recursive ecological connectivity

Compiled with AI assistance and selectively reviewed. Please consult the cited passages; the books remain the authoritative source. About this companion

Editorial synthesis · provisional

Definition

Recursive ecological connectivity is the formation of relations that change the conditions for further relations, as developed in RB2’s account of cascades. Pollinators, predators and symbioses can alter wider opportunities and dependencies. The proposal distinguishes this generative organization from a simple inventory of links, universal all-to-all connection or a guarantee that every disturbance has a predictable or beneficial ecosystem-wide result.

Explanation

The source’s examples include pollinator loss changing flowering patterns, predator loss reorganizing a food web and fungal–plant symbiosis opening new scales of terrestrial life. Their role is to show altered conditions of relation, not merely an unchanged set of entities connected by more or fewer identical links.

Ecological individuality retains local organismic integrity alongside the circuitry that sustains it. Recursive connectivity therefore need not erase differences of role, reach or tempo among participants. The passage provides a conceptual pattern, not a newly specified predictive model calculating the precise outcome of any proposed ecological intervention.

AB’s recursion account likewise makes achieved patterns available as terms in further patterning, while PB expressly denies an all-to-all total mesh. These comparisons preserve selective and consequential dependencies. The entry does not infer universal connectivity, inevitable amplification or moral goodness simply because a relation can shape the possibility of another relation.

Scope and attribution

Retain bounded ecological examples and refrain from invented prediction rules.

RB2 — The Real Book, Volume II: Becoming Is Being

Ecological cascades alter conditions for further relations within differentiated fields.

Occurrence locators: 202.

Background used in the editorial explanation

Ecological cascades are distinguished from general recursive relations and the categorical mesh.