The cosmopolitan ecologist

One of the oddest things to have occurred after the dramatic market crash of the last few days is the spectacle of plenty of news commentators claiming it shows the importance of the US economy. The idea is that since the collapse of the US housing bubble and our stock market affected other economies, we therefore must matter to them.

Apart from seeming rather juvenile (a point which Jon Stewart scathingly satired), this argument displays an ignorance of history. Of course, it is clear that as the largest economy in the world we can influence other countries. But there are plenty examples of the converse: smaller countries collapse, affecting us. The collapse of the Asian Tigers in the late 90s affected many US stocks (albeit far from all of them). And once those economies collapsed many US and other foreign firms moved in to find bargain deal in the damaged economy. At no time did American commentators proudly proclaim that this showed that Asia was important to the US. The main discussion was about the nature of the globalized economy and the flaws in the Asian economies (whether real or perceived).

Much the same is happening now, just on a bigger scale. Systematic problems in the US economy have caused some foreign investors to pull out, triggering a fall in the stock market. Later, once the dust has cleared, I’m sure some savvy firms (both foreign and domestic) will move in looking for some bargains. For those particular firms, it may be an opportunity to make money. However, why in the world would anyone regard this collapse as a good thing for the average American citizen?

Posted by ecologist at 03:40 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

It has been an odd week in climate change and presidential politics. John Edwards made an excellent speech where he referred to climate change as “the great moral test of our generation.” And so it is, for what humanity does in the next couple decades will determine the climate our grandchildren inherit. In the same week Edwards gave this powerful address, Hillary Clinton got caught staging a question about climate change at a campaign event in Iowa. What’s worse, her answer to the canned question wasn’t even that inspired or well written!

See the rest here

 

Posted by ecologist at 04:21 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

It’s always great to pick up a new work by an author and realize he’s done exactly what you hoped he would do. Such was my feeling when I started reading Joseph Stiglitz’s new book, written with Andrew Charlton.

In Stiglitz’s last work, entitled Making Globalization Work, he mostly rehashed criticism from Globalization and its Discontents, leading to my bad review. Basically, he detailed why current patterns of globalization aren’t working, and stopped there.

Finally, in the most recent piece, Fair Trade for All, Stiglitz gets down to details: If he were benevolent emperor of the world, how would he run the WTO and the next round of negotiations? The book actually ventures into lots of messy, policy-wonkish details, so readers without a basic knowledge of economics might be a bit lost. All this messiness is actually kind of liberating to read: an economist actually arguing (with data) that particular countries and cultures require particular development strategies, not some grand philosophy a la “The Washington Consensus”. It reminds me a bit of Jeffery Sachs’ concept of “clinical economics”.

I can’t pretend to pass judgment on all of Stiglitz and Charlton’s suggestions, for I’m not an economist. The central argument is that in a true “Development Round” of WTO negotiations, proposals should maximize gains to poorer countries. Provocatively, they argue that “all WTO members commit themselves to providing free market access in all good to all developing countries poorer and smaller than themselves.” This is, of course, the complete opposite of the current unjust trading system. As a corollary, they present good evidence that it is mainly via increased South-South trade that least developed countries can lift themselves up.

At one point in a parenthetical statement they express regrets about the inclusion of “the infamous Chapter 11 of Nafta” (i.e., foreign firms can sue and win if a country reduces their profit via a regulation, even a totally reasonable one), essentially implying that trade negotiators put it in with Stiglitz and others approving. Anyone out there know if this historically substantiated?

Posted by ecologist at 04:38 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

I was recently in Washington, DC, and wandered into onto one of my favorite bookshops, Kramer Books and Afterwords. I was planning on just window-shopping, but was drawn to Joseph Stiglitz’s new book, “Making Globalization Work.” An ambitious title, to be sure, but having loved his previous book (“Globalization and its Discontents”) I had hope he might ambition.

I came away perhaps a bit disappointed, because perhaps 2/3 of the book is just a restatement of the problems with the current corporate-led globalization, territory well-mined in Stiglitz’s previous book. Perhaps this amount of repetition was inevitable, to make the book a self-contained work that anyone in the lay public would be able to understand.

