Can nature heal itself?

The record of past recoveries shows the capacity is real even where it is slow

Question: Can nature heal itself?
Position1 of 3›: Yes, nature can heal itself
Argument‹2 of 2: The record of past recoveries shows the capacity is real even where it is slow

The argument

A second argument offered for this position appeals to what is known of the deep past. Proponents note that the biosphere has passed through episodes in which a very large share of living things disappeared, and that what followed each of them was not permanent impoverishment but the rebuilding of diversity and of the functions an ecosystem performs. The fossil record, on their reading, is a record of recovery as much as of loss, and that recovery was accomplished with no management of any kind. The argument identifies the mechanism as ecological opportunity. A function left unperformed is an opening, and surviving lineages diversify into it: something comes to eat what is uneaten, to decompose what is undecomposed, to occupy the space that has been vacated. Proponents stress that this is not restoration of what was lost. The organisms that come to fill the roles are generally different from those which held them before, and the system that results is a new one. Their claim concerns function rather than identity, that a working biosphere reassembles itself, and they argue this is the sense in which healing is the right word for it. Holders of the view accept the obvious objection and say that it concerns humans rather than nature. Recovery on this scale is slow, far slower than any human horizon, so it offers no comfort to anyone alive and no reason to go on causing damage. But the question asked is whether nature can heal itself, and proponents argue that the record answers it, since the capacity exists and has been exercised under conditions far more severe than the present. That the timescale is inconvenient for us is a fact about our position within it rather than evidence that the capacity is absent.

Premises

[P1]The biosphere has previously passed through episodes in which a very large share of living things was lost. [P2] Diversity and ecological function were rebuilt after those episodes with no management, as surviving lineages diversified into the roles left unoccupied. [P3] That rebuilding produced a working system composed largely of different organisms, so the recovery was of function rather than of identity. [C] Nature possesses a demonstrated capacity to heal itself, even though the timescale on which it does so is far longer than a human one.

Counter-arguments

Opponents argue that an answer which concedes the timescale has conceded the question. Asking whether nature can heal itself is, in context, asking whether the living world people depend on will recover, and a capacity exercised over spans no person or society will witness does not bear on that. They also dispute the analogy, since past episodes were shocks followed by long quiet periods, whereas present pressures are continuous and still intensifying, so the recovery phase the argument relies on has not begun and may not. Several add that treating function rather than identity as the measure of healing sets a standard so low that almost any outcome counts.

Rejecting the premises

[Rejecting P3] Treating the recovery of function rather than of identity as healing sets a standard low enough that almost any surviving assemblage would satisfy it. [Rejecting C] Past episodes were shocks followed by long periods without them, whereas present pressures are continuous, so the conclusion generalises from conditions that do not obtain.