Ghosts of Abundance

George Schuler
5 days ago
18 min read

Updated: Mar 7

When the world moved together — and what we lost when it stopped

What the living world once knew about collective power — and we forgot

Author’s Note

This essay begins in the natural world because that is where I first learned to see systems in motion. But it is not really about animals or forests. The great migrations of the living world — herds, fish runs, flocks — are simply some of the clearest examples of what happens when life moves together.

The questions that follow belong as much to human communities as to ecosystems: how coherence forms, how it dissolves, and what it takes for movement to become power.

Knowledge of the natural world is not a prerequisite for the story that follows. The deeper question touches any system — ecological, social, or human — and asks what becomes possible when motion turns into collective force, and what is lost when that motion breaks.

Prologue

When herds darkened the plains and rivers shimmered with fish, movement itself was a kind of intelligence — a rhythm that stitched the world together. For millennia, Indigenous nations across these landscapes lived within that motion, following the bison’s path, marking the return of shad and eel, shaping abundance through reciprocity.¹ What later settlers called miraculous or “biblical” was simply ecology at full expression — life moving at scale.²

Ghosts of Abundance looks at how that rhythm unraveled: how migrations vanished, coherence dissolved, and what those losses might teach us about rebuilding collective motion — in ecosystems, and in ourselves.

“A species in isolation is a relic. A movement is a force.”

You can have a few bison, eels, or chestnut trees left, but without millions moving together, the phenomenon — the force — is gone. Those migrations were more than species; they were living networks that reshaped the world through motion and scale.

This essay uses that loss — the silence after the great migrations — to explore what happens when human systems lose their own capacity for movement and coherence, and what renewal might look like.

The Vanishing Pulse of the Living World

There was a time when the world itself seemed to move. The Great Plains rippled like a living sea, the ground trembling beneath herds of bison so vast they took days to pass.³ Rivers once ran silver with shad and eels, their bodies flashing like mirrored sunlight as they surged upstream.⁴ In the eastern forests, American chestnuts stretched to the horizon — a green cathedral that bloomed white every June and fed everything that walked or flew beneath it.⁵ The sky once darkened with passenger pigeons — billions of them — until the air hummed with wings and the sun turned to shadow. Contemporary accounts described flocks so immense they took hours to pass overhead; one 1813 observer near Kentucky estimated more than two billion birds in a single migration, their droppings layering the forest floor like snow.⁶

Long before settlers called such abundance “biblical,” Indigenous peoples lived within it — reading the migrations of bison, shad, and pigeon as part of a living order rather than a spectacle.⁷ Their knowledge systems, from the buffalo-centered economies of the Plains to the coastal fish weirs of the Penobscot and Shinnecock, were not about “managing” nature but about sustaining motion through reciprocity. What newcomers described as miracle was simply ecology at full expression — life moving at scale.

These are the landscapes I know — the ones that formed both the continent and my imagination. The Great Plains of North America, the eastern forests, the Atlantic rivers: places where movement once was the ecosystem.⁸

Then, almost without warning, it all went quiet. The herds thinned. The flights faltered. The forests dimmed to scattered ghosts of what they had been. You can still find a few survivors — bison behind fences, a lone chestnut in a park, an eel wriggling through a dam’s fish ladder — but these remnants are only the outlines of a former power. They are existence without movement, life stripped of its collective rhythm.

When abundance disappears, so does identity. A migration isn’t just many animals — it’s a choreography that reshapes everything it touches.

Ecologist David Wilcove — whose No Way Home captured both the science and sorrow of migration’s disappearance — estimated that more than three-quarters of the world’s great terrestrial migrations have already been disrupted by roads, fences, and dams. His work, and his voice, remain among the clearest on what happens when the world’s motion stops.⁹ The caribou of Alaska, the wildebeest of the Serengeti, the salmon of the Pacific Northwest: each has been fragmented into smaller, slower, more localized lives. In North America, the bison that once numbered between 30 and 60 million now total fewer than 800,000, most behind fences.¹⁰ The American eel, once one of every four fish in eastern rivers, has declined by more than 90 percent in many watersheds.¹¹ What we call “conservation” is often a static form of loss — keeping things alive but no longer letting, or able to let, them move.

