Robert MacArthur was a doyen of ecology in the mid-twentieth century. He built a concept of nature based on the notion of natural balance. His models assumed that equilibrium existed, that plant and animal populations would remain close to their equilibrium amounts. Twenty years later, even his worst student realized that ecology based on a sense of balance must fail. The problem with traditional models is that their biggest disadvantage is the compromised assumption of linearity, while nature is much more complex. Did the corona virus tell us we could no longer work the old way?