Nematodes, which include groundworms as shown above, account for about 80 per cent of the animals on earth. They are constantly at work changing things.

Published in the Gananoque Reporter

by Cameron Smith

One of the most cherished thoughts that dominated the past century was that balance is possible. That through proper management, equilibrium can be found. It’s a notion based on a mechanistic view of the universe, and it stems from the stunning successes achieved over the past 300 years in mathematics and physics.

But balance beyond the laboratory or the mathematician’s blackboard is impossible. We live in a world that is constantly changing and monumentally complex. If there is one constant in life, it is change, and there are so many agents of change, it’s impossible to accurately track where they will take us.

There are countless examples. To take a very simple instance, the killing of wolves in the western United States resulted in the loss of trout in a river. With the wolves gone, elk felt safe enough to leave high ground to browse on willows along the river banks. Without the willows, soil eroded into the river and covered spawning beds in silt. With spawning beds buried, trout declined.

Ah yes, you say, but that’s because things were put out of balance by killing the wolves. But yet, think of this: At any one point in time, there are countless other changes naturally occurring, and each one is altering an existing situation. In a teaspoon of soil there can be a billion microbes. The ants of the world, taken together, weigh about as much as the entire human population. Nematode worms, with millions of species, make up four fifths of all the animals on Earth. They’re all busy at work changing things and responding to changes. We have no idea how many ripple effects a change can produce.

Our world has so many unknowns — even unknowns that we don’t know exist: unknown unknowns — that we have no way of accurately predicting outcomes.

What we do know is this: We humans, and the world we live in, are incredibly adaptive. We can accommodate to change. But we run into difficulties when the changes are too big, or come too fast. When this happens we have to rely primarily on resilience.

And resilience is what we need right now, because climate change is bringing huge challenges, and bringing them very quickly.

Here in the Thousand Islands, we have a greater opportunity than most to moderate the effects of climate change. We live in the middle of a great pathway of connected ecosystems that stretches from the northern boreal forest, through Algonquin Park, across the St. Lawrence River to Adirondack State Park in the United States, and down the Appalachians to Georgia. It can be a continental bulwark of resilience.

Our area is the hourglass bottleneck, the most vulnerable part, of this pathway. Maintaining resilience here will strengthen the entire pathway. We can do it by making sure forests and wetlands remain connected, and that biodiversity flourishes.

It’s the challenge of our lifetime.