Grieving for ecosystems

I had a dream that there was a hillside covered with rainforest. In the dream, Americans came in and cut down the rainforest to make room for new modern apartment buildings. They did it overnight, so suddenly, and then in the morning the forest was gone. I was overwhelmed with grief that something so precious had been destroyed beyond repair, and was gone forever. It's the same way I have felt when someone close to me has died, the feeling that something irreversible has happened. In the dream, I wandered through the stumps on the hillside, and finally found a few scattered old growth trees - huge old eucalypts more than an armspan wide. This did nothing for my grief, though, because the forest, the living system they had been a part of, was still dead. If someone wonderful had died, and someone said, no, look, the rest of the body is gone, but we've still preserved some lung tissue in a Petri dish, it wouldn’t comfort me. The point was that the forest was gone, irrevocably. I woke up still feeling the grief.

An ecosystem cannot be brought back. Individual species can find new ways to survive, as peregrine falcons have done in the “canyons” of modern cities, but the complex interdependence of an ecosystem, once destroyed, cannot be put back together. What took hundreds of thousands or millions of years to develop, with its intricate web of interrelationships, cannot be put back together by human action, it can only be destroyed by it. This now seems to be our species’ role in the ecosystems of the world. But we are also a species who can grieve these losses, foresee them, and try to stop them. Where I live used to be covered with rainforest or dry eucalypt forest a century ago, and though there are many trees around, there is no more forest. My dream was a dream of this place, where I live. So what can I do now to stop this from happening in other parts of Queensland? Conservation shouldn’t be about individual species, it should be about ecosystems. Can we develop an ethos in which ecosystems have as much right to exist and live as do people?

Australian Rainforest Conservation
Australian Wildlife Conservation
Community Biodiversity Network
Rainforest Action Network