The Persistence of a Popular Environmental Meme

There are certain tropes that linger in the public imagination long after they've been discredited. Such is the case with the "balance of nature." In 2009, the ecologist John Kricher wrote a book about this "enduring myth," and years before that, another ecologist, Daniel Botkin, published his seminal Discordant Harmonies in 1990, which I think was the first mainstream book "to challenge the then dominant view that nature remained constant over time unless disturbed by human influence." The shelf life of this outdated ecological concept rankles Botkin, who last year wrote: