"But natural communities are far more complex than the monocultural experiments on which the law of the minimum [i.e. Liebig's Law] is based. Different species have different requirements for a given element, as Liebig knew. Consequently, when one element is limited in a community of species, population growth typically does not grind to a halt; rather, a species that is less constrained by that limiting element replaces another that is more constrained in a process called succession."
This is something that seems to have been left out in the descriptions of Liebig's Law in this forum. In ecology, Liebig's Law is the mechanism of succession, not collapse. Succession and climax ecosystems are generally regarded as a positive thing, so Liebig's Law would seem to be something positive, rather than the law of the grim reaper.
Here's a more detailed variation of the same concept:
Conclusion: Collapse as a Succession Process
Even within the social sciences, the process by which complex societies give way to smaller and simpler ones has often been presented in language drawn from literary tragedy, as though the loss of sociocultural complexity necessarily warranted a negative value judgment. This is understandable, since the collapse of civilizations often involves catastrophic human mortality and the loss of priceless cultural treasures, but like any value judgment it can obscure important features of the matter at hand.
A less problematic approach to the phenomenon of collapse derives from the idea of succession, a basic concept in the ecology of nonhuman organisms. Succession describes the process by which an area not yet occupied by living things is colonized by a variety of biotic assemblages, called seres, each replacing a prior sere and then being replaced by a later, until the process concludes with a stable, self-perpetuating climax community (Odum 1969).
One feature of succession in many different environments is a difference in resource use between earlier and later seres. Species characteristic of earlier seral stages tend to maximize control of resources and production of biomass per unit time, even at the cost of inefficiency; thus such species tend to maximize production and distribution of offspring even when this means the great majority of offspring fail to reach reproductive maturity. Species typical of later seres, by contrast, tend to maximize the efficiency of their resource use, even at the cost of limits to biomass production and the distribution of individual organisms; thus these species tend to maximize energy investment in individual offspring even when this means that offspring are few and the species fails to occupy all available niche spaces. Species of the first type, or R-selected species, have specialized to flourish opportunistically in disturbed environments, while those of the second type, or K-selected species, have specialized to form stable biotic communities that change only with shifts in the broader environment (Odum 1969).
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