‘Where the Wild Things Were’ etc./Juxtapositions of Human of Human Ecological Evolution and Nature

I have enjoyed reading this book by William Stolzenburg published in 2008. It is a work on naturalism, species diversity and predators in keeping natural balances leading methodically through an environment of naturalists, experiments, learning, academia, history and field insights. I have a few preliminary comments and synthetic observations to make though I have yet to finish the reading.

Actually I haven’t made it too far. Robert Paine’s work on ‘predator-prey’ interactions is the present topic. As a reader interested in the social sciences and humanities I naturally consider the examples from the natural world to that of human society as a species in its relation to the planet Earth as an ecosystem.

Paine published a famous paper in the Jan.-Feb. 1966 issue of The American Naturalist’ named ‘Food Web Complexity and Species Diversity’. Stolzenburg had already summarized Paine’s history as a young naturalist bumping through prestigious academic halls and inventive field studies such at ocean intertidal zones. Paine had researched what happens when predator species are removed from an ecosystem and discovered that one species tends to dominate others and end species diversity.

Paine wrote that “local species diversity is directly related to the efficiency with which predators prevent the monopolization of the major environmental requisites by one species’. We find this phenomenon obviously exemplified in human proliferation upon the world ending all interspecies predation upon itself. With the human elimination of predators except for a few microbes human life is implementing the elimination of species diversity killing other life forms intentionally and unintentionally with the assertiveness environmentally of its own cultural tool kit.

I wonder if the Internet is an accelerant of an intra-human reduction of human cultural diversity, and if a progressive reduction of cultural diversity is a parallel to Robert Paine’s observations about the natural world. If I had more time I might write an historical-sociological thesis on the subject. As a Christian I tend to rely on the prophetic criteria of the Bible and infer that by the time of the return of Christ human social power and its cultural developments will have made a complete totalitarian mess of things.

In the meantime intentional species diversity conservation might be made by replacing the lack of predators upon the human species with human intelligence acting to limit its own existential surge into geographical species totalization. Human intelligence collectively may need to substitute its own creative intellect for predation’s culling work of the monocultural domination of an environment by any one species free of predators. This should not be mistaken as advocating that human society become idiotic self-destructive human predators upon themselves as they have for most of history excelled at. It is a suggestion that intelligent and selective planetary environmental interactions may be actualized through far better human design of its own cultural insinuations into the word environment phenomenally.

The profit at the margins of human social sprawl in megacities such as Bangalore may be decreasing over-all as the currency of human culture draws upon a finite natural bank of resources. In time the irreplaceable lost species diversity and basic ecological eradication will hyper-inflate the value of human cultural money.