DAILY TRIFECTA: Putting The "Eco" Back In Ecosystems

Don't let tech find and replace the natural world

THE SET-UP: Have you noticed how the word “ecosystem” has been hijacked by the tech business? Go plug “ecosystem” into the news search function on the Google machine and you’ll find that the real ecosystems of the natural world are being linguistically supplanted by the artificial “ecosystems” of business.

Today, the Google machine spit out a real winner from Supermarket News on the coming transformation of the “automated store ecosystem.” Like almost everything I see in the business press, the author is gobsmacked by the possibilities of artificial intelligence:

…the AI-powered store of the not-too-distant future will be a living, breathing ecosystem, shaped by the precise needs of consumers, from the store interior to the supply chain and beyond.

A store will be “living” and “breathing”? Compared to what … to an actual forest or riparian ecosystem with a web of interlocking plant and animal species that are, in fact, living and breathing?

Look, I am not trying to be intentionally daft … I get the analogy and/or the metaphor behind these various applications of the term, but I cannot help thinking that this Borg-like takeover of the term hijacks and devalues our sense of what an ecosystem truly is … or, increasingly, what it was.

Let’s face it, we’ve seen a catastrophic loss of wildlife over the last fifty years. By one recent accounting we’ve lost a staggering 73% of this planet’s other animals to the march of human “civilization” since 1970. Everywhere we look we find microplastics and pesticides and PFAS and pollution. And the incoming administration sees the natural world as nothing more than yet-to-be-harvested products and soon-to-be shot trophies. The only “eco” they care about is “economics.” Perhaps that’s why they’ve merged with a group of tech oligarchs who seem completely indifferent to the natural world.

Elon Musk doesn’t give a damn about the environmental cost of launching his rockets. For him, the Earth is a transient circumstance to be overcome on the way to Mars and beyond … not a rare gift to be cherished. That sense of the Earth’s ultimate irrelevance is why you find him and Young Earth Creationist Mike Johnson on the same team. Like Elon, Speaker Johnson believes the Earth is a transient stage for human actors. The difference is that Johnson’s playing a role in an eschatological drama authored at the beginning of time by the Almighty. Musk, on the other hand, has cast himself in the role of savior in his SciFi melodrama.

Both see the Earth as a means to their end. And its utility is limited.

Many American Christians agree that the Earth is a limited-time offer. Use it while you can …. that is, until the Rapture and the Return and the End … a.k.a. the final, End Times conflagration that will consume the planet. After that the Earth will be an afterthought as Jesus leads his people to a “much better place” than this.

For some of us, it’s hard to imagine a much better place than a fecund forest or a teeming grassland or a sparkling stream. It’s why I shudder to think that we are replacing the idea of the natural ecosystem with the cold, manufactured artificiality of a business or tech ecosystem. The truth is that a hi-tech grocery store ecosystem is no match for a tidal basin or coral reef. We should be wary of anything that tries to convince us otherwise. - jp

TITLE: A Court Says Coastal Marine Ecosystems Have Intrinsic Value—and Legal Rights
https://insideclimatenews.org/news/17012025/ecuador-constitutional-court-marine-ecosystem-rights/

EXCERPTS: The Constitutional Court of Ecuador ruled that coastal marine ecosystems have legal rights that must be protected, potentially requiring stricter limits on human activities like industrial fishing.

Those ecosystems, the court said, have a right to maintain their natural “life cycles, structure, functions and evolutionary processes” and the Ecuadorian government must adopt sufficient protective measures to ensure those “vital processes” persist.

Marine coastal ecosystems have “intrinsic value,” the court added, and Ecuador made a commitment in its constitution to “build a new form of citizen coexistence, in diversity and harmony with nature.”

Ecuador, in 2008, became the first country in the world to recognize in a national constitution that nature, similar to humans and corporations, has legal rights. More than a dozen other countries have through legislation or court rulings recognized that ecosystems or individual species have rights, including to live, persist and regenerate.

Until now, all of Ecuador’s Constitutional Court rulings regarding nature’s rights have involved ecosystems on land, mangroves and wild animals. Lawyers familiar with rights of nature jurisprudence say the coastal marine ecosystem case, released late last year, is a landmark decision that extends heightened protections to the country’s vast aquatic ecosystems.

Ecuador, which includes the Galapagos Islands, is home to hundreds of fish species, whales, sea turtles, dolphins, sharks, manta rays and corals.

