by Pat Tigges
How many times have you read the word ‘ecosystem’? If you’re in natural resource industries you must be as sick of it as I am. Our kids cut their teeth on it, you can’t pick up a paper, read a magazine, or talk to a researcher, scientist or university minion without the word being introduced into the conversion. Enough. We’re all being scammed. An ecosystem is smoke and mirrors.
As near as I can determine - and I read more than most - the concept of an ecosystem was created originally to estimate energy flows in systems. It was a model created by researchers and used the same way researchers model changes in the atmosphere to try and predict global warming.
But the models themselves don’t correspond to anything in the natural world. In the natural world they are undefinable. No one, not environmental scientist, not historians, not anyone that I know of, can tell you the limits of an ecosystem. They don’t have a natural world counterpart. They are an artificial concept.
Unfortunately the green groups have taken this artificial, lab-created, concept as their banner. “Everything is connected”, they cry, “therefore all plants, animals and activities are interrelated. Any change in one affects another. Therefore we must protect everything from ever changing.”
Stopping change is a meaningless and impossible goal. But the goal works. It rallies the troops. And, it has caused actual resource industries, people who should know better, to pickup their phoney crusade.
Reprint permission given by AgAir Update, P.O. Box 850, Perry, GA 31069 - an international agricultural aviation publication.
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