Deliberate Disturbance
The health and productivity of soils, livestock, plants, landscapes, ecology, and people is guided and shaped by deliberate disturbance — deliberate in the sense that the choice to implement a specific disturbance is a considered, conscious and intentional one. A choice that gets made as a subconscious pattern of habit, indoctrination, or dogma is not a deliberate choice. To be good stewards of the landscape, we need to make mindful choices of the disturbances we impose.
All active management decisions and actions result in imposing a disturbance, whether that be grazing livestock, pruning a tree, moving a fence, locating a water trough, adding a soil amendment, using a wormer, adding fertilizer, spraying a pesticide, or tilling the soil.
Disturbance is a reset action that can lead to greater soil and ecosystem health and productivity when used wisely. And disturbance can also reset soil and ecosystem health backward when not used wisely.
Moving Out of Equilibrium to Improve the Ecosystem
Reset actions and wise disturbance are a foundational requirement to trigger optimal health and performance outcomes and are inherent in natural ecosystem function. When a thermodynamic system remains in equilibrium, there is no output of energy or growth. If we desire for an ecosystem to evolve, to grow, to expand its carrying capacity and its biological diversity, then there is a requirement for stewardship decisions to move things temporarily out of equilibrium.
Deliberate disturbance in an ecosystem is the equivalent of pushing a pendulum. Without a push, eventually a pendulum stops moving and there is no further energy output. A slight touch to reset it will get it moving again, and the energy released from the back-and-forth oscillation is cumulative and much greater than the energy applied to get it restarted. A pendulum with no movement is a pendulum at equilibrium. A natural ecosystem at equilibrium, with no disturbances to reset it, is static and begins to decline.
Any specific disturbance is not inherently good or bad. The question to be determined is if the particular disturbance serves as a beneficial reset action in a particular context. When a reset action is applied, does it lead to greater ecosystem health and function in a reasonable timeline? A reset action that is very valuable in one context may be detrimental in another. A reset action that is needed only once in one context might be needed routinely in another.
A volcano is a reset action that can produce very positive ecosystem outcomes over a decades-long time period. A large bison herd eating every green leaf to the ground for weeks at a time is a reset action that appears to have negative consequences in the short term but is a long-term net positive. Pruning a vine or tree of a large percentage of its total biomass might appear to some as a major short-term negative, but we know that the disequilibrium this creates leads to much greater productivity.
Thinking about deliberately creating productive disequilibrium and deliberate reset actions that fit our particular context provides us with a first-principles framework such that we can lose all manner of dogma and indoctrination in our thinking. This approach is invaluable, for we have a lot of dogma to overcome around the use and value of some types of disturbance.
