
in the 1940s. I was told at Yale, by Yale forestry school people,
that there's no balance in nature. All that's romantic imagination
that you naturalists have. In fact, everything out there is always
out of kilter. Again and again, it seems to me, I've heard over the
years, those who are ready ideologically, from what I would call an
historical point of view, to take control of a world which they hope
is disorderly, to take control of a world to find that it is
disorderly. Now we have a chaos theory which, in fact, doesn't say
that at all. Chaos theory is nothing more than the discovery of
physicists that things were more complicated then they thought.
Chaos theory talks about fluid dynamics and in fact is that awesome
discovery by the physicists that if you try to deal with more than
three variables at once in predicting where molecules in a fluid will
be tomorrow, you can't do it given the levels of information that we
have. It has nothing to do with disorder. So that it's possible to
misunderstand, as the article in the NYT does, the whole business of
chaos as equivalent to discovering that there's no balance in nature.
The naturalists never said that there was a static balance. That
have always contended that things are always changing. But they're
changing around a central pivot. They're changing over the long arc
of time which has very little to do with our daily lives. Very
little to do with the fact that the sun comes up every morning and
goes down every evening, and the tides in my own body fluids change
on a regular basis. That I'm going back, time and again every hour,
every day, every month, every year, and starting over again even if
that circle is a slightly more distant place along the arrow. That
you cannot go back is the great end of the conversation attempted by
those who say "in our efforts here to recover that which we have
called the neolithic or the paleolithic in our way of thinking, is
behind us on this trajectory and there's no way of recovering it."
Whereas, in my own view, that's an abstraction that is created by
those grand sweep thinkers who think in terms of cosmic evolution and
not those who are looking at the way in which life is actually lived
and goes back continuously starting over, because it never departs.
You can't go back because you never really left. We are pleisticene
beings no matter what we call the age in which we live."
>At 09:08 30-10-05 -0800, you wrote:
>>
>When any of these elements goes missing, the bioacoustic
>>balance is offset and, it is thought, that this change is reflected
>>in the collective vocal behavior and expression of the critters that
>>remain.
>
>Bernie,
>
>Can you explain what you mean with the latter?
>
>You should have gone recording some 15000 years ago, before the South
>American megafauna was exterminated by the first Amerindians. Considering
>this you won't be able to find an ideal recording site anywhere on the
>continent.
>
>Cheers, Paul
>
>
>
>
>"Microphones are not ears,
>Loudspeakers are not birds,
>A listening room is not nature."
>Klas Strandberg
>Yahoo! Groups Links
>
>
>
>
--
Wild Sanctuary
P. O. Box 536
Glen Ellen, CA 95442
t. 707-996-6677
f. 707-996-0280
http://www.wildsanctuary.com
[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
________________________________________________________________________
________________________________________________________________________
|