In the 1890s, a University of Chicago botanist named Henry Chandler Cowles took a walk along the Indiana Dunes on the southern shore of Lake Michigan and noticed something that would reshape ecology. The dunes formed a gradient: nearest the lake, only beach grass. A few hundred meters inland, cottonwoods. Further still, pine forests. And deepest inland, towering oak-maple-beech forests that had stood for centuries. Cowles realized he wasn't just looking at different plants. He was looking at time, laid out in space. Each zone represented a stage in a process ecologists would call succession — a predictable sequence where one community of organisms builds the conditions for the next, then gets replaced by it. If you've spent any time watching markets evolve, that sequence should sound familiar. The Pioneer's Paradox Pioneer species are the first organisms to colonize barren ground. After a volcanic eruption, a glacier retreating, a wildfire clearing a mountainside — pioneers show up before anyone else.…