Dark diversity

Dark diversity names the ecological influence of species that are no longer present: an absence that can still shape the living community around it. In a conversation about Amazonian ecosystems, Tom Paulin explains the concept through the image of a stone removed from the ground, its outline persisting in the hollow. The idea then resonates beyond ecology, connecting extinction and environmental change to grief, memory, and the work of restoring damaged forests.

The Concept and Its Image

Tom introduces dark diversity while discussing the other end of the Amazonian ecological spectrum from hyperdominant species: rarities and extinct species. He compares the concept to dark matter and to “absent presence.” When a sunken stone is pried from the ground, he explains, its shape remains visible in the hollow. Likewise, the disappearance of a rare plant may continue to affect the other plants and trees around it if that species had influenced their conditions. Ecological absence is therefore not simply a blank; it has a form and consequences that remain legible in what survives.

Jeanne asks whether a vanished plant might return if conditions change, and whether extinction is therefore necessarily permanent. Tom does not settle the question. He suggests they continue the discussion the next day, leaving the idea open rather than turning it into a claim that species will reappear. The uncertainty matters: dark diversity describes the continuing effects of absence, while the future of the absent species remains unresolved.

Ecological Knowledge and Change

The conversation places dark diversity in a novel where ecological understanding emerges through attentive observation and shared knowledge. Earlier, Mari teaches René Sel practical ways of fishing for eels: she makes three traps, supplies bait, and takes him to places likely to yield a catch. Her knowledge is grounded in the river and its seasons, and in the repeated practice through which René brings her eels. It is not abstract information detached from a particular place.

That practical knowledge contrasts with the assumptions recorded by Père Crème, who writes that Mi’kmaq people regard trees, plants, fish, moose, and bears as equals, and that they resist the French demand to organize life around farming and human uses of nature. His account also records his difficulty understanding their relations with other beings: he admits that he sometimes feels they are teaching him. Read beside Tom’s later ecological discussion, this contrast foregrounds how different systems of knowledge interpret forests and other species. The novel’s ecological thinking is not limited to modern scientific language; it also attends to knowledge formed through sustained relationships with plants, animals, and place.

The contrast appears again in Kuntaw’s relationship with Beatrix. He recognizes that she needs him to help her understand her Mi’kmaw inheritance, and takes her into the forest to teach her how to read animal tracks, seasonal signs, plant and tree changes, and other connected indications. He describes the forest and ocean shore as joined by countless fine threads. This instruction presents ecological understanding as the ability to perceive relationships, not merely to name individual resources. Dark diversity similarly asks the reader to notice a relationship through its absence: what is missing may still be shaping what remains.

Grief as Absent Presence

Tom’s ecological idea becomes personal when the narrative turns to his memories of Afghanistan and the comrades he lost. He feels alienated from civilian life and continues to experience a bond with the men whose shared experiences outsiders could not understand. He imagines that absence as a kind of dark diversity: the lost members of his former group remain part of the shape of his life, even though they are gone. The comparison does not equate human loss with ecological extinction; it gives the abstract concept an emotional analogue, showing how a missing presence can continue to organize the lives of those who remain.

At Seeley Lake, Tom joins a crew working in an old-growth larch forest while struggling with suicidal despair. The narrative describes how Indigenous people had burned underbrush to encourage grassy openings for deer, while later thickets of Douglas fir crowded out larch sprouts. The crew burns accumulated fuel around the old larches, and thousands of seedlings rise the following year. Tom touches a young tree and thinks of one of his lost friends as being inside it. As he plants seedlings in other forests, he sees his dead comrades in the young trees and finds that the work eases his grief. Restoration does not erase the loss; it gives his continuing bond with the dead a place in the living forest.

Narrative and Thematic Significance

The term gathers the novel’s ecological and personal strands without reducing one to the other. In the scientific conversation, a vanished plant may leave a hollow whose influence persists in the surrounding ecosystem. In Tom’s experience, dead comrades remain present in memory and in the meaning he gives to the larch seedlings he plants. Across both strands, absence is consequential: the present carries traces of what has disappeared.

Dark diversity also sharpens the novel’s attention to environmental change. The forest is not simply a passive backdrop or an inexhaustible supply of useful material. Its species shape one another, and the loss of a species can affect the community beyond the moment of disappearance. Tom’s work with the restoration crew makes that principle concrete: changing the conditions around old larches is followed by a surge of seedlings. The idea therefore joins ecological uncertainty to practical care, while its connection to grief shows how recovery can acknowledge what cannot simply be brought back.