Can Ecosystems Malfunction?
My new essay in Aeon on the hidden philosophy behind "ecosystem function"
I have a new essay out today in Aeon. It’s about a word that most ecologists use without thinking much about it: function.
We say the Amazon “functions” as a carbon sink. We say wetlands “function” to filter water. We say coral reefs are losing their ability to “function.” The language is so embedded in how we talk about the environment that it barely registers as a choice. But it is a choice, and it carries assumptions that deserve scrutiny.
The essay traces how “ecosystem function” became the dominant frame for conservation science, starting with the biodiversity-and-ecosystem-function research agenda of the 1990s and scaling up through the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment and the ecosystem services framework. I look at the philosophy behind the word (what does it actually mean to say something has a function?) and argue that ecosystems, unlike hearts or chloroplasts, were not shaped by natural selection as cohesive units. They don’t reproduce. Their boundaries are impermanent. They have no intrinsic goals.
The consequence is not that ecosystems can never malfunction. They can. But only when we appropriate them for our own purposes. If we designate a wetland as a water filtration system, a disruption in its filtering capacity is a genuine malfunction. If we manage a forest for carbon sequestration, a decline in storage is a real failure. In these cases, the selected effects framework still applies, but the selecting agent is us, not natural selection. The anthropocentric commitment is ineliminable. You cannot coherently talk about ecosystem malfunction without specifying whose purposes are at stake.
This is not a case against environmentalism. I am an environmentalist. I am concerned about the Amazon, about coral reefs, about the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation. The essay is a case for intellectual honesty: when we say an ecosystem is “breaking down,” the standard it’s failing to meet is ours. Our needs, our ethics, our futures. Owning that is harder than pretending the purposes belong to nature itself, but it makes for stronger environmental arguments in the long run.
The piece draws on interviews with Peter Calow (founding co-editor of Functional Ecology) and David Tilman, and on my own path through philosophy of science as a graduate student in the late 1990s.
Read the full essay at Aeon: Can ecosystems malfunction?