The free oxygen and low carbon dioxide of Earth's atmosphere are biological products of photosynthesis by bacteria, algae, and plants going back over a billion years; high-metabolism animals could not evolve until enough bacterial photosynthesis had oxygenated the atmosphere, so human existence depends on biology having reshaped the planet at a grand scale.

Because climate is always changing at every timescale and life has existed for three and a half billion years in a constantly changing environment, most species have evolved and adapted to change—many depending on it—so managing nature toward a fixed steady state actually works against species' needs.

Across 4000 years of writing, humans have used three great metaphors for nature—the balance of nature (gods made a perfect, balanced world), Mother Nature (nature as a living organic being), and nature as a machine (mechanical system with gears)—and all three lead back to the idea that nature has a single perfect, static state.

Exaggerated climate disaster claims will impose a future cost in lost scientific credibility: combined with rising religious and ideological opposition to science and declining science education, alarmism that proves inaccurate will lead to broader rejection of science.

Suppressing all fires (the 'Smokey the Bear' approach) in fire-adapted ecosystems like Western ponderosa pine and Southern California chaparral causes dangerous fuel accumulation: ponderosa pine forests became thickets of small stems and deadwood since the 1870s, producing fires so intense they destroy seed trees and soil fertility.

A complete map of every Santa Barbara fire since World War II showed that, despite both arsonists trying to ignite fires and firefighters trying to prevent them, the entire chaparral hillside burned once during exactly the 40-to-60-year natural cycle—implying that chaparral will burn when it is ready and cannot be made to burn before then.

Rather than seeking a single target population size, sound wildlife management defines an acceptable range; for the well-studied Isle Royale wolves, this means roughly 20 to 100 wolves—not letting the population drop below about 20 (to maintain reproduction probabilities) nor allowing thousands.

Thoreau, despite being claimed by both pro- and anti-environmentalists, was a practical man (surveyor, inventor, pencil-maker) who distinguished 'wildness' as a spiritual state of being from 'wilderness' as a physical place; after finding Mount Katahdin barren, he concluded he could never live in wilderness and preferred a mixture of the richest parts of nature and civilization.

The primary problem for endangered-species and habitat protection is gross underfunding of agencies like the National Park Service, US Fish and Wildlife Service, and NOAA, combined with a lack of fundamental data—for example, there is no population history of Yellowstone grizzly bears adequate to determine what a 'recovery' target should even be.

The idea that nature is best without human beings, and that wilderness is a positive virtue, is a purely modern notion that only emerged since the 1980s; no other civilization or culture ever held it, and before the Romantic poets wilderness was hated and seen as dangerous and ugly.

The balance-of-nature idea persisted because if gods or God made the world, it was assumed to be perfect, and perfection was understood as static and symmetric (the Greeks even believed the highest mountain must match the deepest ocean); thus to claim nature was imperfect was to be irreligious, and the only allowable perfection was a single unchanging state.

All available data show that nature is not in balance: populations are always changing by huge magnitudes, as shown by Hudson's Bay Company fur records where species like the lynx swung from hundreds of thousands in some years to only thousands in others—variations far too large to be attributed merely to hunting pressure.

The false balance-of-nature concept is not merely an intellectual metaphor but remains embedded in current college ecology and environmental-science textbooks and underlies policies and laws for managing natural resources such as fisheries, whales, and endangered species.

The New England forests that appeared to be pristine primeval nature were actually fire-dependent forests created and maintained by fires deliberately set by American Indians; when European settlers suppressed those fires, the forests changed into forms never seen before.

Ecology lags behind economics in handling static models: whereas economists use comparative statics knowing equilibrium is a useful fiction (changing one thing to gain insight), ecologists tend to believe their static models actually are reality.

Ecology textbooks still teach the logistic growth curve (invented in 1838 by Verhulst), which produces an S-shaped curve ending in a constant population, along with Lotka-Volterra predator-prey equations giving balanced oscillation—these are explicit mathematical statements of the balance of nature.

The appreciation of wild nature as beautiful is itself a product of civilization and technology: only with the rise of science and the ability to survive harsh environments (e.g., warm clothing) did the Alps shift from being described as 'horrible' to a 'horrible joy' and then sublime by the Romantic poets.

Ecologists cling to balance-of-nature models partly because the alternative mathematics (stochastic processes, game theory) is unfamiliar to people entering the field, even though those tools exist and are routinely used in fields dealing with risk and uncertainty such as insurance and finance.

We need new metaphors for nature that capture its dynamism—Botkin proposes the wild Missouri River (constantly flooding and shifting) and the moose (which depends on and creates young forests by eating trees), since the deeply entrenched cultural idea of static balance must be displaced at a fundamental level.

Because humans are the only sentient, technological species and are unavoidably having big effects on nature, we cannot 'get out of the way'—we are in the driver's seat and obligated to manage nature deliberately, though acting from the wrong (balance-of-nature) mythologies causes more harm than good.