Harmonic Destruction

Look at the brochures of just about any environmental organization and what you will see are images of an energy system that appears to lie weightlessly on the land. Solar panels gleam atop suburban homes. Wind turbines sprout from fields where cows graze contentedly. It is a high-tech, bucolic vision that suggests a future in which humankind might finally live in harmony with nature, rather than waging ceaseless war with it.

But there are other images to consider as well. Trees clear-cut, chipped, and fed into boilers. Once diverse forests turned into monocrop plantations. Wild places sent under the plow. And melting ice caps from global warming. This is the underside of renewable bioenergy — biomass, biofuels, and biogases – one that is decidedly at odds with the ethos of pristine eco-friendliness described in the brochures.

On the face of it, bioenergy would seem to embody the ecological vision: an energy source rooted in the soil, attuned to the seasons, and governed by life’s cycling rhythms of growth, decay, and reuse. But today, that expression of the ecological vision is destroying nature in order to save it. From the production forests of Germany to the rainforests of Southeast Asia to the American Midwest, we are using millions of square miles of land for crops to feed our cars and power plants that could be used to feed people or become wilderness.

As the scale of the carnage has become evident, a growing number of environmentalists have turned against biofuels. But the change of heart about present generation biofuels hasn’t stopped their rapid expansion. Biofuels represent one of the fastest growing wedges of the renewables pie. Germany’s heavy investments in solar and wind get most of the attention, but 29 percent of its renewable electricity comes from burning woody biomass in power plants.¹ Throw in liquid biofuel production and wood-fired space heating and biomass provides 38 percent of Germany’s non-fossil-fueled energy.²

Half of Germany’s timber harvest is now burned for fuel,³ and 17 percent of its arable land is used to grow energy crops for biodiesel, ethanol, and biogas production, a proportion that may rise to one third by 2020.⁴ The rest of Europe is also turning to biomass heating and electricity generated in refitted coal plants as an easy way to meet renewable energy mandates, using millions of tons of domestic and imported wood.⁵ Energy derived from ethanol in the United States far outstrips the power generated by the wind and solar sectors.⁶

The growing reliance upon biofuels as public commitments to renewables have grown is neither an accident nor a coincidence. The renewable energy paradigm requires an unprecedented industrial reengineering of the landscape: lining every horizon with forty-story wind turbines, paving deserts with concentrating solar mirrors, girdling the coasts with tidal and wave generators, and drilling for geological heat reservoirs; it sees all of nature as an integrated machine for producing energy.

Bioenergy is, at present, an indispensable feature of that landscape because it provides one of the only renewably generated sources of the stable power that’s needed to shore up the chaotically intermittent output of wind and solar generators. While wind and solar get the photos and the headlines, dispatchable generators – hydro dams, geothermal wells, and biomass burners – are an increasingly important part of the grid in places like Germany.

Perhaps, as some advocates suggest, the next generation of biofuels will resolve these knotty issues. Or large-scale energy storage technologies will resolve the intermittency challenges associated with wind and solar. But the problems associated with biofuels point to a deeper flaw in green ideology: the notion that, to be sustainable, human civilization must be “ecological” – modeled on ecological processes, regulated by an ecological calculus of efficiency, bounded and limited by the resources of the biosphere in which we are embedded.

As imagined by supporters, bioenergy represents an idealized ecosystem – a closed loop of perennial abundance supported by a perfectly efficient recycling of wastes, self-sufficient and self-contained, generating no externalities and requiring no inputs except sunlight. It’s also a suggestive model of how human society can be remade into a sustainable ecosystem.

That’s not only a grossly distorted picture of bioenergy as it exists, but also a profoundly wrong-headed concept of what human society should be. As we construct a material and technological basis for a sustainable way of life, we will need to look beyond the rules and resources of biology and ecology. Making civilization conform to an idealized model of nature turns out to be bad for civilization and downright disastrous for nature.

1.

For most of human history, biomass – burned or fed to draft animals – was the main source of energy, and the cutting, growing, and hunting of it has always had severe environmental repercussions. Early modern Europe was extensively deforested to get wood for heating and charcoal for metallurgical fuel. Many whale species were hunted to the verge of extinction for their oil – a good lamp biofuel – in the 19th century before kerosene from the nascent petroleum industry replaced it as a lighting fuel.