A migration, after all, is more than many animals traveling together. It is a network made flesh — a choreography that bends rivers, feeds continents, and knits the world into coherence. When that motion stops, the system forgets its shape. The silence left behind is not just ecological; it is moral. Because movement at scale — whether of herds, currents, or people — is what turns living things into forces capable of reshaping the world.

The Power in Numbers — When Biology Becomes Physics

There’s a tipping point where life transcends biology and becomes physics — where density, synchronicity, and motion produce emergent effects. When abundance tips into rhythm, rhythm into pattern, and pattern into force, a system becomes something greater than its parts. What we call migration is not just behavior — it’s transformation.

Air: The Locust

On the Great Plains, a single grasshopper is nothing — a drab scrap of chitin. But crowd it close to its kin and there is a neurochemical phase shift. Entomologist Jeffrey Lockwood traced how a pulse of serotonin floods their bodies when density crosses a threshold, flipping them from solitary to gregarious — a process biologists call phase polyphenism.¹² Their color darkens, wings lengthen, appetites explode. Within hours a million individuals move as one body, a living weather front that can strip fields and forests bare. Solitude and abundance are different species in the same skin.

Scale changes chemistry; abundance becomes physics.

Land: The Bison

On land, the same law shapes giants. Tens of millions of bison once poured across the Great Plains in tides that took days to pass. Historian Dan Flores writes that their hooves tilled soil, broke crust, and sowed seed; fire, grass, and predator moved in rhythm behind them.⁶ Each migration was an act of engineering — topsoil built by motion. Recent field studies show that prairie plots grazed by bison support roughly 30 percent greater plant-species richness and up to twice the soil infiltration rate compared with cattle-grazed sites, confirming that movement itself engineers fertility.¹³ The fertility of the prairie was not an accident of geology but a memory of muscle and hoof, of lives lived at continental scale.

Water: The Shad

In spring, the rivers of the Atlantic once ran silver with American shad and their cousins, the river herring. Early travelers wrote that you could walk across their backs without sinking. They carried the ocean upstream in their bodies, delivering phosphorus and nitrogen into inland forests, feeding bears, eagles, and people alike. Historical landings data suggest that in the mid-Atlantic states alone, annual shad harvests exceeded 20 million fish in the nineteenth century — a biomass flow large enough to fertilize inland forests each spring.¹⁴ Indigenous communities timed ceremonies to their arrival; early colonies survived on their abundance. When dams rose, that shimmering current stalled. The rivers forgot their direction, and the forests lost a vein of salt that had kept them green.¹⁴

Forest: The Chestnut

In the Appalachian woods, one in every four trees was once an American chestnut, its blooms turning entire valleys white in June. The tree fed everything that moved — deer, bear, people, soil microbes — until a foreign blight erased it in a generation.⁵ Oak and maple filled the space, but not the function. The forest canopy recovered its height but not its rhythm; abundance, once the architecture of the system, could not simply be replanted.

Synthesis

At scale, these creatures and trees ceased to be individuals; they became networks — distributed intelligences that shaped continents. Their abundance made them agents of coherence, the way data becomes pattern or melody emerges from notes. In their motion, energy became order. The world recognized them not as many, but as one.

We tend to think of power as something that resides in dominance — the lion, the empire, the leader. But in nature, the real power lies in movement that synchronizes difference. When the world moved together, it didn’t require control to be effective. It required coherence.

The same law holds beyond biology. People move in patterns, too. When enough of us move together — with purpose, with rhythm — energy crosses a threshold and becomes meaning. A social movement is its own kind of migration: moral, cultural, collective. Conviction becomes current; direction becomes force. The civil-rights marches, the long arc of decolonization, the early environmental movement — each was a living network of conscience, changing not just policy but possibility.¹⁵ What herds and rivers once did for the land, people have done for justice: turning motion into transformation, and transformation into memory.

Power, it turns out, is what happens when motion learns to mean.

When the Movement Stops, the System Collapses

When the motion stops, everything begins to fray.

The air feels thinner, the land quieter, the water less certain of its path. The Great Plains without bison became brittle grass and dust. Rivers without shad lost their anadromous pulse of nutrients; the forests that depended on their silver cargo grew poorer, ring by ring. Even the soil beneath vanished herds hardened and forgot its breath. Life kept its outlines, but not its rhythm.

Stillness, in ecology, is rarely peace; it is amnesia.

Ecologist David Wilcove has shown how the collapse of salmon migrations in the Pacific Northwest left a measurable absence in the trees themselves — the δ¹⁵N signatures of marine origin fading from the rings of Douglas firs that once thrived on fish carried inland by bears.¹⁶ The forest recorded the silence of the river.

Once the network fragments, everything else weakens. Nutrient loops falter. Predators wander. Rivers stagnate. Forests forget their timing. You can keep a species alive, but still lose its meaning. Zoos, hatcheries, and seed banks preserve form without function — existence without motion.

A few bison behind fences are not a herd.

A few hundred grazing on postage-stamp remnants of prairie or fragments of intact forest are not a herd, much less a force. The early travelers wrote of herds that took days to pass — exaggerations, perhaps, but truthful in scale. Those migrations were weather systems of muscle and dust, the land itself in motion.

A few chestnuts in a greenhouse are not a forest.

Even in the deep woods, an occasional chestnut sprout survives — isolated, outnumbered a thousand to one by oak and maple. Once, its mast fed deer, bear, and the passenger-pigeon flocks whose “biblical” numbers were themselves powered by chestnut abundance. The survivors today are memories without an ecosystem to remember them.

A few fish behind a dam are not a run.

A handful of shad managing to climb a fish ladder are not the silver rivers that once filled the night with sound. On Maine’s Kennebec River, for instance, more than 3 million river herring now ascend past the former Edwards Dam site each spring — a dramatic recovery, yet still less than one-tenth of pre-industrial runs.¹⁷ We comfort ourselves with “restored” runs pegged to the 1940s or the 1980s, but those are centuries into decline — fragments of fragments. Ecologist Daniel Pauly named this the “shifting-baseline syndrome” — the tendency to accept whatever level of abundance we first remember as normal, even when the true scale of loss lies generations deeper.¹⁸ We have forgotten what abundance felt like; our baselines have drifted downstream with each generation.

And perhaps,

a few humans isolated behind our screens or locked behind our doors are not a movement.

We are numerous but scattered — our clans, tribes, and communities dissolved into networks that promise connection while delivering distraction. What once bound us in shared labor and story has splintered into feeds and factions. Too many things now block, divide, or monetize the very choreography that once powered humans in rhythm with one another. Sociologist Robert Putnam charted the same unraveling in civic life: bowling leagues, unions, and local associations declining in parallel with the rise of screen-mediated connection.¹⁹

We have not stopped moving; we’ve just forgotten how to move together.

When that rhythm breaks, power scatters. What once flowed through marches, meetings, and mutual care now leaks into the friction of distance and distraction. Long before the screen replaced the square, the rhythm had already faltered — the bowling leagues, union halls, and congregations that once carried civic life falling silent under the weight of long hours, economic strain, and fading trust.²⁰

Surveys show the same erosion quantified: public trust in government and one another has dropped by more than half since the 1970s, and civic participation has shifted from sustained acts to expressive ones.²¹ We began to lose time before we lost touch. Later, digital networks arrived and amplified the pulse — but not the muscle. Protest could flare overnight, yet without structure, coherence slipped away.²² What we call polarization is often just disconnection made visible — an old fracture made louder by new tools.²³ We confuse information for engagement, awareness for alignment, reaction for participation, reach for relationship. The energy is still there, but without coherence it becomes turbulence. Just as a river cut off from its source turns stagnant, a movement cut off from shared purpose loses its current.

What if the collapse of these migrations mirrors our own — our fragmentation into disconnected individuals, our decline in shared motion, shared story, shared direction? The world of people, too, is full of rare species: brilliant, inventive, intact — but increasingly solitary, increasingly still.

We have preserved the parts and lost the pattern.

But somewhere beneath the noise, the signal remains.

The Human Parallel: Our Lost Migrations

We once moved in rhythm too. Before there were borders or clocks, before we confused permanence with progress, our lives followed the slow choreography of seasons and stars. Movement wasn’t optional; it was how we learned. It braided language, memory, and kinship into one continuous flow.

Sedentary life brought continuity and comfort, but it also fixed us in place. Villages hardened into towns, towns into kingdoms, stories into property lines. We traded the migration of meaning for the management of things.

Now our migrations are mostly metaphorical — waves of protest, surges of digital attention, markets that rise and fall in pulses we can’t quite predict. We still crave movement at scale; it’s how we express shared consciousness. But our currents are fractured. The signals collide. We scroll instead of travel, react instead of respond. Motion without coherence isn’t movement. It’s noise.

You could feel the rhythm once — in the long marches and mass meetings that beat like a collective heart. The civil-rights movement was not just moral clarity; it was choreography. Every sermon, leaflet, and carpool carried its share of the current. The Montgomery Bus Boycott lasted 381 days — a sustained choreography of carpools, church meetings, and collective endurance that turned conviction into kinetic strategy.²⁴ When that current moved through cities from Montgomery to Memphis, it carved moral topography as surely as the salmon shapes a stream.

The labor movement was another kind of migration — bodies converging in mills, mines, and streets to transform solidarity into law. Its unions were networks in motion, where trust and time converted grievance into leverage.²⁵ Over the late twentieth century those networks thinned; strikes fell by roughly ninety percent, and wage growth decoupled from productivity.²⁶ The herd had not vanished, but it no longer moved.

Then came the digital uprisings — from Cairo to Zuccotti Park to Standing Rock — fast, luminous, and short-lived. Zeynep Tufekci calls them “movements without organizations”: capable of scale but not stamina.²⁷ They flash like swarms, brilliant in formation, fading when coherence collapses. The same platforms that amplify the call also dissolve the cadence. The current surges, then scatters. The 2016 encampment at Standing Rock became a living network — thousands converging along the Missouri River, coordinating supply, ceremony, and message as if the river itself had gathered them.²⁸ It was an ecological rhythm briefly reborn in human form.

Physicist Geoffrey West describes this tension in the mathematics of scale. In Scale, he found that cities and social systems, like organisms, obey power laws: double a city’s population, and innovation per person rises by roughly fifteen percent — but only if the network stays connected. Fragment it, and the advantage collapses.²⁹ The difference between a flourishing society and a stagnant one isn’t population; it’s circulation.

The same unraveling plays out in us. Movements, too, depend on rhythm — on people finding one another and moving in time, inspired by common purpose and a shared signal. When that rhythm breaks, power scatters. What once flowed through marches, meetings, and mutual care now leaks into the friction of distance and distraction. Long before the screen replaced the square, the rhythm had already faltered — the bowling leagues, union halls, and congregations that once carried civic life falling silent under the weight of long hours, economic strain, and fading trust.¹⁹ ²⁰

We are still moving, but the motion no longer means.

Rebecca Solnit calls this the moral physics of hope. In Hope in the Dark, she writes that movements are “not a lottery ticket you cling to; they’re an ax you break doors with.”³⁰ Hope isn’t optimism; it’s kinetic. It exists only when people act together, when shared motion turns uncertainty into possibility.

Hope moves.

The same rule that governs the locust swarm or the salmon run governs us: connection turns energy into order, motion into meaning. When we lose our migrations — whether of body, idea, or conscience — we don’t just stop moving forward. We forget how to move together at all.

Lessons from the Animal Kingdom (and Roald Dahl’s Fantastic Mr. Fox)

Nature, even in loss, remains the better teacher. Its lessons are rarely gentle, but they are never ambiguous: everything alive depends on something else moving. The fox survives because the hen runs. The forest breathes because the rivers rise. Stability, in the natural world, is not the absence of motion — it is motion in balance.

Roald Dahl’s Fantastic Mr. Fox is a children’s story, but its moral is ecological. Cornered by farmers and starving underground, the animals of the valley — foxes, badgers, moles, rabbits — tunnel together toward freedom. Predators and prey, rivals by nature, learn to dig as one. What begins as desperation becomes choreography.

This is the moral biology of movements: survival through coordination, difference as advantage, motion as resilience. The fox is not a hero because he is clever — he’s a hero because he catalyzes collective motion.

Leadership, in this sense, is not command but rhythm. The best leaders — human or otherwise — sense when to move and when to let others move through them. They create patterns, not control.

Ecologists have long shown that motion and diversity are inseparable. When wolves returned to Yellowstone, rivers changed course; when prairie species mix, productivity rises.³¹ ³² Abundance, it turns out, is not a number but a network — stability born from motion that links unlike lives.

Botanist Robin Wall Kimmerer calls that choreography a form of reciprocity — a system where giving and receiving are indistinguishable. In Braiding Sweetgrass, she writes that abundance “is born in relationship.”¹ The prairie that feeds the bison is shaped by their hooves; the forest that feeds the chestnut thrives on its generosity. Anthropologist Fikret Berkes calls this sacred ecology — management as mutual motion rather than control.³³ ⁷ Abundance, in this sense, is not the opposite of scarcity but the outcome of balance — of movement that circulates benefit through the whole.

Reciprocity is the choreography of survival.

Every enduring ecosystem is an orchestra of difference. Wolves and elk, fungi and tree, current and tide — each part incomplete without the others’ motion. Diversity without coordination is cacophony; coordination without diversity is monotony. The genius of the living world lies in its ability to make both coexist.

The same holds true for us. Collaboration that hoards energy collapses; collaboration that circulates it thrives. The most durable communities, like the healthiest ecosystems, are those that keep generosity in motion. When networks become self-feeding loops — when motion is sustained not by dominance but by reciprocity — they enter the moral physics of life itself. Economist Elinor Ostrom found the same in human commons: communities endure when trust and information circulate faster than depletion.³⁴

To move together is to remember that we are not separate from what we move through. And in that remembering lies the first hint of renewal.

The Return of the Herd — or the Hope of Renewal

Sometimes the world remembers.

It begins almost imperceptibly — a tremor underfoot, a flicker of silver in the current, a sapling reaching toward light. Motion returns in fragments first, then in waves. The choreography we thought extinct rehearses itself again.

In the tallgrass prairies of Kansas and South Dakota, bison are running again — not in millions, but in numbers large enough for the ground to tremble and for a child to feel the vibration through her boots. Tribal nations are restoring herds to ancestral lands, not as museum pieces but as kin returning to ceremony. The InterTribal Buffalo Council now coordinates more than eighty tribal herds across twenty states, restoring both ecological and cultural motion to the plains.³⁵

These herds are not just ecological projects. They are acts of repair — reviving food systems, spiritual practices, and the living continuity of treaty land.

In the Appalachian hills, chestnut saplings bred from century-old survivors reach toward the light, their leaves whispering the syntax of a lost forest. The American Chestnut Foundation’s restoration trials now span sixteen states, blending backcross breeding and gene-editing to resist blight — a form of assisted memory for the land itself.³⁷

In the Pacific Northwest, salmon have begun returning to rivers that were silent for generations. When Washington’s Elwha and Glines Canyon dams came down, salmon recolonized more than 140 kilometers of river within three years.⁴⁰ Marine nutrients once again began traveling inland through bear, eagle, and forest.

These are not spectacles.

They are memory taking root again.

Ecologist David Wilcove calls such moments “restorations of flow” — the point where motion re-enters the system and life remembers its choreography.³⁹ When the bison run, the prairie breathes. When the eels return, the rivers pulse. When a single chestnut flowers, the forest recalls its song.

Each is an ecological memory restored — not abundance yet, but direction.

Across North America, more than two thousand dams have been removed in the past half century, reopening tens of thousands of kilometers of river habitat.⁴¹ Nearly 800,000 bison now roam the continent, up from fewer than a thousand in 1889.¹⁰

These are not miracles.

They are rehearsals.

The world re-learning how to move.

And maybe, slowly, so are we.

Every time people march for justice, rebuild communities, or organize to protect the places they love, we echo that same rhythm — the migration impulse, the moral choreography of movement.

We are trying, however imperfectly, to remember what the living world never forgot:

Power is not accumulation but alignment.

Abundance is not excess but rhythm.

Movement — when shared — becomes meaning.

The herds, the runs, the forests — they are not gone.

They are waiting for the signal to move again.

So are we.

Because movement — not might — is the true measure of life.

Endnotes

Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass (Milkweed Editions, 2013), pp. 221–229.
Tim Flannery, The Eternal Frontier (Grove Press, 2001), pp. 3–7.
Dan Flores, American Serengeti (University Press of Kansas, 2016), pp. 38–45.
Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission, American Shad Benchmark Stock Assessment Report (2020).
Susan Freinkel, American Chestnut (University of California Press, 2007), pp. 33–38.
Joel Greenberg, A Feathered River Across the Sky (Bloomsbury USA, 2014), pp. 15–18.
Deborah Bird Rose, Reports from a Wild Country (University of New South Wales Press, 2004), pp. 54–59.
Flannery, The Eternal Frontier, p. 391.
David S. Wilcove, No Way Home (Island Press, 2008), p. 5.
U.S. Department of the Interior, Bison Conservation Report 2022, pp. 12–15.
U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service, Atlantic Eel Status Update (2024).
Jeffrey A. Lockwood, Locust (Basic Books, 2004), pp. 111–118.
Alan K. Knapp et al., “Fire and Grazing Interactions in Tallgrass Prairie,” Oecologia 153 (2007): 102–114; S. D. Fuhlendorf & D. M. Engle, “Restoring Heterogeneity on Rangelands,” BioScience 51 (2001): 625–632.
ASMFC, American Shad Benchmark Stock Assessment Report (2020), Table 2; NOAA Fisheries historical landings archive (accessed 2024).
Adam Rome, The Genius of Earth Day (Hill and Wang, 2013), pp. 1–12.
Robert J. Naiman et al., “Pacific Salmon, Nutrients, and the Dynamics of Northwest Ecosystems,” BioScience 52 (2002): 289–297.
Maine Department of Marine Resources, Kennebec River Anadromous Fish Restoration Summary 2023 (Augusta, ME, 2023).
Daniel Pauly, “Anecdotes and the Shifting Baseline Syndrome of Fisheries,” Trends in Ecology & Evolution 10 (1995): 430.
Robert D. Putnam, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community (Simon & Schuster, 2000), pp. 63–67.
Arlie Russell Hochschild, The Time Bind (Metropolitan Books, 1997), pp. 6–10.
Pew Research Center, “Trust and Distrust in America” (2019); “The State of Civic Engagement” (2021).
Zeynep Tufekci, Twitter and Tear Gas (Yale University Press, 2017), pp. 18–22.
David Brooks, “The Fragmented Society,” The Atlantic (January 2020).
Taylor Branch, Parting the Waters: America in the King Years 1954–63 (Simon & Schuster, 1988), pp. 136–168.
Sidney Tarrow, Power in Movement (Cambridge University Press, 1998), pp. 3–7.
U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, “Work Stoppages Summary” (2023); Economic Policy Institute, “Decoupling of Wages and Productivity” (2021).
Tufekci, Twitter and Tear Gas, pp. 32–39.
Sarah J. Bloom, “The Standing Rock Encampment and the Politics of Collective Presence,” Environmental Sociology 5 (2019): 233–245.
Geoffrey West, Scale (Penguin Press, 2017), pp. 345–352.
Rebecca Solnit, Hope in the Dark (Haymarket Books, 2016 ed.), pp. 14–16.
David Tilman et al., “Biodiversity and Ecosystem Stability in Grasslands,” Science 277 (1997): 1300–1302.
Cristina Eisenberg, The Wolf’s Tooth (Island Press, 2010).
Fikret Berkes, Sacred Ecology (Routledge, 2008), pp. 16–24.
Elinor Ostrom, Governing the Commons (Cambridge University Press, 1990); Brian Walker & David Salt, Resilience Thinking (Island Press, 2006).
InterTribal Buffalo Council, Program Overview 2024 (Rapid City, SD, 2024).
National Park Service, “Tribal Buffalo Restoration Program Expands,” NPS News Release (2023).
The American Chestnut Foundation, Restoration Strategy 2024, pp. 2–5.
The American Chestnut Foundation, Restoration Summary 2024 (Asheville, NC, 2024).
Wilcove, No Way Home, pp. 162–165.
U.S. Geological Survey, Elwha River Restoration Monitoring Summary 2023 (USGS Open-File Report 2023-1075).
American Rivers, 2023 Dam Removal Update (Washington, DC, 2023).