The remaining 1/3 does contain some tantalizing suggests how to reform the global economic order. Some highlights:

• He echoes the common World Social Forum phrase, “Another World is Possible.”
• He argues for measures of development other than GDP, what he calls a comprehensive approach to development.
• He argues for the right of developing economies to protect infant industries.
• He argues for looser intellectual property rights in developing countries.
• Most boldly, he suggests that countries cease to hold reserves only in US currency, but instead keep reserves in a basket of investments.

All in all, an excellent book. If I were to offer a mild criticism, it would be that the environment I given only 26 pages out of a 358 page book, even though ecosystem services are arguably the single greatest market failure in the global economy.

Posted by ecologist at 08:56 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

I’ve been lucky enough to be able to take some extended time off to visit France. There’s something wonderfully relaxed about the pace of life here. Partly it’s because it’s summer, and every one in France (excluding some unfortunate poor sans papiers) is either on vacation or will be soon. The average worker here gets around 4 weeks vacation, more than double the average US worker. Partly the relaxed pace is because the French work a rather short work week, leaving plenty of time for social interactions with friends and political arguments over coffee. Most French work a nominal 35 hour week, although in practice many work longer for several weeks in a row and then take a long weekend. This contrasts with the nominal US 40 hour week, which in fact seems far longer for all the salaried professionals I knows. Surprisingly (here’s a statistic to drive Thomas Friedman crazy), the French are around 5% more productive per hour of work than the US-they just work a lot less, some 40% less over their lifetimes.

This all sounds idyllic, and in a very real way it is (I would dare say, at the risk of offending my countrymen, that the average Frenchman enjoys his life more than the average American), but I must confess that from perspective it seems a bit slothful. A friend joked that my reaction is just residual guilt from my “Protestant work ethic,” as Max Weber famously put it. Maybe so. In America, a man is defined by his success in his career. This leads to tremendous overwork, and isn’t a very pleasant way to live life, but it’s democratic, in a sense: anyone can, in theory, fight their way up. Americans protest that we want to “work to live,” and not “live to work” as we so often do, but the truth is that deep in my heart I cannot shake the notion that my work is an integral part of my life.

Posted by ecologist at 03:36 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

I’ve been thinking a lot recently about the difference between absolute and relative poverty, and how ecologists often don’t differentiate adequately between the two when we discuss the challenge of achieving environmental sustainability. Absolute poverty is the absence of the essentials of life, such as adequate food, clean drinking water, sanitary facilities, and basic health care. Relative poverty is being significantly poorer than the average in a society but still having access to the essentials of life.

The cause of my cogitating has been Jeffery Sachs excellent book, The End of Poverty, in which he presents a concrete program to eliminate absolute poverty worldwide. Sachs’ program is eminently achievable in economic terms, if the statesmen of the world have the political will. It’s also a program that will not contribute substantially to the environment pressure placed on the world, and if properly implemented could even reduce it.

More challenging for environmentalists is the continued rising consumption of the already wealthy countries, for many (but not all) of the goods consumed have significant negative environmental externalities. As the mean affluence rises in a society, so does the conception of relative poverty: owning a car is now considered a necessity in the US, but was once considered a luxury. While many environmentalists are deeply concerned about the economic inequalities that give rise to relative poverty, we are worried about the prospect of continued rising consumption levels in already wealthy countries, for unless consumption patterns shift greatly this rising consumption will negatively impact the environment.

Environmentalists should be very clear about this distinction: there are no ecological limits to solving absolute poverty, and the world should move rapidly to do so, but there are ecological limits on that rate of many types of consumption in wealthy countries.