Far from being an unalloyed environmental disaster, the shift from bioenergy to fossil fuels over the last few centuries permitted the developed world to preserve and regrow much of its forest cover while supplying the Industrial Revolution’s immense demand for energy. But the manifold environmental problems of fossil fuels, and the bullying behavior of the corporate combines that control them, have kept alive a vision of a more natural, populist energy supply grown in sunlit fields rather than mined from the Hadean underworld.

These impulses surface reliably in times of economic upheaval. During the Great Depression the vision was voiced by the “chemurgy” movement, whose ideas anticipated many themes of latter-day renewables theorists. Comprised of businessmen and farmers opposed to New Deal policies that restricted agricultural output, the chemurgists sought to bolster the farm economy by diversifying away from food and apparel into industrial products.

The chemurgic ideal of civilization was a symbiosis of agriculture and industry modeled on Nature, thriftily regenerating every year without depleting mineral stocks or intruding into wilderness, with no external inputs other than sunlight. Among their projects was a car made partially out of soybeans and hemp;⁷ more practical was their call to blend corn ethanol into the nation’s gasoline supply⁸ (even then peak oil was presumed to be a decade away), a biofuel scheme that would take control of energy away from the Rockefellers and give it back to yeoman farmers.

The movement went beyond marketing initiatives to elaborate a grand notion of a “sustainable” economy, as we would now call it. One of the leading chemurgists was Henry Ford. Deeply ambivalent about the industrial society he helped create, Ford hoped that it could be refounded on an agrarian basis. He foresaw “a time when industry shall no longer denude the forests which require generations to mature, nor use up the mines which were ages in the making, but shall draw its raw material largely from the annual produce of the fields.”⁹

Others conceptualized the landscape in very modern terms, as a vast integrated production system running on solar power. “Agriculture,” declared one speaker at a 1935 chemurgy conference, “is essentially a synthetic organic chemical industry … using energy bountifully supplied by the sun”¹⁰ to the tune of 400 horsepower per acre.¹¹

Though the sustainability crisis of the day hinged on unemployment and bankruptcies rather than greenhouse emissions, chemurgists saw society’s problems in terms of a technological civilization in existential and spiritual conflict with the natural order. According to the conference’s Declaration of Dependence Upon the Soil: “When, in the course of the life of a nation, its people become neglectful of the laws of Nature and of Nature’s God, so that their very existence is put in peril, necessity impels them to turn to the soil” and thus restore the farmer’s “right of self-maintenance."¹²

The chemurgy movement subsided in the postwar boom. Rather than industry becoming more agricultural and biomass-based, American agriculture became industrial, high-tech, and fossil-fueled. As usual, there were environmental benefits as well as pitfalls: because industrial cultivation boosted harvests and cut food prices, much marginal farmland went out of production and returned to forest and wildlife habitat.

Biomass and biofuel schemes surged anew after the oil price shocks of the 1970s.¹³ High heating oil prices sparked a comeback for wood-burning stoves, and the chemurgists’ corn ethanol program was dusted off and given government support. This time the crisis was felt to be one of permanent resource scarcity, which inspired countless proposals to restore self-sufficiency by gleaning and reusing energy from the unlikeliest bits of biomass. Peak natural gas was seen on the horizon then, and so emerged ideas for producing methane out of everything from municipal garbage to water hyacinths growing on sewage.¹⁴

Once again there was a pronounced moral and social dimension to this vision of sustainability, which would force a heedless consumer society to recycle its waste and embrace the virtue of thrift. Bioenergy was again toasted as the people’s power, available to barefoot subsistence farmers the world over. In 1979 the New York Times reported that India would soon boast 18.75 million rural households with manure-fed biogas generators and another 560,000 village-scale plants.¹⁵

And once again, the urgent plans for the large-scale deployment of bioenergy fizzled as huge new deposits of fossil fuels were tapped and energy prices plummeted.

2.

The turn of the 21st century saw the biggest revival yet of biomass energy, this time in response to the threat of global warming, a crisis not of slowdown and shortage, but of surfeit and bounty created by a world economy choking on the gaseous excesses of its own prosperity. The closed-loop self-containment of biological systems that so captivated the chemurgists made biomass energy a perfect fit with the renewable creed – an energy system that regrew itself with nothing but sunshine while devouring its own carbon dioxide wastes.

