In recent years, we’ve experienced societal disruptions ranging from political and climate tumult to racial and pandemic reckoning. While experienced differently across communities, lessons learned in Carleton’s Arb make me hesitant to write-off the importance of disturbance altogether, instead asking how we differentiate between disruption that is important part of change versus that which is destructive.
Carleton’s prairies were restored to their biodiverse state from single-crop agricultural fields. While productive for those crop species, the simple system came at the cost of other processes we depend on such as nutrient and water cycling and pollination services. Removal of the crop was the first form of disturbance used to restore a more complex and functional species community. Once a diversity of prairie species was established, regular disturbance in the form of fire has maintained species diversity by removing dead plant matter and adding nutrients to the soil. Fire even synchronizes flowering within a plant species across the prairie, resulting in greater pollination and seed production for many prairie flowers (credits to Carleton Arb alums Stuart Wagenius ’91 and Jared Beck ’14 for demonstrating this).The mix of this biodiverse plant community and regular, moderate disturbance has enhanced the ecosystem. In this way, carefully applied disturbance may be the most important tool on the belt of a natural space manager. Knowing that, the Arb burn team works hard to manage the conditions and intensity of fires; a fire that is too intense could burn up the topsoil or spread much further than intended, risking degrading that healthy grassland.
Carleton’s Arb reminds me that disruption is often necessary for resilience-enhancing change to occur.Disruption of rhythms we’ve become accustomed to can be disorienting, just as walking through a charred prairie make you feel exposed when the day before it was covered in shoulder-height grasses and flowers. Yet, the new ideas that we entertain in moments of disturbance offer opportunities to grow in new ways. I hope that we, like the diversity of plants in Carleton’s prairies, grow from disturbances in ways that shift towards communities where many more different people flourish.
- Hannah Specht ’09, former Cole Student Naturalist, currently Research Scientist at University of Montana
Source : carleton.edu