Or if the ecosystem should happen not to improve, at least it would stay constant indefinitely. By the time we headed back to Berkeley, the pillars of my ecological understanding had been shaken. In the younger first and second terraces away from the ocean, the redwood and Douglas fir forest loomed up around us. Over the next several weeks, letters were exchanged, and finally, about four months after the field trip, a letter came from Hans saying he was unaware of such a concept as steadily improving ecosystems. There was little comfort in the fact that I had had it half right.
Fundamentalism sometimes dies hard.
Staring into a soil pit dug into the fourth terrace, I could sympathize with the churchmen who refused to look through Galileo's telescope. Even there, with the evidence before me, I protested, saying that good farming can improve the soil. He thought it would be difficult to improve a good virgin Iowa prairie soil by management techniques, except perhaps by applying nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium. This was the beginning of an important lesson for me. Nature may or may not share human interests.