16.3 Ecosystems Management

243

that the collapse was unwanted). But if it is endogenous, then it is far from clear to

what extent it could be managed.

In any case, the laborious bioinfotheoretic analysis of time series of leading indi-

cators is scarcely necessary to give advance warning of ecosystem collapse. In most

cases it is sufficiently apparent. Already in 1931 Spengler could remark, “Die Mech-

anisierung der Welt ist in ein Stadium gefährlichsten Ueberspannung eingetreten.

Das Bild der Erde mit ihren Pflanzen, Tieren und Menschen hat sich verändert. In

wenigen Jahrzehnten sind die meisten grossen Wälder verschwunden, in Zeitungspa-

pier verwandelt worden und damit Veränderungen des Klimas eingetreten, welche

die Landwirtschaft ganzer Bevölkerungen bedrohen; unzählige Tierarten sind wie

der Büffel ganz oder fast ganz ausgerottet...”. Thirty years later the artist C. F. Tunni-

cliffe wrote, regarding the variety of wildlife in Asia, “All this [geographical] variety

maintains a corresponding variety of wildlife, except in those places where humans

are dominant. Thus, in India, the lion and the rhinoceros are reduced to a remnant,

the Mongolian wild horse will soon be extinct, if it is not already so, and the dugong

has been hunted to a shadow of its former numbers. Soon, unless man becomes sud-

denly more intelligent, we shall have to face the fact that where he lives and works,

animal life will continue to suffer, and where he is in complete control the animals

must disappear completely”. ¹⁶ It was not necessary to analyse time series of leading

indicators to reach these conclusions. Man’s dominance by deploying machinery is

now almost complete. ¹⁷

In some cases, ecosystem collapse has been managed as the result of a deliberate

trade-off. An example is the fate of the Aral Sea, before 1960 the world’s fourth

largest inland water body, which has almost completely disappeared. It has been

called the greatest man-made ecological catastrophe the world has known. To recall:

the water of the Aral Sea is mainly provided by the Amu Darya (the Oxus of antiquity)

and Syr Darya Rivers, and is lost by evaporation (about 60 kmcubed³ per annum). The

sea was the focus of a thriving fishing industry (about 40 kt per annum). These large

rivers and their tributaries were already being used to a certain extent for irrigation;

some canals had been constructed in the eighteenth century, and by 1960 about 4.5

million ha were being cultivated using irrigation, requiring about 60 kmcubed³ of water

per annum. At that epoch, the decision was made (essentially by the central Soviet

planning authorities) to vastly expand agriculture in the region. The irrigated area,

and the amount of water drawn off, were roughly doubled—by 1980, in effect, the

entire volume of the two big rivers was being diverted to irrigation, via a network

of about 30,000 km of canals and over a hundred dams and reservoirs. Meanwhile

the population also doubled, from about 14 to about 27 million during that interval.

The consequences for the Aral Sea and the river deltas were already foreseen by

the Moscow Hydroproject Institute in the 1960s; instead of fish (commercial fishing

16 Even more stark is “If one looks around, the world appears like an anthill where its inhabitants

have lost all sense of direction. They run aimlessly about, chop each other to pieces, foul their nest,

attack their young, spend tremendous energies in building artifices that are either abandoned when

completed, or when maintained, cause more disruption than was visible before, and so on” (Foerster

(1972).

17 Ramsden (2022).