Jiggy Lloyd on how the scientific understanding of ecology has been applied to other fields such as the finance sector
After the onset of the 2008 financial crisis, the Bank of England took advice from ecologists. For me, this was a milestone event in the history of a discipline that, more than any other, recognises the connected nature of the world. This interconnectedness lies at the heart of so many of the big issues faced by environment and sustainability professionals.
A history lesson
Ecology is usually considered a relatively new science that takes a holistic approach to the environment, and is often cited as a late 20th century phenomenon. The term, which comes from "oecology", was actually coined in the 19th century by the German biologist Ernst Haeckel, although others did more to advance the discipline as we know it today.
But ecology has a richer history, which goes back to the natural philosophers of ancient Greece. It was probably the botanist Theophrastus, if not his tutor Aristotle, who was the first to observe and define the ways in which plants respond to environmental factors, such as climate and soil. The natural philosophers were also preoccupied with the ordering of nature; and it was this thinking that continued into the Middle Ages and Tudor times, with a focus on the "Great chain of being" - the hierarchy that began with God and descended via archangels and "man" to animals and plants, and finally to minerals and stones.
The 17th century cleric and naturalist John Ray was an exponent of the way in which nature worked as a whole; while Mark Catesby, who is best known for his wildlife illustrations, used his travel to the "New World" and membership of the Royal Society to draw attention to associations between species.
The Enlightenment and the 19th century were also preoccupied with the ordering and classification of nature, a process that sometimes helped but often hindered appreciation of its interdependence. However, the work of naturalist and explorer Alexander von Humboldt centred on the concepts of unity and interdependence, and it is not surprising that he is often cited as the father of modern ecology. He was tutored by followers of the philosopher Immanuel Kant, who himself resisted the tendency to focus on classification and separation. Von Humboldt travelled extensively in Europe and South America, collecting specimens, measuring temperature and air pressure, and observing the variations in vegetation that occurred with physical changes. Most of von Humboldt's career was devoted to publicising his view of nature as "unity in diversity, and of connection resemblance and order, among created things most dissimilar in their form, one fair harmonious whole".
Charles Darwin cited von Humboldt as the major influence on his life, and an appreciation of the interlinked nature of the universe is evident in On the origin of species. But, while not belittling the influence of Darwin or of his fellow theorist Alfred Wallace, it is the case that they focused largely on competition as the force that drove evolution; while environmental selection was implicit in their concept of "struggle for life", it received less attention.
The Reverend Gilbert White, in contrast to von Humboldt, espoused no grand theories and travelled little beyond his parish in Kent. However, his record of the natural history of Selborne - with its observations on the interplay of weather, habitat and species - is no less remarkable for its domesticity. White's musings on the constancy of the swift population from one year to next may appear particularly relevant when we come to consider the Bank of England.
From the second half of the 19th century onwards, the field of natural sciences grew to the extent that it was increasingly difficult for one individual to embrace it all. There was, therefore, a tendency to specialisation - a hazard that remains to this day. Science became professional, but it was largely the "traditional" disciplines of botany, zoology and geology that flourished; "natural history" was relegated to the status of hobby. Although this was crucial to the development of the popular conservation and environmental movements (about which more in a future article), the study of the functions of nature has perhaps received less attention than it deserved.
Nevertheless, there were advances and - at the risk of oversimplification - five names are particularly worth noting.
Danish botanist Eugen Warming is often cited as the man responsible for establishing ecology as a scientific discipline. His work on plant community responses to their environment was notable at the time, and had a significant influence on both Henry Cowles and Frederic Clements. Working in the US, these men made significant advances in the understanding of plant succession, which in turn became the basis for the emerging profession of conservation management.
Clements' theory of climax vegetation likened the relationship between the species in a plant community to that between an animal and its organs; it was not without critics at the time, but his metaphor is interesting for its parallel with that used in the 1970s by James Lovelock in the Gaia hypothesis, which asserts that the Earth is a self-regulating complex system.
Warming also inspired Arthur Tansley, who was instrumental in establishing ecology in the UK in the first part of the 20th century. Tansley also introduced the term ecosystem and hence formalised the view that organisms cannot be separated from their physical environments. At the same time, Charles Elton was applying scientific method to the study of animals in the natural world. His work on food chains and the ecological niche laid the base for our current understanding of population dynamics. His work had practical applications in his lifetime, particularly combating invasive species; however, it also - more unusually - provides the link to those ecologists who advised the Bank of England.
The global financial meltdown
In the 1970s, an Australian theoretical physicist called Robert May applied his expertise and his interest in environmental issues to challenge the then widely held view that diversity and complexity in ecosystems made them more resilient to "perturbations" or disturbance. His mathematical modelling of food chains demonstrated that the "balance of nature", a popular concept among ecologists in the 1960s, was somewhat illusory and that too much complexity could lead to instability.
After the financial crash in 2008, May, by now a former UK chief government scientist, presented Mervyn King, the then governor of the Bank of England, with his model of the banking ecosystem. In this model, the nodes - which had represented species in the ecological version - represented the banks; the links between nodes were activities such as interbank lending. May and his team used their model to demonstrate how the banks' extreme vulnerability to those events that started with the collapse of Lehman Brothers in the US had come about.
The model was so effective in explaining the sources of risk and vulnerability in banking, revealing the folly of the financial sector's belief in a general equilibrium and exposing the particular risks associated with the market for complex derivatives, that it has led to a lasting cooperation between the two disciplines. Senior staff in the bank now include one of May's former students; and measures in the current package of banking reform - for example, the requirement for higher capital reserves to combat instability - can be traced to advice from the ecologists.
The American scientist Jared Diamond has argued: "Globalisation makes it impossible for modern societies to collapse in isolation." When the environmentalist went to press, both the Greek financial crisis and the spread of international terrorism remained major issues in the news. So as you ponder the implications of all this interconnectedness, be thankful for those who have advanced our understanding of a fact fundamental to the values of the environmental profession, and which is now recognised elsewhere: the world and its inhabitants are all interlinked.