In its ruling, the court noted that nature is made up of “interrelated, interdependent and indivisible” components, including the “human species.”

“When an element of nature is affected, the functioning of the system as a whole is altered,” the opinion says.

Industrial fishers initiated the lawsuit in 2020 against various national government authorities, arguing that a legal restriction on industrial fishing within an 8-nautical mile zone is unconstitutional. Small-scale, “artisanal” fishing is allowed inside the zone.

The industrial fisher plaintiffs argued that the restriction violated their rights to engage in economic activities and threatened food sovereignty. They also argued, ironically, that the law was incompatible with the rights of nature: They claimed that the zoning law could inadvertently lead to overfishing by artisanal fishers and thus lead to a violation of nature’s rights. The government therefore ought to abolish or reduce the 8-nautical mile zone, they argued.

The court disagreed. In their decision, the judges cited scientific evidence indicating that the 8-mile zone was necessary to protect fish populations, maintain the health of marine ecosystems and ensure long-term viability of the fishing industry. Following implementation of the zoning law, fish populations increased, according to one governmental study.

The Ecuadorian court’s decision affirming that marine ecosystems have constitutional rights imposes a stricter obligation on the government to safeguard them. This means that traditional environmental regulations, such as fishing limits and pollution controls, must be robust enough to protect the essential functions of marine ecosystems. Additionally, the rights of other entities, including humans and corporations, may be restricted to prevent species extinction and preserve delicate ecosystems.

In essence, Ecuador’s constitutional recognition of nature’s rights shifts the balance, ensuring that human interests no longer automatically take precedence over ecological concerns in most situations. However, like the rights of humans and corporations, nature’s rights are not absolute and can be limited based on specific circumstances.

TITLE: In British Columbia, a Key to Preserving Old Growth Forests: Salmon
https://atmos.earth/in-british-columbia-a-key-to-preserving-old-growth-forests-salmon/

EXCERPTS: Salmon don’t really die, they transform.

There are salmon in the succulent fruit of salmonberries, the bodies of bears, the deep green of trees. Salmon return from the great pastures of the sea, making a magnificent and mysterious journey thousands of miles home to their natal stream beds. Salmon are abundance manifest in every life stage, even—and especially—in death. As their bodies decompose, salmon provide a feast of nutrients from the sea, brought back to the freshwater streams and the land.

So important are these fish to the forests of the Pacific Northwest of the U.S. and West Coast of British Columbia that they are called “salmon forests.” And to the small but mighty Nuchatlaht Nation of what is today called British Columbia, who have lived intertwined with the forests for thousands of years, those salmon forests are worth fighting for. The Nation has been working to protect these precious fish and the forests they nourish by establishing salmon parks that will safeguard these crucial ecosystems for years to come. In order to do so, they have gone all the way to BC’s Supreme Court to reassert their right and title to these forests and streams that they have long stewarded–and to return their cultural values to the management of these lands.

Their teachings honor the web of life that connects the forests, the freshwater streams, the sea, and all beings. “Everything is one, everything is connected,” said Nuchatlaht elder and tribal councilor Archie Little. “What happens at the top of the mountain has impacts on the estuary. You can’t do something without impacting something else. When you don’t respect, you can do a lot of damage. It is time we stand up, start to take action to save and manage what is left. We are saying we will do better, we will be respectful, we will not damage, we will protect.”

Industrial logging since the 1950s has degraded forests and the watersheds and salmon they support. Salmon face a multitude of threats, including global heating, which depletes ocean food webs and warms stream temperatures. But logging–which causes the siltation of streams, smothering salmon eggs; the destabilization of banks; and the felling of trees that shade the water—has especially devastated the home waters of these fish and the forests that shelter them.

Such treatment of the natural abundance of this place is a violation of the teaching of the Nuchatlaht People: hishuk-ish-tsa’walk. Everything is connected.

“Once you understand hishuk-ish-tsa’walk, it opens your eyes,” Little said. “It is not just beautiful words we talk about. We see how far one salmon will go, where it comes in and lays the eggs, fertilizes the eggs, and then dies; what eats that salmon after and where that salmon is dragged to. It is feeding all the other members of the Earth–the eagle can take it a long ways away. Maybe [the eagle] drops it, and it carries on with feeding the bugs, the flies. It just carries on. There is no end to what happens to one salmon after it has spawned. After that salmon has done its work and gone on to the other world, it has helped a lot of other creatures to survive.”

