Scaled

Greg Martin

Liberty Wildlife Contributor

The world exists by degrees.

A day is a lifetime for a fly with an age-span measured in hours. A three-pound raptor is practically its own ecosystem to the pinhead-sized feather mites calling it home. The square meter of soil beneath your feet might hold a subterranean city worthy, in miniature at least, of any human metropolis.

We tend to view ourselves as the physical measuring stick with which we gauge the worthiness of our surroundings, but the reality is that practically every bit of air, earth, water, flesh, and bone, is teeming with an array of lifeforms, from the microbial level on up. We are never really alone. There’s always something underway, some process that’s either invisible or imperceptible … or that’s waiting there to be noticed and appreciated if we stop to take a look. Pigeons in your local park aren’t loitering; they’re working, cleaning up organic refuse and keeping the urban landscape far tidier than it would otherwise be.

Unsung armies of ants, far from acting as the bane of picnics and kitchens, aerate the soil and clear out the dead and decaying matter that nature (or us) leaves behind. Worms wriggle their way toward the same purpose; just as meaningfully, the perpetual, lethal dance between predator and prey keeps populations balanced, letting the wild machine hum on with long-honed precision.

Caretaker animals aren’t the most glamorous. Vultures do themselves no favors by vomiting rotten meat at the first sign of lethal danger or slight annoyance. Yet they play one of the most important parts in nature’s organization, that of undertaker: death may be a natural precondition to fuel new life, but it needs some help along the way. Everything has its purpose. Ladybugs are adorable, but they also work vigorously (and viciously) to keep plants safe from marauding pests. Butterflies, moths, and bees act as pollinators while animals of all stripes spread seeds throughout the world. Maintenance is never the most flashy of jobs, but it is the most critical, because any system, natural or otherwise, will break down if not sustained. As the planet’s apex species, we have the capacity to help, hinder, or leave the system be. We typically do all three, sometimes in the course of a heartbeat and often without giving it thought one way or the other.

We’ve amply demonstrated our ability to devastate environments, sometimes accidentally, sometimes with cold intent. We’ve also proven that we have the capacity to curb our worst impacts, to neutralize ourselves, and sometimes even to add positively to the natural cycles around us. Worms engaged in composting have no capacity or need to philosophize about what they’re doing; they simply serve their role. We don’t have the luxury to be as single-minded as the dragonfly lurking by the pond, keeping the mosquitos at bay; all the same, we share a responsibility to take ecological health as seriously as they do. If we do much more damage, we can also have a significantly greater impact on environmental wellbeing as a whole. We can take a lesson from the things all around us, and from their patterns of cycles within cycles, seeing where the system is out of whack, and where and how we might fix it.

In the end, it’s not the beauty of a Red-tailed Hawk or the sheer grandeur of a Golden Eagle that provide them with worth; it’s the purpose they serve as natural checks on prey species populations. It’s the fact that leftovers from a successful hunt provide fuel for the ants, the worms, the scavengers big and small, the soil itself: the unintended cooperation of a host of organisms keeps the whole thing running. The world is maintained through billions upon billions of interlocking, living, breathing gears. It’s inevitable that we as human beings, with the size of our population and the scale of our ecological footprint, knock a few out of whack (or a few thousand, or a few million…). What matters is how we respond to it: how, and whether, we fill the gaps.