This blog post from Geekcologist has a fantastic set of links to classic essays and more recent blog posts on ecological topics. As an amateur (albeit an amateur who just spent 3.5 years thinking about the intersection of ecology and engineering and myself wrote about 250 pages on the topic) who cares about the natural world I think it is critically important to try to understand and grapple with these ideas. Because by and large it is not decisions made by ecologists that are determining the fate of our ecosystems. It is the decisions of politicians, bureaucrats, engineers, architects, planners, and businesspeople of all stripes. Even if we have morals that might cause us to make better ecological choices, we don’t know very much about ecology, and we just aren’t thinking about this every day. Meanwhile, if I were going to criticize ecologists I would say they are just arguing with each other in an echo chamber and not getting through to the rest of society. Or, they are probably getting through to us in elementary school, and then the vast majority forget what we learned in elementary school when we turn into serious and cynical grownups. Anyway, a person could spend a lot of time drilling into the links in this one post. Maybe I will try to do some follow up posts on a handful of them.