Governments looking for low-hanging renewable fruit seized on biomass and biofuels as a no-brainer, stuff that could be burned by the existing combustion-centered economy with no permanent greenhouse cost or guilt feelings. Corn ethanol and bio-diesel crop programs left over from the 1970s were ramped up, and the burning for heat and electricity of wood, crop residues and biogas was designated fully renewable and given a generous cut of feed-in-tariffs and portfolio standards.

Bioenergy, which had been on the wane for centuries in the developed world, thus reemerged on an industrial scale. But it didn’t take long for many greens to turn against the initiative. Such industrial-scale bioenergy takes a lot of land and biomass to produce a mere trickle of power. A 2010 study by the Manomet Center for Conservation Sciences, for example, noted that three proposed biomass power plants in the state of Massachusetts, with a combined capacity of 130 megawatts (just 2 percent of the state’s average electricity use) would burn 1.45 million tons of wood every year – 60 percent more than the 900,000 tons that could be sustainably harvested from Massachusetts forests.¹⁶

(BP Statistical Review of World Energy 2013)

The converted coal boilers at the Drax biomass power plant in Britain will burn 7.5 million tons of wood pellets per year,¹⁷ more than Britain’s entire timber harvest and equivalent to annually clear-cutting 165 square miles of forest, to supply about 4 percent of Britain’s electricity.¹⁸ Biofuels proved similarly land-hungry, with the US corn ethanol program becoming proverbial for the disproportion between its huge inputs of farmland and subsidies and its meager outputs of energy. In 2011 the United States used 40 percent of its corn crop, grown on about 50,000 square miles, to manufacture ethanol that supplied just 10 percent of its auto fuel.¹⁹

(BP Statistical Review of World Energy 2013)

If scaled up, environmentalists argued, such programs would do serious damage to the world’s forests and food supply. Indeed, a spike in world food prices in 2008 that started riots in developing countries was widely blamed on diversion of farm acreage to energy crops.²⁰ Nor did the bioenergy system that actually existed fit the picture of populist empowerment and ecological restraint; instead, it was conquering vast new territories for industrial agribusiness and relying on tremendous inputs of fertilizer, irrigation, and pesticide. These unsettling realities sparked vitriolic attacks on bioenergy, with former UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food Jean Ziegler denouncing it as “a crime against humanity” in the pages of The Guardian.

In 2008, studies called into question the carbon-neutrality of biomass as an energy source.^{21, 22} Burning a tree sends a pulse of stored carbon into the atmosphere, creating a “carbon debt” that is paid back when new growth reincorporates an equivalent amount; the “repayment” period may take anywhere from a few years to many decades depending on how fast the biomass regrows. But when terrain is permanently cleared of forest or wild grassland to grow energy crops – or to accommodate other farming displaced by energy crops – the carbon debt may exceed what was incurred by burning the original biomass, and may be further massively increased by greenhouse emissions from soils disturbed by these shifts. The resulting carbon debt may take centuries to pay off, according to many studies,²³ and will only exacerbate climate change in the meantime.

Bioenergy’s defenders offered various reasons why the environmental impacts aren’t what they seem. Biomass energy generation could subsist on residues and scraps from logging operations, sawmills, and pulp factories that would otherwise be wasted; cutting down whole trees would not be necessary.²⁴ In reality, scientists responded, forests and fields actually need their “waste” residues to maintain soil quality and provide habitat. Video documentation emerged showing whole trees journeying from clear-cut to chipper to boiler. Economists who said energy crops drive up food prices were countered by other economists who said oil price hikes were the culprit.²⁵

Facing these disquieting realities, many greens have turned against bioenergy. A recent report by the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, Greenpeace, and Friends of the Earth anathematized biomass burning as Dirtier than Coal.²⁶ Both organizations have called for stricter limitations on biodiesel and ethanol, which they blame for rising food prices and forest loss. Greenpeace wants a cap on fuel sourced from farmland,²⁷ while Friends of the Earth favors the elimination of European biofuels targets;²⁸ both call for an outright ban on biodiesel from palm oil, which they see as one of the worst drivers of tropical deforestation. Backing them up are more staid outfits like the Natural Resources Defense Council, which likewise rejected tree-burning as “dirty and destructive” and celebrated Senate initiatives to eliminate corn ethanol subsidies.