The salmon parks movement began as an effort to regenerate salmon and the forests they return to by establishing parks where logging would still be allowed, but not at an industrial scale. Within these areas, forests would be allowed to regrow and heal themselves and the streams they shelter. The parks were established by the Nuu-chah-nulth Tribal Council, composed of 14 Native Nations, including the Nuchatlaht, who have taken the Canadian government to court for their right to steward these ecosystems.

Their effort has been a historic one: For the first time in Canadian history, a trial court in April 2024 recognized the right and title of an aboriginal Nation, with its decision acknowledging Nuchatlaht right and title to 2,000 hectares, or about four square miles, of their original territory.

It’s just the start of the tiny nation’s larger vision to reassert the original laws of their people on their lands, by which the hereditary chiefs determined how their lands would be managed—from how much fish would be caught to how trees would be used—to ensure continued abundance for the whole community and for future generations.

“Happy trees, happy water, happy salmon, happy people,” Little said, summing up in the language of the heart what has been his people’s key argument in court.

So important are salmon in the life of the forests that their influence on trees can even be seen by satellite, said John Reynolds of Simon Fraser University, who, alongside his collaborators, has studied the influence of the sockeye return to the Adams River and pink salmon in the Fraser in BC.

“We got satellite imagery, and we asked the question, Could we see a four-year annual pulse in greenness in the vegetation in one of the rivers that had the highest densities of spawning salmon in Canada?” Reynolds said. “The answer was yes.” He also worked with his collaborators to sample vegetation along 50 watersheds in the Great Bear Rainforest of British Columbia’s central coast. They found that salmon drive a shift toward plants, including false lily-of-the-valley and salmonberry, that are indicators of nutrient-rich soil.

This is the lesson of the salmon forests, Little said: Everything is connected, and that interconnection is the true wealth that must be stewarded.

TITLE: Why the West needs prairie dogs
https://www.hcn.org/issues/57-1/why-the-west-needs-prairie-dogs/

EXCERPTS: Though black-tailed prairie dogs have a long-standing reputation as pests, their ingenious tunnel systems and industrious prairie pruning make them one of the West’s primary ecosystem engineers. Some researchers call them the “chicken nuggets of the prairie”; if a prairie species eats meat, it almost certainly eats prairie dogs. Without prairie dogs, black-footed ferrets would never survive outside zoos and breeding facilities, and we would have far fewer mountain plovers, burrowing owls, swift foxes, and ferruginous hawks.

Before 1800, an estimated 5 billion prairie dogs lived from Canada to Mexico, covering the West with underground apartment complexes that shifted over the centuries like sand dunes. The Lakota, Dakota and other Indigenous peoples of the prairie shaped and depended on the ecosystems prairie dogs created. Some relied on prairie dogs for nourishment during thin times, or used them as a ceremonial food.

But European settlers were remarkably effective at shooting and poisoning prairie dogs and plowing up their burrows. Today, the five prairie dog species occupy just 2% of their historic range, and some occupy even less.

Prairie dogs still survive in many of their historic territories: Black-tailed prairie dogs, known for their especially large, dense colonies, persist in isolated pockets of the prairie east of the Rocky Mountains from Canada to Mexico. White-tailed prairie dogs live in parts of Montana, Wyoming, Utah and Colorado. Gunnison’s prairie dogs eke out an existence in southern Colorado, and Utah prairie dogs live in, well, Utah. Mexican prairie dogs still hang on in small slices of northern Mexico. But many of these populations are too small to serve their ecosystems as they once did.

After decades of restoration work by tribal wildlife managers, prairie dogs, black-footed ferrets, swift foxes and bison are once again roaming the Fort Belknap Indian Reservation in north-central Montana, one of the few places in the world where all four species coexist. Some private landowners, meanwhile, are finding ways to tolerate the rodents. Together, these researchers, managers and landowners are striving to conserve the West’s remaining prairie dogs and the prairie that depends on them.

Prairie dogs aren’t the only occupants of prairie dog burrows. The mazes of tunnels and rooms also provide shelter for black-footed ferrets, swift foxes and untold numbers of insects. Burrowing owls shimmy their puffball bodies into the tunnels, where they raise their chicks on the plentiful bugs. Prairie rattlesnakes, tiger salamanders, horned lizards and badgers use them, too.

