I watched an hour-long show last month, which seemed to make an organized rebuttal to an argument I never considered. I had to derive the argument from the rebuttal.

The program attempted to demonstrate that there is no such thing as balance in nature, and that utopian schemes which are based on the balance fallacy are not inspired by nature but by the science that gives us machinery.

It was weird. I watched as the creators of the program proved that natural conditions like the ratio of predators to prey don’t acquire equilibrium, really, ever. The proportions are always in flux; the environment is always dynamic; the responses and adaptations are ever changing.

No duh, was my consistent response. Who thought otherwise?

The show became more unreal as the narrator began speaking about leaders in the field of ecology, folks I’d never taken very seriously. I mean, I read The Sea Around Us when I was 13. I’ve been engaged in the subject all my life. I don’t think the Odum brothers were all that influential… And Buckminster Fuller? Really? I was right here in Berkeley for the late 60s, and I can assure you that we were no more into geodesic domes than the folks across the bay were into peacock feathers. That was propaganda, people. It never much happened.

They even interviewed members of failed communes, and discovered what any co-housing participant has long known about the variety of personalities in a community, and about how bullying begins.

I’m not saying it was a bad program. It was watchable. But it made a point no more radical or fresh than the idea that we should eat unrefined clean-grown foods or get regular rest and exercise. And while it shot down the myth of self-regulating cultures, it didn’t offer any suggestions, despotic or democratic, for how to go forward.

But maybe I’m the one off-balance. I described the message of the show to a buddy last night, and when I complained that there’s no point in refuting a natural balance argument that doesn’t exist, she objected. “Sure there’s balance in nature,” she asserted. “You hear about it all the time.”