Thinking like a biome
Aldo Leopold wrote:
The cowman who cleans his range of wolves does not realize that he is taking over the wolf’s job of trimming the herd to fit the range. He has not learned to think like a mountain. Hence we have dustbowls, and rivers washing the future into the sea.
Explaining that it’s the job of the wolf to eat herbivores (which would otherwise strip the land bare of vegetation), Leopold was articulating a basic law of ecology: biodiversity is essential to healthy biomes.
I’ve been thinking so much about biomes lately, showing people how to distinguish the 5 biomes that make up Nonotuck, that I’ve crossed a cognitive threshold, and started thinking like one, if only in play and imagination. What exactly those thoughts are, well, read on.
Biomes are fractal, which means that they retain character, design and integrity at micro- and macro- levels, and they nest within each other. Large biomes—such as Cape Cod—are defined by the climate and geology; and so, on the Cape it is sand that all creatures great and small somehow stem from, from micro- bacteria and clams, to macro- trees and deer. Without the soils the micro-organisms create, there can be no macro-organisms; and when I am able to connect these organisms, to envision them as kindred parts of the same cooperative life—then I’m thinking like a biome:
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