Posted by ecologist at 10:44 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

There has been much buzz in the media this past week about the relatively sharp spike in oil prices. I’ve been frustrated by how the majority of coverage has focused on the (very real) possibility of oil company manipulation, as if we’re searching for a convenient villain in the process. The Bush Administration’s policy response to the price spike has been storyline #2, even though truthfully there’s little a president can do to affect oil prices over the short-term. Sadly, there’s been little coverage of how U.S. oil prices compare to the other G7 counties (they are much lower), except for a brief fact check I saw on CNN International (and even that focused on other countries’ high taxes, without explaining the good policy reasons for them). Even worse, there’s been no coverage of the likely long-term trend in oil prices over the next decade or two. Global supply will remain relatively constant, or at best slightly increase; this is not because of technological limitations like a lack of refinery capacity, but simply because there’s a finite supply of the stuff and what’s left is harder to extract. Global demand, on the other hand, will continue to grow rapidly, as nations like China and India industrialize.

The clear implication is that oil prices will continue to rise over the long-term. In this context, the current U.S. government policy of seeking to maintain steady, low prices seems quixotic. It would be far more honest if the U.S. committed itself to expecting steady 5% annual increases in oil prices. The U.S. economy could absorb that sort of gradual annual increase in prices, as we all slowly adapted, whereas a rapid huge price spike could be very damaging.

Yet the press mentions none of these weighty issues. This seems to be a general problem: the media focus on particulars, not on the underlying trend. Global warming is another great example. There is much discussion of whether this or that hurricane was caused by global warming, an attribution that’s almost scientifically impossible to make. In contrast, the long-term, gradual trends (e.g., glacial melt and sea level rise) that keeps us scientists literally up at night, get little press (Andy Revkin being a notable exception).

Maybe this is just human psychology. We focus on what is nearby in space and time, and forget what is distant. It may also be the failure of environmental scientists like myself to find a good, compelling narrative. It’s just challenging with such a grand process: we’re recreating Noah’s flood by burning fossilized sunlight! Perhaps the best summary was what was once said by Herbert Stein, a conservative economist who served under Nixon and Ford: “What can’t go on forever, won’t.”

Posted by ecologist at 07:19 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

I’ve been reading Amartya Sen’s marvelous book “Development at Freedom,” and I’ve found it revelatory, not for its novelty, but its clarity. Properly understood, Sen’s definition of “development” is functionally the same as the environmental community’s sacred goal, “sustainable development.” Basically, Sen argues that true development is the increase in the capability, or freedom, to live the way one would wish to live. He categorizes five instrumental freedoms: Political freedom, the ability to participate in the exercise of political power (Cicero’s definition); Adequate economic facilities to allow people to achieve their monetary goals; Social opportunities, arrangements that society makes for education, health care, and other essentials; Transparency guarantees, “the freedom to deal with one another under guarantees of disclosure and lucidity”; Protective security, such as minimal unemployment benefits.

If you stop to think about it, this is the world that “sustainable development” is supposed to create. We environmentalists have simply added three constraints to Sen’s freedom: there must be inter-generational equity, so that future generations have similar levels of freedom as today’s generation; there must be social justice, so that within a society the least free person has adequate freedom; and there must be trans-frontier justice, so that there is adequate freedom in all societies. I believe all three of these qualifiers are implicit in Sen’s writing, and in Rawls’ writing for that matter.

Despite the simplicity and beauty of this argument, I am well aware that it will make many of my fellow environmental scientists cringe. There is a fear that all this talk is too vague, and far too difficult to quantify. More and more though I think this can be overcome: look at the effectiveness of the UN’s Human Development Index, for example. I suspect many environmentalists also cringe because Sen’s definition of “development” explicitly has a political component. If the environmental mainstream really adopted it, it would be much harder for environmentalists to hid behind the vagueness of the term “sustainable development”, and work in authoritarian regimes like the Congo (Kishasha).

Posted by ecologist at 09:26 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

There is a malaise among United States environmentalists. We remain proud of our past victories, and certainly hope to maintain these victories into the future. The Clean Air Act has dramatically reduced SO2 air pollution in the US, substantially decreasing respiratory problems and toxic smog. The elimination of lead from gasoline has saved thousands of children from mental impairment. Even today, environmentalists make progress on some issues: the amount of wild land protected from development steadily increases every year. Still, there’s a deep sense of fear about the future, a sense of powerlessness, like the environmental movement is being derailed by something far more powerful and fundamental than mere anti-environmentalism.