Meanwhile, public support has shifted away from bioenergy, with major biomass projects now facing a gauntlet of protests and lawsuits. Western governments have responded by capping some bioenergy subsidies and mandates and asking new projects to prove their emissions savings and meet standards of sustainability and habitat protection.²⁹

But it would be a mistake to imagine that the battle against bioenergy is won. A huge expansion of biomass and biofuel projects is in the offing as a major component of renewable energy plans, an expansion that will likely pose the same thorny issues – on a much greater scale – of land use, agricultural displacement, and resource constraints. What’s more, much of the environmental community is signing on to it.

3.

Bioenergy refuses to die in part because it is critical for plugging the many feasibility holes in proposed renewable energy systems. Biofuels could serve as (notionally) carbon-neutral motor fuels until auto batteries become cheap and capacious enough to support electric cars operated on grid power. More fundamentally, biopower is needed to backstop the chaotic intermittency of the wind and solar generators on a renewable electricity grid. Biopower is “dispatchable,” available on demand precisely where and when it’s required. Just as a whale oil lamp provides light after sunset and a wood-fired steam engine propels a ship when there’s no wind in the sails, modern biopower is there when we need it.

The dismal statistics on the reliability of wind and solar show why. In Germany, for example, wind and solar generation frequently collapses for days on end during calm and cloudy spells. During the week of November 12 to 18 in 2012, for example, the combined output of all the wind turbines and solar panels in the country averaged just 4.8 percent of their nominal capacity.³⁰ Even drastically redundant overbuild of capacity won’t bridge these “common-mode failures,” and electricity-storage schemes are expensive and probably unfeasible on the required scale. These considerations imply that a renewable grid will require enough dispatchable generating capacity to meet electricity demand on its own during long periods when wind and solar produce next to nothing. Hydro and geothermal generators fill this role well, but they are limited by geographical constraints. So biomass must step into the breach.

Reliability is why just about every renewables plan carves out a prominent share for biomass and biofuels. The German Energy Agency forecasts that Germany’s already substantial biomass-fired electricity generation will grow a further 19 percent by 2020.³¹ The Australian Energy Market Operator’s scenarios for a 100 percent renewable grid by 2050 envisions generating up to 18 percent of the country’s electricity from wood-burning, with biogas and sugarcane residue chipping in an additional 8 percent.³² In its Renewable Electricity Futures study, the US National Renewable Energy Laboratory assumes 100 gigawatts of biomass-fired electric capacity on the grid by 2050, burning upwards of a billion tons of biomass each year to generate about 16 percent of the nation’s electricity.³³ And these figures don’t count the increased use of biomass and biofuels for heating and transportation; US biofuels mandates (mainly bioethanol) will climb from 15 billion gallons in 2015 to 36 billion gallons per year in 2022.³⁴

Despite misgivings about the present-day impacts of bioenergy, the Union of Concerned Scientists places biomass – Clean Power and Fuel, If Handled Right – at the heart of its own sustainable energy blueprint. It estimates that 680 million tons could be grown sustainably in the United States by 2030, enough to make 54 billion gallons of ethanol fuel or generate 19 percent of the US electricity supply.³⁵

The contrast the environmental community draws between right and wrong bioenergy hinges on several distinctions between “first generation” biofuels – wood, corn ethanol and biodiesel from oil seeds – and the coming “second generation” of biomass from specialized energy crops and “cellulosic” ethanol.

Cellulosic processing extracts fermentable sugar from the tough cellulose of the whole plant, not just the starchy fruit and seed kernel; it could double per-acre ethanol yields. Sourcing ethanol and biomass from fast-growing grass and tree species could greatly improve the carbon balance sheet of bioenergy and avoid diverting edible crops to energy production, thus driving up food prices.

If we’re careful, second-gen thinking continues, we can glean woody biomass from industrial scraps and forest waste with plenty left behind for soil enrichment, rather than from whole trees or from fragile or significant ecosystems. What’s more, UCS contends, perennial grasses and other specialty energy crops “[require] only modest amounts of fertilizer and pesticide” and actually increase soil carbon; instead of displacing agriculture they have “a positive impact on the sustainability of food production.”³⁶ NRDC’s Getting Biofuels Right concurs that we can forge ahead with bioenergy if we install a hedge of exacting sustainability standards that will prevent the old first-gen abuses.³⁷

The second-gen model sounds a lot more like the ecological ideal of bioenergy: restrained and unobtrusive; generating abundance through the efficient cycling and reuse of waste; and sustaining itself on minimal inputs and positive feedbacks rather than negative depletions.

But when you read the fine print, Gen II biomass often looks a lot like Gen I, only more so. Take the US Department of Energy’s (DOE) Billion-Ton Update³⁸ on future biomass supplies, on which the UCS plan was based. BTU reckons America’s energy biomass potential at anywhere from 767 million to 1.3 billion tons per year by 2030,³⁹ depending on how optimistically they forecast yield increases. It models an impeccably sustainable Gen II regime of biomass and cellulosic biofuel, centered on specialty energy crops – switchgrass is the star prospect – grown with little fertilizer and no irrigation on marginal lands, and supplemented by forest and crop residues gathered with a meticulous eye to maintaining soil and habitat.

But for all its fastidious eco-prudence, there’s no hiding the immense environmental impact of this biomass program. DOE estimates that it would take 98 square miles of switchgrass plantation growing at maximum yields – twice that many square miles at average yields – to produce 50 million gallons of cellulosic ethanol, enough to fuel the American auto fleet for all of three hours a year.⁴⁰

DOE’s most ambitious scenarios puts the energy crop footprint at 79 million acres⁴¹ – equivalent to a strip of land 124 miles wide and 1,000 miles long – to supply half of America’s transport fuel consumption or one third of its electricity.⁴² DOE characterizes that acreage as “marginal.”⁴³ But since they aren’t making any more of it, energy crops are likely to displace millions of acres of food crops, pasture, and “conservation plantings” (aka wildlife habitat).⁴⁴ The DOE’s concept of “energy crop” is an expansive one, for it subsumes even the forests by turning huge swaths of woodland into monocrop slash pine or poplar tree plantations optimized for rapid harvesting cycles.⁴⁵ Whole trees will indeed be cut for Gen II biomass, by necessity and by design.

This is industrial agriculture on an awesome scale, and there’s no reason to think it will lack any of the features that greens detest. Like all agriculture – the very first human industry and always the most disruptive to the environment – it will regiment and standardize the land and suppress biodiversity. Industrial-scale inputs of fertilizer and irrigation will surely be needed to keep up yields – production of Brazilian sugar-cane ethanol has slumped in recent years, in part from soil exhaustion – and genetically modified biomass is being discussed to apoplectic green protest.⁴⁶ Energy biomass cannot help but elbow aside both actual and potential food production in a world that may well need to put its pastures and marginal lands back under cultivation to nourish a soaring population. If much of our transportation fuel is grown rather than pumped, then fuel costs will march in lockstep with bad harvests and amplify food price shocks. And environmentalists’ assumption that the kind of sustainability strictures they have decried as toothless in the past will bite hard in the coming Gen II regime seems naïve.

So “good” Gen II bioenergy is shaping up as a reprise of “bad” Gen I bioenergy on steroids. It will entail a colossal arrogation of land and resources for disproportionately modest energy payoffs, and that profligacy could in turn precipitate hard land use tradeoffs that sacrifice pressing human needs along with allegedly useless “marginal” land uses and ecosystems. It’s everything environmentalists hate, yet environmentalists support it because it plays an indispensable role in the renewable energy project, and is perhaps the ultimate expression of the tacit renewable goal of transforming all of nature into an integrated industrial power plant.

4.

Writing for The Guardian last year, the Head of Climate Change for the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds waxed poetic about the future of Gen II bioenergy:

We want to see a brave new world where every ounce of food waste and sewage goes into anaerobic digesters that produce green gas for our homes. Where local woodlands are brought back into management and the wood clearings are used to provide heating for schools and hospitals, and where steelworks are powered by combined heat and power stations using wood waste.

Environmentalists, in this way, ease their cognitive dissonance about bioenergy by imagining it as all the things that it patently is not – efficient, abundant, and populist. All the old 1970s schemes – barnyard biogas, methane from landfills and sewage plants, and cars run on used vegetable oil from restaurants – are back to capture the green imagination, along with new experiments aimed at distilling biofuels from coffee grounds and alligator fat. (Yes, the reptile leather sector will finally be made sustainable.) From the confluence of these microscopic trickles of repurposed waste and rediscovered potential will surge a new energy supply for a new society, one hearkening back to the chemurgist dream of closed-loop thrift and self-reliance.

The vision of a society subsisting off its own waste sounds ecological, but it is undeniably harsh. Like Huxley’s brave new world, it is remorselessly engineered around efficiency and utility, with any residue of unrationalized wildness strictly managed and marginalized. Implicit in the green total efficiency state is a general penury that’s fixated on the hoarding of scraps and sticks. Paradoxically, it also suggests that we continue to wallow in waste – that there will be plenty of logging to create slash, plenty of pig manure and leftovers to power an industrial society.

The counterpoint between extravagant waste and desperate shortage shouldn’t surprise us: it’s the central feature of the real ecosystems from which environmentalists misguidedly take their cue. In the cliché of wildlife documentaries, “nature wastes nothing” and thus achieves a sublime abundance.

In truth, nature wastes almost everything, from solar energy to seeds, and its default condition is therefore red-fanged competition for scarce resources. The resources of ecosystems are thus already spoken for; there are no lands that are not used by something for some purpose, no caches of unexploited energy piled up in the margins that we can tap without depriving other organisms, human and non-human, of their sustenance.

That’s why modern civilization has grown by going beyond the circle of life for resources that lie far outside ecological boundaries. When firewood and whale oil ran short we did not conserve and recycle them; instead we dug for coal and petroleum and gas, retrieving colossal reserves of energy that were wasted by ancient ecosystems and had fossilized beyond the reach of biology. When rising food production strained soil fertility, we did not hoard compost and guano; instead we invented the Haber process that fixed nitrogen fertilizer out of thin air, thus creating an artificial nitrogen cycle that now rivals the natural one in its importance for agriculture.

In each case, ingenuity and technology unlocked enormous resources that biological processes cannot access, thus transcending Malthusian constraints on growth while easing the demands we placed on wild ecosystems. That these advances eventually drew excesses and externalities in their wake has made greens wary of that kind of Promethean development. Better, they feel, to live within the limits ecology imposes on development – and to accept an ethos of restraint and humility as both more responsible and more spiritually connected to the world around us.

Unfortunately, the bioenergy project exposes that agenda as a mirage. Retreating to a nostalgic ecological paradigm powered by energy systems that the developed world abandoned long ago – and for good reason – will merely increase the pressure civilization places on the planet.

We’re well advised to instead continue with what has actually worked in the past – to seek new technologies that transcend ecological constraints. The renewables movement is attuned to that strategy – wind power, solar power, and geothermal power are all serious efforts to access energy reserves outside the biological sphere. Unfortunately, their intrinsic limitations prevent them from meeting society’s need for abundant dispatchable power. Nuclear power, a reservoir of low-carbon energy that’s stupendously larger than the planet’s stock of fossil fuels, with arguably the smallest environmental footprint of any energy source, can meet that need if society can see past the myths and anxieties shrouding it.

Low-carbon biomass-based motor fuels may play a transitional role, but we’d do better to focus on electrifying transportation. Grid power is the easiest energy system to decarbonize: France and Sweden have demonstrated how swiftly a grid can be decarbonized using a mix of nuclear and renewables (mostly hydroelectric dams). Or, with a superabundance of clean electricity from nuclear energy, we could extract methane- and ammonia-based motor fuel from carbon dioxide and nitrogen in the air, a method of fuel production that takes up virtually no land, with a carbon debt that’s pre-paid from the start.

Society can’t entirely sever itself from its roots in the environment, but neither should it organize itself as an elaboration of closed-loop ecology. To view ourselves as an organic part of an ecosystem, constrained to scrimping along on its resources as efficiently as possible, is to place too heavy a burden on ecosystems to sustain us. There is no way such a conception of civilization can satisfy the social imperative of economic growth and improved living standards and accommodate what green consciousness values most in nature – its otherness, its autonomy from utilitarian ends, and its purposeless effusions of beauty.

Environmentalists often talk of the “ecosystem services” the environment provides to society, but we must be equally mindful of the benefits that human technological genius can afford to ecosystems. Stewardship of the planet requires that we continue to unshackle ourselves from ecosystems, and ecosystems from us.