Abstract

Disturbance, claims Seth Reice, is “paradoxical” . What kills also rejuvenates. Disturbances provide the creative destruction in nature's economy; the silver lining is enhanced biodiversity. What matters is the right mix of disturbances and the extent to which ecosystems have adapted to them. The ideal is what Joseph Connell developed into the “Intermediate Disturbance Hypothesis” in 1978: enough disturbance to keep the pot bubbling, not so much that it boils over. What the popular media often characterize as “devastation” resulting from eruptive natural events is actually valuable and even necessary.The Silver Lining seeks to bring these “fresh insights of disturbance ecology to a broader, nontechnical audience,” with the added goal of showing “the importance of living with uncontrolled natural systems and process” . The core of this brief text is a pithy tutorial on disturbance ecology, dynamic equilibrium in ecosystems, and their contribution to biodiversity, as variously measured. The presentation is concise and lucid; the intended reader is indeed someone with almost no knowledge of the field. While Reice exploits a range of examples, he collapses his illustrations primarily into fires and floods. The text opens with Black Saturday, the blowup that climaxed the Yellowstone conflagrations of 1988.But short veers into simplistic. Problems seep in when the author goes beyond the basics of what is no longer a new theory, one that has in truth become a bit shopworn. At least with respect to fire, he is consistently incorrect about policy, history, and the ecology of humans as fire agents. The federal policy of total fire suppression did not arrive in 1940 . Bambi's mother did not die in a fire . It's the “U.S.” or “USDA” Forest Service, not the “National” Forest Service. The current policy is not one of “Let It Burn” but of “appropriate response” and “fire by prescription.” The 1988 Yellowstone fires, while startling the media and the urban public, served to educate both about the character of wilderness fire and have created an audience perhaps more sophisticated than Seth Reice supposes.The deeper trouble with the book is that its paradox of disturbance fails to address people. The author's heartfelt but naïve solution to restoring damaged ecosystems is to “leave them alone” . Stop harming them, then get out of the way and permit them to repair themselves; in particular, let nature ramble and roar over those preserves as it will. There is almost no middle ground, no Intermediate Human‐Nature Disturbance Hypothesis that allows for human disturbance as a legitimate ecological agency. The author declares flatly, “I know of no case in which human‐induced disturbance of the environment has enhanced biodiversity or ecosystem services” .I know of scores. Certainly with respect to fire, an immense catalyst, there is ample evidence that anthropogenic burning has profoundly shaped the character—and biodiversity—of many landscapes. Ethnobotanists in eastern Amazonia, for example, have estimated that perhaps a third of the total species present are the result of traditional swidden cultivation. Remove people, and the region's biodiversity declines. Instead, in The Silver Lining, people exist on the extremes: they either nuke landscapes or abandon them to nature parks.What is notably absent, too, is the silver lining that bonds nature's economy with society's. But the link between biodiversity and bullion here goes largely unexplored. One exception is an account of the Conservation Reserve Enhancement Program that allows North Carolina to lease stream buffers from farmers along four sensitive watersheds. It is, Reice proclaims, a “win‐win situation: the farmer gets paid and the ecosystem is protected from pollution” . The silver lining that makes this possible, however, gets obscured in the stormclouds of environmentalist exhortations