Staff Book and Media Recommendations

Patrick Douglas is a Library Technician at the University of Central Oklahoma.

The Silver Lining: The Benefits of Natural Disasters

Seth R. Reice

We naturally think of earthquakes, forest fires, and floods as disastrous occurrences, deliverers of unnecessary death and destruction that render portions of the world nearly uninhabitable. Seth R. Reice's book The Silver Lining: The Benefits of Natural Disasters contests that popular thought. Rather than "natural disasters," Reice refers to these events as "disturbance ecology," since they are always temporary and are "an important part of the dynamics of an ecosystem."

Ecosystems, claims Reice, are ever-changing environmental niches whose alteration and even destruction are essential to the biological diversity of the planet as a whole. The physical and chemical makeup of the ecosystem determines the range of species that can live within it. Many more species can live in a given ecosystem than actually do, but a species must be able to get there, survive there, and reproduce there in order to be a long-term part of that niche. Ecological disturbances change the environmental conditions of an ecosystem and therefore create the opportunity for new species to occupy it, often bringing different species into close contact that had before been kept apart from one another.

This is a radical departure from the long-held equilibrium model, which states that populations of ecosystems fluctuate for a time but eventually find a permanent balance, and the species that are the most suited to that habitat will be the inhabitants until the next depopulating disaster. Reice contends that equilibrium models "presume a constant environment and exclude disturbances as any other environmental fluctuations." His example is the Yellowstone forest fires, in which years of fire suppression created an undergrowth that choked out some species of vegetation. The thickly wooded forest burned more rapidly and more intensely than it would have, causing much more destruction than it would have had it been left alone. The fires, however, opened up the forest floor, and many tree species germinated for the first time in decades.

The Silver Lining doesn't exactly undo modern ecology, but it presents a much different way to perceive it. Rather than thinking of an ecosystem as a temporary thing that will one day be replaced by another ecosystem, we should view it as a nearly permanent but ever-changing piece of a whole, constantly expanding and contracting, dividing and combining. Reice not only uses well-reasoned arguments to support his line of thinking, but he also defines standard terminology and introduces new vocabulary, as well as give real-life examples, many of them first-hand. The Silver Lining is a well-conceived text that many will find enlightening and is a must-read for anyone considering a career in ecology.

Reviewed March 2010