Conclusions

Abstract

Science is often portrayed as an incremental process of building an edifice of knowledge, brick by brick. The benefits of this approach are said to accrue from the precision and rigor that comes from studying a carefully chosen set of variables at small spatial scales. Robert Paine argues that the understanding of ecological systems at large scales can be built this way, noting, “Even the smallest bricks, if solid enough, can be used to construct the largest building.” But this analogy and, by extension, this way of doing science, which served us adequately in the twentieth century, doesn’t hold up when we try to make sense of rapidly changing ecological systems that are increasingly intertwined with complex human behaviors. The problem is no longer how large we can make the building, but rather how quickly it can be made, and even whether a building is really what we need to bring together the growing body of scientific understanding of the world. The brick-by-brick approach would be fine if we had limitless time to build ecological understanding, but it is not scaled to the dimensions of time in which we need answers right now. The foundation of ecology — the natural world and its networked relationships — is collapsing faster than bricklayers can build an understanding of it.