In the human world, population growth combined with available resources and functioning organizational structures = growth of the built environment and a general improvement in the standard of living. Take away or seriously degrade one or more of those factors and you have a civilization unable to adapt to change, unable to grow and not capable of improving the standard of living.
The finding that turnover has slowed rather than accelerated is one of those results that makes more sense the longer you sit with it. If colonization requires intact dispersal networks, viable propagule sources, and suitable microsite conditions, then a system that has been degraded on all three fronts does not accelerate toward a new state — it stalls in a diminished one. The forest die-off literature shows something analogous: drought-killed forests do not reorganize into new assemblages, they get stuck in shrubland or grass because the seed sources, mycorrhizal networks, and soil conditions that recruitment requires have been eliminated by the same disturbance that killed the canopy. About 79% of documented die-offs show no recovery toward the pre-disturbance state within monitoring timeframes.
The systems question underneath is the same we see across the board: (at what point) does degradation destroy the capacity for ecological response?
In the human world, population growth combined with available resources and functioning organizational structures = growth of the built environment and a general improvement in the standard of living. Take away or seriously degrade one or more of those factors and you have a civilization unable to adapt to change, unable to grow and not capable of improving the standard of living.
The finding that turnover has slowed rather than accelerated is one of those results that makes more sense the longer you sit with it. If colonization requires intact dispersal networks, viable propagule sources, and suitable microsite conditions, then a system that has been degraded on all three fronts does not accelerate toward a new state — it stalls in a diminished one. The forest die-off literature shows something analogous: drought-killed forests do not reorganize into new assemblages, they get stuck in shrubland or grass because the seed sources, mycorrhizal networks, and soil conditions that recruitment requires have been eliminated by the same disturbance that killed the canopy. About 79% of documented die-offs show no recovery toward the pre-disturbance state within monitoring timeframes.
The systems question underneath is the same we see across the board: (at what point) does degradation destroy the capacity for ecological response?