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Abstract:
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"The New Ecology has attacked traditional ecological thought (what I will for convenience call 'The Old Ecology') for emphasizing constancy, stasis, and equilibrium in describing ecological systems, and for under-emphasizing the role of change, disturbance, and dynamism. I tell the above anecdote because it occurs to me that the readiness of ecologists to embrace equilibrium theories and to find constancy in ecological events may have deep-perhaps even nonrational-sources. Equilibrium theories may not be empirical theories at all, but rather may represent pre-theoretical assumptions, which are perhaps rooted in a deep, psychological need for stability in the face of threatening changes. Ecologists, too, are affected by psychological needs. If my speculations about the depth of the Western commitment to stability have any merit, we might acknowledge that we have no choice but to find some level or type of stability. The intellectual question then becomes one of how to characterize stability and how to reconcile it with the empirically obvious change we experience everywhere."
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