Botkin, Daniel B.

The ecologist daniel b. botkin has worked and published on forest and wildlife ecology for many decades, and developed one of the first computer simulation models in ecology. His best known work is Discordant Harmonies: A New Ecology for the 21st Century (1990). Botkin forcefully argues against the myth of the balance of nature, which he claims has permeated environmental thinking since antiquity. Illustrated by many case studies, Botkin shows that this balance has never existed, and that “wherever we seek to find constancy we discover change.” It is not only impossible to preserve unchanging “natural” landscapes, but attempts to do so can actually have disastrous consequences. Thus at Tsavo National Park in Kenya, the elephant population first grew to completely destroy the existing tree ...