There is a wilderness island in Lake Superior that holds great lessons about our economy, unemployment, and what we should expect from our jobs.
Isle Royale is a 210-square-mile north woods island. It is the third largest island in the contiguous United States yet there are no roads and no permanent human inhabitants. It is just about as close to true wilderness as you can find in this country.
Isle Royale supports dynamic and mutually dependant populations of wolves and moose – wolves are the only predators that the island’s moose face and the moose make up 90% of the wolves diet. The populations of the moose and the wolves fluctuate relative to each other. The (admittedly over-simplified) interaction works something like this: when the moose thrive there is more food for the wolves, which makes them healthier and when they’re healthier they reproduce more successfully. Larger wolf packs eat more moose, which decreases the moose population. Fewer moose means less food for the wolves, which decreases their population. Fewer predators mean more moose survive and their population grows again. Of course there are other factors involved such as the weather, vegetation (moose food), and ticks (a major health problem for the moose) but the dynamics in the relationship are clear.
This interdependency has been continuously studied for over 50 years making it a classic story of the relationship between predator and prey. Through this study we’ve learned a great deal about “carrying capacity”. The Global Development Research Center defines carrying capacity as “the number of individuals who can be supported in a given area within natural resource limits, and without degrading the natural social, cultural and economic environment for present and future generations”. But it’s clear that “the number” of individual wolves and moose supported on Isle Royale varies in a complex equation relative to other populations on which they depend. Carrying capacity is not stable and it’s not predictable.
To the wolves of Isle Royale, the island is their entire world. Moose make up the majority of the wolf economy and hunting is the wolves’ job. There are numerous small employers on the island but the biggest employer in wolf world is Moose Incorporated (General Moose? MooseSoft? International Business Moose?). When production at Moose, Inc. drops, consumption in wolf world drops as a result. From the wolves’ point of view the carrying capacity of Isle Royale fluctuates. The wolves can’t establish an ever-growing economy; they can’t even establish a stable economy.
So, to understand the real meaning of carrying capacity we need to remember that food is scarcer in winter than in summer and harder to come by in drought years than when times are flush. It changes as a result of dynamic interactions that are out of the control of the participants. When the economy falters jobs go away. Carrying capacity drops.
Our human economy is built around the expectation of steady, endless growth. It’s not designed to work well with the fluctuating production and consumption that result from the cycles of the natural world. We don’t like the kind of population fluctuations that the moose and wolves on Isle Royale experience (I expect that the wolves and moose aren’t crazy about it either). We like our growth steady and predictable.
On top of that, we also care about other people (okay, that’s an overgeneralization. I’ll take that up in another post). When large numbers of people die because of famine or disease (akin to a drop in the moose population), we are horrified. We want to help. We send aid. (Is it possible to suggest without sounding inhuman that these populations had exceeded their local carrying capacity? Rather than sending aid to help more people survive, perhaps only to die later in another famine or plague caused in part by that increased population, is the better solution to encourage social changes that lead to limiting population growth?)
It is true that technology has allowed us to artificially increase the carrying capacity of our environment almost everywhere we live, which has led us to increase our populations well beyond their natural limits. However, carrying capacity is diminished by the effects of increased population: as an environment (or an economy) is degraded, its carrying capacity shrinks further leaving it unable to support a population that could formerly have lived there on a sustainable basis.
Dana Meadows says that a “… state of global equilibrium could be designed so that the basic material needs of each person on earth are satisfied and each person has an equal opportunity to realize his or her individual human potential”. The moose and the wolves show us, though, that equilibrium is not the same thing as stability. Equilibrium, when considering the interdependencies of a biologically diverse environment and the variations (natural and human caused) in climate and seasons, implies that populations (and economies) will fluctuate over time. Including ours.
Here, from our vantage point half way through 2009, we see unprecedented unemployment; “iconic employers”, the very symbols of American commerce, are drying up and blowing away leaving thousands without work. Rather than bemoan the very natural (and uncontrollable) ebb and flow of our economy, we should put our efforts and our resources into changing society’s expectations of and our relationship to work. Economic “command and control” is beyond our ability. We can’t control our economy any more than the wolves can control the moose population. We must learn to adapt to economic forces that are out of our control. More on that in future posts.
Postscript: If you’re not from the upper Midwest you may never have given much thought to Lake Superior, which is the largest fresh water lake in the world (by surface area). Much of the beauty of this region remains unspoiled simply because it’s not on the way anywhere. Spending time on Lake Superior and visiting Isle Royale should really be on your “must do before I die” list.
