48. Allocating resources - how do ecosystems do it?
I have written several posts that conclude, in one way or another, that when decisions are made in markets, the needs of societies and of ecosystems are underserved or ignored completely. Many mainstream economists argue that the market is the most efficient way to allocate resources and without this mechanism we would be badly served. In this post, I want to reverse the question and ask: How do ecosystems allocate resources? Would the results really be as bad as these economist suggest?
There is no God or single planner in an ecosystem. There are: organisms with their own needs and? wants; more or less competition between them; more or less cooperation amongst them; and, a set of background conditions that act as enablers and/or constraints. So far, so like a market.
Before the detail, a reminder of Ken Cordell’s definition of ecological value:
“We define ecological value generally as the level of benefits that the space, water, minerals, biota, and all other factors that make up natural ecosystems provide to support native life forms. Ecological values can accrue to both humans and nonhumans alike.”
In one sense, ecosystems allocate energy among their members. The “hand” that makes the “allocation” is just as invisible as Adam Smith’s. Ecosystems are organised into different types of energy producers and consumers. Primary producers, called autotrophs, capture energy from the sun and convert it into biomass through photosynthesis. Herbivores consume plants and store energy in their bodies. Carnivores and omnivores predate herbivores and other carnivores and omnivores. In this way, energy goes to the top of the food chain. Decomposers, or detritivores such as fungi and bacteria break down dead organisms recycling energy and matter back into the ecosystem. Energy losses occur at each level, so energy becomes scarcer as it moves up the chain and there are fewer organisms at higher levels.
Human beings are among the organisms at the top of this chain. We are in the class of organisms that is the most powerful but also the most vulnerable to change. We have dealt with our high energy needs ingeniously, supplementing our needs for energy from living organic matter (or of the recently deceased) with the energy locked away in ancient stores. Not only that, we have found new ways to use them that has helped us to dominate other species and other aspects of ecosystems. Fire changed food and nutrition forever. Fossil fuels, which used to look like a positive, one-way bet, brought wider benefits. Now, we are aware of their shortcomings as well.
And it is through our cognitive abilities that we have gone beyond the resource allocation methods of traditional low-cognition ecosystems. Seen in this way, the resource allocation systems of economics are a human subset of ecosystem resource allocation, one in which:
To say that we are damaging or destroying ecosystems might conjure up the image of someone doing something to an environment that is independent of us. To see ourselves as separate is to create a distance between ourselves and the environment that does not exist. We are an indivisible part of many ecosystems. The damage or destruction we cause will catch up with us sooner or later.
Resources, such as food, water, space and light, are limited. Competition and cooperation, within and between species, act in all ecosystems to allocate them. You could argue that humans are just better competitors than the other species and that our current dominance doesn’t really matter; there has always been a more dominant species and now it just happens to be us. But there are several features of our dominance that should make us pause for thought:
In the days when human cognition didn’t dominate the landscape, resource allocation was guard-railed, creating a kind of super homeostatic balance. When we talk about homeostatic balance, it is not like looking at a pair of finely balanced weighing scales. It concerns staying within the bounds of safety, a margin of error. If one species stepped over the guard rail to outcompete others, automatic feedback loops forced it back within the bounds of ecosystem reality.
I accept that there are times when this can be painful for humans. Plagues of locusts were literally biblical and they persist today, but modern methods can slow the spread, reduce the impact and ultimately stop a plague. For most of human history we had to wait until their expansion became limited by distance, climate and the availability of food. However, today, in the short- and medium-terms, humans have found ways to defy some of these laws of nature.
Pesticides can eradicate insect pests, for example. But such measures often have unintended consequences. Many of our pesticides are not so well targeted that they kill only the insects we consider to be pests; they kill the beneficial ones too. One of the consequences of this is a decline in pollinating insects that has been calculated to have reduced fruit crop production by at least 3%. Another example of short-term gain and longer-term pain.
Massive change in ecosystems doesn’t have to take a lot of time. In the age of the dinosaurs, giant meteorites disturbed the balance of life on earth. They changed the path of ecological succession, enabling different species to colonise and modify the environment. A tragedy for dinosaurs; an opportunity, initially, for ants and fungi, eventually for humans and many others.
In our efforts to become more secure, to have more abundance, we are changing the biosphere. We are literally moving mountains. And we are covering vast areas in mono crops, burning huge amounts of ancient forest and woodland, changing substances from benign but useless into profitable and poisonous. We are not only changing succession paths but we are also changing the pathways of evolution and selection.
Until relatively recently, the main influences on natural selection were environmental happenstance. Mutations were more or less random. The features that were successful were “chosen” by the goodness of fit of the mutated versions of organisms with the changing environment. Academics from historians to economists have claimed that one of the biggest changes to the human way of life was the introduction of farming. It made us invest in the future in particular ways. It also led us to select various plants and animals as being more important than others. We selected those that were a good source of food, reproduced easily, were less prone to disease and were easily manageable.
In the 18th century we learned how to create plant hybrids rather than merely selecting the organisms with the most desirable characteristics, as defined by humans, for selective breeding, but it was in the 20th century that human intervention in the breeding of other organisms exploded. Statistical techniques, advanced hybridisation for specific characteristics (higher yield, better disease resistance etc.) and, most dramatically, genetic engineering and modification transformed agriculture enabling more people to be fed than ever before.
Here is one standard view of the aspect of the evolutionary process that I have focused on in this post:
“Over long periods, natural selection drives resource allocation by favouring organisms with traits that allow them to exploit available resources more efficiently.”
It’s not only about efficiency of resource exploitation. Indeed, we may be too efficient in resource exploitation. In chasing efficiencies, we may destroy an environment/ecosystem that we ultimately depend on. Nor is it solely about natural selection. We are the only species that interferes directly and intentionally with the genetic future. A beaver builds a dam to make the environment better for itself and its offspring. It is deliberately changing the environment to its advantage. Our use of our environment including other organisms is more instrumental and more wholesale, and it must come with a price tag, even if it is not one that economists recognise until it is too late.
Reducing biodiversity in all forms, whether in complete or local extinctions, varietal reduction or loss, damage or elimination of habitats, and the impacts of hybridisation and genetic engineering, many still unknown, have fed the world and cost the earth. A resource allocation system that puts money first and foremost and environmental needs as a footnote is a recipe for disaster.
In summary: