JohnDenver wrote:
I think it will happen as autonomous process, just like it does in nature. When the stress of a limiting resource is applied, the growth of the most dependent species is retarded, and this opens up the niche to less dependent species which are more complex, but also more efficient users of the limiting resource. The resources which the dependent, dying species was consuming are freed up, and can be used to fuel the growth of the less dependent successor species.
You don't have to agree with the process. It's just a choice. But if you choose to be dependent on the limiting resource (oil), you'll be punished, and your nimble, less-dependent competitor will steal your cheese!
John, you have embraced some new facts without understanding the big picture. Ecological succession is a force of nature. It is the observed process of change in the species structure of an ecological community over time. In other words, ecological succession is a change over time of what is living in any given ecological system.
Any disturbed ecosystem will immediately begin a process of ecological succession. For example, look at our agriculture. We must expend a huge cost in terms of time, fuel, herbicides and pesticides every growing season because of the force of ecological succession trying to turn our “garden” into a weed patch.
This weed patch is the start of an ecological succession that culminates in a "climax" community, usually a forest. The apparent species structure and composition will not appreciably change over observable time .This forest may stay stable until such time as a disruptive force like a fire re-starts the succession process. The fires in Yellowstone, where I worked as a ranger, brought new life and diversity to the ecosystem. This image shows the ecological succession of a pond.
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William Catton wrote:Crash can be thought of as an abrupt instance of "succession with no apparent successor." As in ordinary succession, the biotic community has changed its habitat by using it, and has become (much) less viable in the changed environment. If, after the crash, the environment can recover from the resource depletion inflicted by an irrupting species, then a new increase of numbers may occur and make that species "its own successor." Hence there are cycles of irruption and die-off (among species as different as rodents, insects, algae). Our own species' uniqueness cannot be counted upon as protection. Moreover, some of the resources we use cannot recover.
Nature treated human beings as winemakers treat the yeast cells, by endowing our world (especially Europe's New World) with abundant but exhaustible resources. People promptly responded to this circumstance as the yeast cells respond to the conditions they find when put into the wine vat.
When the earth's deposits of fossil fuels and mineral resources were being laid down, Homo sapiens had not yet been prepared by evolution to take advantage of them. As soon as technology made it possible for mankind to do so, people eagerly (and without foreseeing the ultimate consequences) shifted to a high-energy way of life. Man became, in effect, a detritovore, Homo colossus. Our species bloomed, and now we must expect crash (of some sort) as the natural sequel. What form our crash may take remains to be considered…
Such total exploitation of an ecosystem by one dominant species has seldom happened, except among species which bloom and crash…It was thus becoming apparent that nature must, in the not far distant future, institute bankruptcy proceedings against industrial civilization, and perhaps against the standing crop of human flesh, just as nature had done many times to other detritus-consuming species following their exuberant expansion in response to the savings deposits their ecosystems had accumulated before they got the opportunity to begin the drawdown.
Liebig’s Law is about what determines the carrying capacity of an environment. It does not determine whether the result will be collapse or ecological succession. Dominant exploitation of an ecosystem by one species has
always ended with a bloom and then a die-off. We will be our own successor following the die-off.
Oh, and John, it is not a choice once we are in overshoot, which we are. We were already in overshoot when we first learned we had a choice, and by then it was too late. The sequel to overshoot is a dieoff, which may take decades. We don't know the rate and magnitude, just it's certainty
A Saudi saying, "My father rode a camel. I drive a car. My son flies a jet-plane. His son will ride a camel."