Turbulence Biodiversity

Ecological Turbulence and the Hadean Arcadia

Frederick TurnerWhen prairie restoration ecologists, by careful research, reseeding, weeding, andfire, have rekindled a living prairie, they often begin to yearn for buffalo. Why wouldthey want their carefully-planted prairie to be tromped all over by large animals? Theanswer is that the rarer species, the special surprise of the prairie orchid, the turk's-headlily, need disturbance to find a place to grow; their ecological niche

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turbulence anddisruption. But the same could be said for many prairies as a whole, which rely onoccasional fires to prevent an oak forest from growing up in their place. The AmazonBasin is so rich in species because of the rapid climatic variations of the recent glacial-interglacial cycles, that periodically isolated and stressed its ecological communities andmade them diverge. It is the wild swings of salt and fresh, wet and dry, storm and calmthat make seacoasts so rich a field of genetic experiment.Humankind is perhaps the most opportunistic of all such "disturbance" species.We exist at ecological margins, whether indigenous or artificial; like beavers and termites,but more so, we must disturb the Earth to exist at all. The recent rise of environmentalrestoration, and the exciting new art of landscape design based on its findings, shows ushumans turning back to contemplate our own evolution and intervening in the presentworld so as to recover its past. The deeply mediated nature of this process should notalarm us; for nature always was mediated, experienced, sophisticated, disturbed, as thehistory of species and biome evolution shows. We have accelerated the process, to besure, and must take care that it does not go astray, but here we are in the middle of it;there is no escape.

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I want to talk a little about a landscape design exhibit now touring the country thatI had some part in bringing about. One of the glass display cases housing the VintondaleMine remediation exhibit had broken in transit when Terry Harkness first introduced meto the Eco-Revelatory Design show. The heavy plate glass had been etched with text andimages--by some acid process, I imagined--but the breakage made the words hard to read.The case contained a dark orange substance, of the consistency of damp coarse salt. Itook a pinch of it and tasted it. It was as sour as vinegar or lemon juice, and acrid, and atthe same time foul like sweat, and somehow parched, as if antipathetic to moisture andthe human tongue.This was Yellow Boy, the toxic crust that forms on the streambeds and alluvialflats beneath the abandoned coalmines of Pennsylvania: it is a precipitate of the highlyacid waters from the old mineshafts and "bony piles" (slurry tailings). Yellow Boy ismainly ferric oxide, but I thought I tasted sulfuric acid or carbonic acid as well; theclusters of oxygen atoms on each molecule were reaching out to burn whatever they couldcombine with. One was reminded that oxygen is a caustic and highly reactive element,the bane of the Earth's first anaerobic lifeforms, the explosive fuel used at our own risk byall of us eukaryotes.That taste of Yellow Boy was the taste of the Industrial Revolution, when our ideaof value in the universe was the one given to us by the new and powerful science of thermodynamics. Value was work, a diminishing stockpile of free energy, over thecontrol of which the social classes were locked in mortal struggle, and our idea of production was to dig things up and burn them. We could not beat the increase of entropy, of thermodynamic disorder; the best we could do was to outrun it by squanderingthe abundant stores of natural order faster than nature itself could. One of the natural

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resources we burned was the sweat and youth of the laborer, of the hundreds of men andboys--oven stokers, pickmen, door boys, lift operators and carmen, who toiled at the No. 6mine.When we built our great industrial cities with the forces those men had put at ourdisposal we found that the rain itself had become our enemy: it pooled on our streets andour acres of roofing and our huge parking lots, soaked up the toxins of our commerce,transportation, and waste, and rushed in flash floods through our homes and businesses.So we "chartered" our streets, as William Blake put it, and built culverts and storm drainsand subterranean pipes and caves to hide and rid ourselves of what had once nourishedour crops. We wanted only the ordered, linear laminar flow of the liquid, not its unrulyand unpredictable turbulence. And we wanted the undesirable and shamefulconsequences of our actions to be sent underground, hushed up--even, in the case of theEast German government, to the extent that the law declaring certain environmental"sacrifices" a state secret was

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a state secret.In Senftenberg, as a remarkable German exhibit shows, the great open-cast lignitemines that fuelled the Third Reich and the GDR had created the ultimate combination of secrecy and threat. Local plumes of toxic industrial wastes, often from unmarked andconcealed sites, were waiting for the water-table, artificially lowered by mine pumping, torecharge itself and rise to where they could be carried away. The town of Senftenbergand its accompanying villages such as Buchwalde, lay directly in the path of the toxins,which would begin to rise in flooding throughout the area in about 2020. The Germanpast, it seems, never ceases to haunt its present. As the exhibit text puts it, chillingly, theonly "solution" that seemed to offer itself was the complete depopulation of Senftenberg,and the "Auswanderung" or deportation of the 1,000,000 inhabitants of the area as a

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