And as climate extremes become more common aboveground, these burrows may become even more important.

“By creating tunnels, they’re also creating a thermal refuge,” said Hila Shamon, the director of the Smithsonian’s Great Plains Science Program and principal investigator of the colony-mapping project. “The prairie can be so hot in the summer or brutally, brutally cold in the winter. You don’t have any shade or place to hide from the cold … and conditions in the tunnel systems are consistent.”

Prairie dogs spend much of the day and all night in their burrows, living in family coteries composed of one male, three or four females and the year’s young. Their tunnel systems, which can extend across an area larger than a football field, are like bustling apartment complexes where every family has its separate unit. Residents periodically pop out of doors to grab food, gossip about the neighbors and scan for danger.

Aboveground, the effect of prairie dogs on the landscape is more obvious. “Prairie dogs create an entirely novel habitat type,” said Andy Boyce, a Smithsonian research ecologist. “They graze intensely. They increase the forbs and flowering plants, and they clip woody vegetation. They will eat and nibble on a new woody plant until it tips over and dies.”

[P]rairie dogs eat grass. Quite a bit of grass: A single prairie dog can devour up to 2 pounds of green grass and non-woody plants every week, according to Montana State University. For ranchers who use that vegetation to feed their cows, prairie dogs look like competition. Researchers, however, say the effects of prairie dogs on livestock forage are mixed. Black-tailed prairie dogs’ propensity to clip and mow, for instance, results in plants with higher fat and protein and lower fiber. “Across years, enhanced forage quality may help to offset reductions in forage quantity for agricultural producers,” a study published in 2019 by Rangeland Ecology and Management reported.

Montana State Sen. Mike Fox (Gros Ventre), D, who served as Fort Belknap’s director of Fish and Wildlife from 1991 to 2001, oversaw early efforts to restore buffalo, swift foxes and black-footed ferrets to the reservation. The goal was to “create a steady, healthy population of native animals that were driven to extinction because of the different uses of the land,” he said. “Like when they started poisoning the prairie dogs off in the ’30s and ’40s and wiped out the ferrets that were native here, and the same with the swift fox. We want to make as complete an ecosystem as we can, along with the buffalo.”

The tribes worked with the Fish and Wildlife Service to reintroduce black-footed ferrets, and, with researchers at the Smithsonian, World Wildlife Fund and other organizations, to bring back the swift fox. The collaborators spent two years planning the swift fox capture and translocation, Shamon said, considering factors like habitat quality, community attitudes and the overall risk to a re-established population.

Swift foxes had already been reintroduced in parts of Alberta and Saskatchewan and on the Blackfeet and Fort Peck reservations. The reintroduction at Fort Belknap continued the tribes’ restoration efforts and added a possible point of connectivity for other populations.

DRIVE SOUTH from Fort Belknap down Highway 191, head east on a straight gravel road, and you’ll find one more place where prairie dogs are left in peace.

American Prairie began in 2001 as an effort to protect and restore Montana’s grasslands. The nonprofit now manages more than 527,000 acres of private land and federal and state leases. Its ultimate goal is to connect 3.2 million acres of prairie, providing habitat for an array of species from bison to mountain plovers to black-footed ferrets. To the casual observer, American Prairie’s lands may already look like intact prairie, though ecologists like Daniel Kinka can’t help noticing the nonnative crested wheatgrass and the hundreds of miles of fencing.

“This is kind of like the Field of Dreams model: If you build it, they will come,” said Kinka, American Prairie’s director of rewilding. “A better habitat houses more wildlife, and the wildlife that are here are perfectly capable of restoring themselves.”

Prairie dogs, said Kinka, are the “unsung heroes of a prairie ecosystem,” important to all the other species American Prairie is trying to foster. And as researchers have found, the woody plants that prairie dogs chew down to clear their line of sight tend to be replaced by nutritious grasses and wildflowers, suggesting that even cattle may benefit from their presence.

The possibility that prairie dogs could be good for cattle, or at least not as bad as generally believed, is met with skepticism by American Prairie’s neighbors, many of whom see the nonprofit as a threat to ranching. Signs posted along highways in Phillips County, Montana, read “Save the American Cowboy. Stop American Prairie Reserve.” For now, Kinka isn’t trying to convince anyone to like or even appreciate prairie dogs, aiming instead for tolerance.