The conservation establishment preaches stability as gospel. Protect the pristine, fence off the remnants, maintain the status quo is the comfortable orthodoxy that dominates environmental policy.
Park rangers patrol boundaries, scientists catalogue species in static inventories, and bureaucrats draft management plans designed to freeze landscapes in amber. In Australia, this also means fixing on some pre-1788 ideal, the time before Europeans arrived.
The mythology insists that human interference equals ecological destruction, that the best conservation is hands-off conservation.
But ecosystems are not museum exhibits. They are dynamic, pulsing networks shaped by millennia of disturbance from fire, flood, windstorms, grazing, drought and even the odd meteor strike.
The very biodiversity we seek to protect was forged in chaos, not serenity. Real ecological vitality thrives on disruption, not on the artificial life support of preservation mandates.
Counterpoint
The seductive lie is that nature exists in perfect balance, waiting to be disturbed by careless humans.
This fairy tale underwrites a massive industry of environmental control through agencies that budget for stability, scientists who study equilibrium, and activists who rage against any change to their preferred baseline. The preservationist’s Bible teaches that every fire is a catastrophe, every species shift a crisis, and every management intervention a violation of natural law.
This is ecological nostalgia dressed as science.
The truth is that pristine wilderness” never existed. What we call natural landscapes are artifacts of constant upheaval—prairies maintained by fire and bison, forests shaped by storms and disease, wetlands carved by floods and droughts.
The attempt to preserve static snapshots of dynamic systems is not conservation; it’s embalming. We create ecological museums where diversity slowly suffocates under the weight of our good intentions.
Thought Challenges
Examine your local conservation areas. Map the management strategies for local nature. Are they designed to maintain a fixed state or accommodate natural cycles of disturbance? Challenge managers about their baselines for what “pristine” condition are they trying to preserve, and when did it supposedly exist? Document what happens in areas managed for stability versus those left to natural disturbance cycles.
Visit two comparable ecosystems… one heavily managed for preservation, another that experiences regular natural disturbance. Count species, observe ecosystem processes, and note signs of ecological vitality versus stagnation. Question the underlying assumptions. Is the goal to maintain today’s species composition forever, or to sustain the processes that create and maintain biodiversity over time?
Closing Reflection
Nature’s resilience lies in change. The ecosystems we most value were sculpted by catastrophe, renewed by disruption, and enriched by instability.
Conservation that fears disturbance is conservation that fears life itself. Embrace the burn, welcome the flood, trust the process of creative destruction.
Stability is death by another name. Let chaos do its ancient work.
Evidence Support
Connell, J. H. (1978). Diversity in tropical rain forests and coral reefs. Science, 199(4335), 1302–1310.
TL;DR… Many communities rarely, if ever, reach a stable equilibrium state and that species diversity tends to peak under intermediate levels of disturbance, not under complete stability or constant catastrophe. Using tropical rainforests and coral reefs, Connell proposed the Intermediate Disturbance Hypothesis (IDH): low disturbance allows competitive dominants to exclude others, whereas very high disturbance eliminates many species; intermediate disturbance maintains coexistence and high richness.
Relevance to the insight… This paper directly undercuts the museum exhibit view of ecosystems by framing high biodiversity as a product of ongoing disturbance, rather than of long‑term stability. It offers a canonical, widely cited theoretical foundation for the claim that ecological vitality is often forged in chaos, not serenity, and that managing solely for stability can erode the processes that maintain diversity.
Briske, D. D., Fuhlendorf, S. D., & Smeins, F. E. (2003). Vegetation dynamics on rangelands: a critique of the current paradigms. Journal of Applied Ecology, 601-614.
TL;DR… Synthesises nonequilibrium ecology and resilience theory, showing that many rangeland systems are shaped by variable rainfall, grazing, and episodic disturbances, with multiple possible stable states rather than a single equilibrium. They argue that traditional management assumed linear succession back to a climax state after disturbance, but empirical work reveals strong roles for disturbance, spatial heterogeneity, thresholds, and alternative attractors.
Relevance to the insight… This work formalises the critique that conservation based on a single historical pristine baseline misrepresents how these systems actually function. It supports your argument that management aiming to freeze landscapes (e.g., fixed successional endpoints, suppression of variability) conflicts with the reality of disturbance‑driven dynamics and resilience; effective conservation must work with, not against, those dynamics.
Turner, M. G., & Seidl, R. (2023). Novel disturbance regimes and ecological responses. Annual Review of Ecology, Evolution, and Systematics, 54, 63–83.
TL;DR… This review examines how ecosystems respond when disturbance regimes (frequency, intensity, type, spatial pattern) shift beyond historical ranges of variation. It indicates that many systems possess robust response mechanisms that can buffer change, but that crossing thresholds in disturbance regimes can trigger organisational or regime shifts, creating novel ecosystems when disturbance exceeds adaptive capacities.
Relevance to the insight… The paper strongly reinforces the idea that disturbance is fundamental to ecosystem structure and function, and that a “static snapshot” view is ecologically misleading. At the same time, it tempers a simplistic “more disruption is always good” stance by showing that when disturbance regimes become too novel or intense, resilience can fail, and conservation goals may be compromised—supporting a nuanced dance with disturbance rather than unbounded disruption.
Puig‑Gironès, R., Brotons, L., Herrando, S., & Pausas, J. G. (2025). The use of fire to preserve biodiversity under novel fire regimes. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 380(1905), Article 20240312.
TL;DR… This paper synthesises global evidence on using fire to conserve biodiversity under changing, often more severe or altered, fire regimes. It concludes that prescribed burning aimed solely at hazard reduction can harm biodiversity, and proposes a decision framework emphasising clear objectives, explicit learning, and aligning fire management with the needs of fire‑adapted biota and landscape processes.
Relevance to the insight… The authors treat fire not only as a threat but as a tool for restoring ecological processes (e.g., controlling shrub encroachment, maintaining open habitats), illustrating “conservation through disturbance” when carefully aligned with system history and organism traits. At the same time, they warn that too‑frequent or poorly designed burning regimes can erode biodiversity, aligning with your insistence that we must respect disturbance as an ecological architect without turning it into a blunt, technocratic instrument.
Pastro, L. A., Dickman, C. R., & Letnic, M. (2011). Burning for biodiversity or burning biodiversity? Prescribed burn vs. wildfire in a fire‑prone region. Ecological Applications, 21(8), 3238–3253.
TL;DR… In arid Australian hummock grasslands, the authors used a before–after control–impact design to compare biodiversity responses of plants, mammals, and lizards to small patchy prescribed burns and a larger wildfire. They found that effects of fire on alpha and beta diversity were strongly taxon‑dependent and often inconsistent with expectations from the Intermediate Disturbance and Patch Mosaic Burning hypotheses, with stochastic events like rainfall exerting major influence.
Relevance to the insight… This paper shows that simply adding disturbance (e.g., prescribed burns for “biodiversity”) does not mechanically deliver positive outcomes; responses vary by taxon, scale, and context. It supports your critique of formulaic, control‑oriented management plans by highlighting that disturbance is central, but its conservation value depends on how it interacts with system‑specific dynamics, not on generic stability‑oriented prescriptions.