Economies Are Warped Reflections of Ecosystems

If ecosystems are what the planet is made of, then economies are the funhouse mirrors that wildly distort the principles the two have in common. A diversity of species fill all the niches in a natural ecosystem. Humans fill most of those roles in urban ecosystems. Humans fill all of those roles in economies.

It is said that nature abhors a vacuum. The elimination of apex predators, parasites, and competing species do not leave voids. Those niches are filled by human equivalents. This becomes abundantly clear in urban ecosystems, but we do not think of it that way. We prefer to think we are civilized, that we can somehow rise above the laws of nature, that in fact we do not even need natural systems to flourish. Should we regress to the village living in fear of lions, to an era before medications rendered disease merely a chapter in history books? No, of course not, but the marvels of our modern age have conveniently allowed us to imagine we are now immune to ecology.

We have further complicated matters by overlaying economics on top of nature, failing to acknowledge that economies are themselves a type of ecosystem, in which all the niches are filled by people. The currency of nature is energy. That energy is parceled out into three basic categories: organismal growth (metabolic), movement (kinetic), and rest (potential). The currency of economies is money. It, too, has several functions, including growth (interest and investment), movement (the marketplace), and rest (savings, retirement). The ideal form of economics would operate much like a natural ecosystem in terms of energy flow, but this is not what is happening. The predatory lenders, the parasitic scam artists, the diseases of poverty and addiction, among many other villains, derail economies time and time again. Capitalism and socialism alike are prone to rampant corruption, resulting in the hoarding of wealth (financial currency) that starves the system.

The energy of nature is requisite, finite, and circulates freely. The currency of man is arbitrary in the value it assigns to objects and resources, and it does not flow as freely as it should. "Precious metals" and "precious stones" are only so because we say they are. Nature assigns equal value to all of its components. Our human economies now look at everything from land to certain categories of humans in terms of whether they can produce financial profit. This is in direct conflict with natural laws and so we see deforestation, desertification, poverty, climate change, endangered species, pollution, invasive species, mass incarceration, and racism and genocide. These are just the intolerable conditions that come immediately and randomly to mind. You can probably add to the list.

Our final failure lies in a stunning denial of the fact that no matter what we do, we answer to the whims of planet Earth. We started to see the effects of our economic practices on nature shortly after the Industrial Revolution, but now that we are in the digital age, we believe that technology can save us. Computers and cell phones still rely on the extraction of natural resources, which leads not only to pollution with the disposal of the outmoded generation of products, but to ruthless competition to harvest materials for the components, among other complications we conveniently turn our heads away from.

Ultimately, the future of nature comes down to the willingness of Homo sapiens to exercise restraint, in our sheer numbers, and in our economic impact. Every species dreams of being in our shoes, able to eliminate mortality factors, eliminate competitors, reproduce astronomically, and thoroughly dominate the landscape. It is an impossible "success" story, however, when you erode the foundation of your castle. We will adapt and truly evolve only if we recognize value beyond financial profit. The marketplace is artificial. The Earth is not.