Within the US, the rise of the neo-conservatives to power in the Republican Party means that little progress has been made on any environmental issue since 1994. There seems to be a prevailing belief not that limited and well-run government is wise, but that all governmental action is inevitably flawed. As Grover Norquist put it, the goal is to get government small enough to “drown it in the bathtub.” The obvious corollary is that any government action to protect or conserve the environment. In the limit, this argument could be used to get rid of almost any law: land-use regulation, the Endangered Species Act, the prohibition against illegal dumping of toxic waste, whatever. What’s new here is the existence of an anti-government tendency in the Republican Party- that’s been around for decades- but the shift from a focus on efficient, limited government to a hatred of all government. And so, we environmentalists find out movement in the US derailed, for reasons that have very little to do with the environment itself and much to with the Republican Party’s masterful political strategy over the past few decades.

The most significant environmental problems are now global, not national: Global warming, biodiversity loss, sustainable development, and urbanization are all challenges of the highest order to civilization, and must be dealt with by the international system. And yet US environmentalists find ourselves impotent on this stage as well. The neo-conservative vision seems to be that America’s military and economic power must never be limited by anything, anytime. The clear corollary for the environment is that no environmental treaty should constrain US activities, ever. This is why we can’t sign the Convention on Biological Diversity, or the Kyoto Protocol, or anything else- to sign would be to admit that there was something worthwhile about international governance. Again, there has always been a streak of isolationism in the Republican Party, but in its new form the idea is taken much further: the US is a new empire, and should act like one. And so again, we environmentalists fin the US simply absent from all the international environmental activity, for reasons that have little to do with the CBD or any other treaty, and a lot to do with the invasion of Iraq and the US opposition to the International Criminal Court. What, then, is an environmental scientist like myself to do? All the issues on which I could provide useful scientific input are non-issues, taken off the table, and in truth I feel increasingly useless. I can keep doing my science, but it doesn’t matter one damn bit as long as these larger political tenets of neo-conservatism stay unchallenged.

Posted by ecologist at 09:24 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

One of things that ecologists and conservations spend a lot of time worrying about is the process of “parcelization”, which is rampant worldwide. Parcelization is just an infelicitous term used to describe the process by which one parcel of land is split into many smaller pieces of land. It is seen as the first step in a sequence (or spiral) of events that inevitably reduce the ecosystem services that land provides to humanity. First, after some triggering event a large parcel is subdivided legally into a set of smaller parcels, whose boundaries are set by the landowner and the relevant town or county planning commission (in some states, like Massachusetts, landowners have free reign when it comes to how to subdivide their land). The triggering event is often the death of the previous landowner, which usually brings the land into the hand of his descendants, who are often interested in maximizing the sale value of the property by subdivision. Second, these smaller parcels are generally sold to a developer, who builds a set of houses that often perforate intact habitat. What’s worse, from an ecologist’s perspective, is that these small parcels are usually too small to be managed in an ecologically beneficial way- it is impossible to manage for forest resources in a sustainable way on a parcel below a certain size, just as it is impossible to use controlled burns to minimize the risk of catastrophic fire, just as it is difficult to provide habitat to many wide-ranging species. Third, landscapes almost never go back toward a more intact state, but instead the process of parcelization continues further.

I’ve realized recently, however, that there’s an ideological split between this way of talking about land and the old progressive ideal of land ownership. Thomas Jefferson and others propounded agrarianism, the desirability of every citizen having a small farm that provides a measure of self-sufficiency and economic stability. When freed slaves were promised the proverbial (and apocryphal) “40 acres and a mule”, the motivation was similar, to strengthen U.S. democracy by having all citizens having some basic landholdings. In most developed countries today, agrarianism seems irrelevant to the mostly industrial and postindustrial world we live in, but the ideal lives on in a sense in the quest of the U.S. to make sure home ownership is available to a broad spectrum of Americans. In developing countries, of course, land reform remains a contentious topic, and one that I believe must be addressed in countries where old colonial systems of concentrated land ownership persist.

