Diversity and Stability

Over the past few decades, it has been commonplace for conservationists to appeal to the diversity-stability hypothesis as a component of their arguments for the importance of conserving biological diversity, at least in popular writings. Consider, for example, the following passage from Barry Commoner's book, The Closing Circle:⁴

The amount of stress which an ecosystem can absorb before it is driven to collapse is also a result of its various interconnections and their relative speeds of response. The `qmore complex the ecosystem, the more successfully it can resist a stress $\ldots$ Like a net, in which each knot is connected to others by several strands, such a fabric can resist collapse better than a simple, unbranched circle of threads - which if cut anywhere breaks down as a whole. Environmental pollution is often a sign that ecological links have been cut and that the ecosystem has been artificially simplified [3]