Green Ben: Benjamin Franklin and Ecosystems

(Historynet) - Long overlooked correspondence between Franklin and Priestley gives us front row seats to a remarkable historical drama: two great minds grappling with the first stirrings of a genuinely new way of thinking about life on earth. Priestley’s experiments revealed that the air we breathe is not some unalienable physical phenomenon, like gravity or magnetism, but is rather something that has been specifically manufactured by plants. In turn, Franklin recognized that the manufacture of breathable air is itself part of a vast, interconnected system that links animals, plants and invisible gases. And the choices we make as humans—destroying trees that grow near houses, for instance—can have a dangerous impact on that flow, if the core participants in the system aren’t properly appreciated and protected. In discovering how Mother Nature had invented our atmosphere, Franklin and Priestley were inventing something just as profound: the ecosystems view of the world. Continued