Resource limitation, economic inequality, and diversity

August 25, 2015 3:02 PM

Why Poor Places Are More Diverse : a lesson from ecosystem ecology.
posted by dialetheia (15 comments total)

This makes spreading global wealth thin across the entire world's population sound like a good thing.
posted by deathmaven at 4:44 PM on August 25, 2015

"necessity is the mother of invention"
posted by rebent at 5:23 PM on August 25, 2015

Thanks for the awesome video, which is likely to appear in some of my classes soon! Although I am an ecosystem ecologist, I am totally a North American ecosystem ecologist, so the kwongan is a completely new system to me. Very cool.
posted by hydropsyche at 5:41 PM on August 25, 2015 [1 favorite]

I think there's a lot of room for community ecology to inform macroeconomics (in the way that micro helped develop behavioral ecology), but the metaphor of poor soils = poor countries just seems really weak. How do they explain all of the oil-rich countries like Nigeria? Strong interactors and invasive species and other biotic interactions (i.e. between corporations and between states) seems like a much more useful way forward to unite the two fields. The extinction rate thing is such a stronger argument for explaining latitudinal diversity gradients than the edaphic one, and again it's not clear how the explosion of large corporations in the past hundred years is explained by varying times of development.
posted by one_bean at 6:27 PM on August 25, 2015 [1 favorite]

And further I think that the diversity/stability stuff could really help inform our discussion about big business! Like apply all of that knowledge about retention time in diverse systems to capital to explain how "inefficient" monetary systems could actually promote all sorts of beneficial things. And then also how low resistance systems respond to injections of nutrients. Ecosystem ecology could teach economists a lot.
posted by one_bean at 6:32 PM on August 25, 2015 [2 favorites]

Shoot sorry I didn't mean to be so negative about the video itself, which is cool, and I really like that they include refs at the bottom. Thanks for sharing!
posted by one_bean at 8:19 PM on August 25, 2015

This has been bothering me since I looked at it earlier. The video was cool, but the explanatory theory, as one_bean has pointed is really weak.

Diversity seems to drop when systems scale. You can hardly say Rome, Berlin, London, Paris, New York are poor areas, but historically are very diverse. As cities have scaled to countries, more economic specialization occurred. As we have recently scaled to global interconnectedness, you're seeing countries specializing economically. (Apologies, I'm less familiar with large historic Asian cities, but suspect you'd see the same there.)

I suspect that local networks that grew up organically no longer retain their initial value to their users, as that value is now provided by higher layers in the network.
posted by herda05 at 1:28 AM on August 26, 2015

The video seems to presume that its a good thing to have all these little businesses making a pittance, all doing basically the same thing. Rather than uniting them together into a larger entity that is more able to utilize economies of scale, become more efficent, thus requiring less man-hours and have less people work meaningless sales jobs.

For all the problems that exist with Amazon, are they not actually more efficent and hence wast less man-hours in total?
posted by mary8nne at 1:32 AM on August 26, 2015

I found the explanations of diversity and disturbance interesting, though both dry scrublands and tropical rainforests tend to be highly disturbed (by fire and other human manipulation, largely), just not necessarily glaciated, so I think there may be a more complex interchange at play than the video can show in a couple of minutes.

But the extension to human societies and trying to make a connection between poorer countries and these ecological patterns struck me as particularly weak and ahistorical. There is definitely an argument to be made about wealth and ecology (cf Guns, Germs, and Steel), but you can't do it without using the word "colonization" and pretend you are presenting a serious argument.

There is also a lot of need to unpack the term "diversity" and be clear about how diversity interplays with ecological benefit. A suburb may be more diverse than the native landscape it displaces because of all of the introduced plant and animal species, but few people would describe it as an ecological improvement, for example.
posted by Dip Flash at 5:18 AM on August 26, 2015 [2 favorites]

a larger entity that is more able to utilize economies of scale, become more efficent,

And is often owned by someone outside of the community, and where the profit resulting from efficiency and economies of scale is removed and used elsewhere. Part of the point in the film is that larger entities impose monocultures on their holdings, because it's more efficient. But from the perspective of the communities where the production occurs, there's a dangerous lack of diversity. Think about the Irish Famine for a non-corporate example, or the American Rust Belt and the recent history of Detroit.
posted by sneebler at 7:40 AM on August 26, 2015

This might be a stupid objection, but one of the few concrete mechanisms that the video talked about was the way that, with rich soils, dominant trees are able to grow tall and wide and block out the sunlight for all the little trees and plants.

Doesn't exactly the same thing happen with the rainforest canopy, though?
posted by clawsoon at 8:12 AM on August 26, 2015

In a nutrient-rich system, a single species will dominate the canopy. In the nutrient-poor rainforest, the canopy species diversity is incredibly high.
posted by hydropsyche at 2:41 PM on August 26, 2015

Okay, fair point. But another objection: The nutrient-rich ecosystems get that way because they get mediocre levels of rain and sunlight. Those ecosystems are too poor in those resources to fully exploit the nutrients in their soil, which is why the soil nutrients build up in the first place.

It's like calling an economy with lots of hoarded gold "rich". As with economies, richness is better measured via velocity of resource movement than via amount of static, unused resources.
posted by clawsoon at 7:08 AM on August 27, 2015

The explanation I have always heard for soil richness is based on age. Young soils in recently glaciated areas are richer. Soils in areas that have not been glaciated in eons are poorer.
posted by hydropsyche at 8:34 AM on August 27, 2015

IIRC, rainforests retain and cycle nutrients in climates where the soils are generally poor and (or because) rainfall tends to wash away nutrients. So in a sense they are similar to an economy that hoards gold - it's just that the gold is shared among all the trophic levels, and adding more diversity creates more capacity to store gold. Again, that's like a human economy with lots of smaller players, unlike the vertically integrated and similar sets of large players you'd find in the mall economies of Mississauga and urban Calgary. It does seem like the people who value growth over stability also value velocity because it lets them to capture more gold in a shorter time, allowing them to grow and become a dominant organization/ism.
posted by sneebler at 4:19 PM on September 1, 2015