Given this progressive pedigree of the ideal of an equitable distribution of land, ecologists and conservationists must be careful with how they talk about parcelization. We must state honestly what needs are driving increasing numbers of Americans to leave dense urban regions for less dense suburban or exurban regions:
1. Many people are simply moving away from cities in a quest to find an affordable way to own a house.
2. They are seeking access to recreational amenities, like a walk in the woods or the babble of a brook, that are often absent from urban settings.
3. They are fleeing negative aspects of urban like, like higher crime and bad public schools, by going out to the suburbs or exurbs.
Our goal as conservationists must be offer political alternative that satisfy these needs with a minimum of parcelization. These must be offered to the body politic not as solutions to the “evils of parcelization”, which will be inevitably portrayed as elitist, but as ways to more fully satisfy the needs of Americans while preserving the environment. After all, Thomas Jefferson did not present agrarianism primarily because of some mystical quality of the soil (although there’s a bit of that in his writings), but because ownership of small farms led to political opportunity and democratic power. In today’s world, owning a house on a 40 acre ranchette doesn’t bring any more political power to the owner than owning a smaller house on a ½ acre lot.

I can think of two ways that conservationists can begin to address the problem of parcelization. First, we need to make urban areas more livable places. If home ownership can be made more practical to urban dwellers, crime can be reduced, and schools can be improved that much of the things pushing young parents out of the city would cease. There is much work on this front by people pushing affordable housing agendas, etc., which is wonderful. Second, in more rural locations, we need to offer more viable legal means for a set of people to share ownership in a property without legally subdividing the land. For example, states could change their subdivision laws so that instead of having an absolute minimum lot size, an increased number of (small) lots could be created if they were clustered on one edge of a parcel. The remainder of the parcel would go under a conservation easement, and be open for recreational use by all members of the community.

Posted by ecologist at 09:15 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

There’s been much discussion recently about the U.S. “bringing democracy” to Iraq. I got curious about the track-record of U.S. military interventions (my list below is taken from Wikipedia). Being a scientist, I looked for some quantitative data on the level of democracy in each country. This is an obviously difficult thing to quantify, but the data from Freedom House are useful and reasonably objective and reproducible. They use a 7-point scale for two different metrics, political rights (PR) and civil liberties (CL), with 1 representing the highest and 7 the lowest level of freedom. So, for the record, here are the U.S. interventions since 1972 (when the Freedom House data start), the rankings before the intervention, the change in rankings immediately after the intervention (positive numbers = more freedom), and the change in rankings 5-years after the intervention.

 

 

The net change is barely positive, with on average no-change in the PR score and a 1 point move toward more constitutional liberties. 5-years after the interventions, on average the countries have also moved 1 point toward more political rights. The next thing that should jump out at you is how variable the list is. Chile stands out as the single worst U.S. intervention, as the U.S. sponsored coup substantially reduced democracy. Grenada and Panama stand out as countries that significantly increased democracy after a U.S. intervention. Now, of course, this kind of crude analysis cannot replace a detailed analysis by historians of what actually occurred in each of these countries after the intervention, but I think the data capture the broad patterns of change very well.

To put this all in perspective, below are the average scores by region over the last two decades. There’s a general trend toward more democracy worldwide, with the exception of the Middle East and North Africa. Most of the changes are small (a point or two shift), but given that they involve hundreds of countries, they make the effect of U.S. interventions on democracy seem very minor indeed.

Posted by ecologist at 09:03 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

I’ve been thinking a lot recently about the United States’ general disdain for the social welfare systems of Europe and Canada, which we Americans view as bureaucratic and stultifying. And there are serious trade-offs involved with maintaining a substantial safety net, as any economist will tell you. Still, I’ve been shocked to realize that some commentators now go far beyond simply itemizing the costs and benefits of different government programs. For example, John Tierney argues in a New York Times column that the fact that Americans are living longer, and hence living longer past the standard retirement age, is a serious problem. He doesn’t mention some of the economic problems caused by this trend (e.g., the threat to social security’s solvency), but instead argues that work itself is virtuous, in part because it helps us stay competitive in a globalized world, but in larger part because it keeps us from being slothful and lazy. This general attitude is now pervasive among economic commentators, from Thomas Friedman to the entire editorial page of the Wall Street Journal. What is shocking to me is not the admiration of work for what it can bring- material wealth, mental stability, national power- but for itself. Work becomes a quasi-religious duty one must give to the almighty market. Various religions, including many Protestant sects, have viewed work in a similar divine sense, but they believed in a rather clear (if delayed) reward for work in the afterlife. These commentators don’t really care if there’s a reward for work- it should be done because it must be done.  And as Vaclav Havel once noted, a system that was once viewed as serving man is now viewed as being served by man.

The problem for free market disciples of this creed is that most people don’t view work that way. Work is often something to be done painfully, grudgingly, while free-time to just relax is a wonderful and coveted thing. Now, it may well be true that certain aspects of developed countries’ working habits are not economically competitive in a globalized world (e.g., 35 hour work weeks), but that doesn’t make those aspects in and of themselves bad, however much Mr. Tierney might want it to. In fact, Mr. Tierney takes the argument even further, and argues that someone retiring early from one job to work in a new job they find more exciting or personally rewarding is being lazy. That certainly shouldn’t be criticized, if work is such a laudable thing in and of itself! On closer inspection, however, these commentators seem to be arguing that only a particular type of work is virtuous: that of a person trying to maximize their personal income. Picture for a moment the ideal world that would obtain under this vision: everyone would work 60+ hours a week, with minimal health insurance and vacation time, and a retirement age of perhaps 80. I’m sure that world is more economically competitive, but who would actually want to live in it?

Posted by ecologist at 08:38 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

All throughout Boston there are whispered conversations… in French. In the French Cultural Center, where I take classes, ex-pats gather in little groups, trying to figure out on what street near Copley it is located. It is the French Consulate, and it may seem odd to Americans that all the excitement is over an election, something only 1 in 2 of us Americans seem to bother participating in. What may seem even odder to Americans, given our penchant for musing about the black helicopters at the UN, is that this is not a national election everyone is so excited about, but an international one. On May 29, France will vote on whether to ratify the new European Union constitution. The coverage in the press in the United States continually betrays a sense of profound confusion: why in the world would someone want to give up some sovereignty to a higher body?

Nevertheless, Americans should care, and care deeply, about what happens on May 29. Globalization, the process of increasingly rapid connection between peoples by commerce and information flows, has been much attached from both ends of the political spectrum, but will continue its inevitable march onward over the next 20 years. There are now two main models for how this can proceed. The current U.S.-backed paradigm is one where economic globalization continues apace, while politics remains firmly national. NAFTA is a prime example of the kind of treaty that results from such a worldview; it’s loaded with special provisions for big companies, but workers had little say in the design of the treaty. The current EU process also involves a lot of economic liberalization, some of it with questionable public utility (that’s why it’s in such trouble right now in France, as people rightly question some of its economic effects). In contrast to the U.S. paradigm, however, it also involves considerable political integration. In principle, at least, democracy is globalized as well as economics. If this sounds idealistic and experimental, it’s because it is. The current EU is the greatest political experiment of the last 25 years: an uneasy truce between Beethoven and capitalism.

The important thing for Americans to realize is that economic globalization is coming, one way or another. What is up for debate is its character, its soul. Democracy can either rise to globalization, or it will sink beneath it.

Posted by ecologist at 08:31 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

I’m sitting in a posh lobby in the Atlanta Hilton, reading the tragicomic The Crisis of Democracy by Michael Crozier, Samuel Huntington, and Joji Watanuki. I picked it up mostly for the historical value, as the book that launched a thousand conspiracy theories about the Trilateral Commission. It’s an exceedingly odd book, not for what is said, but for what is not. Throughout the whole book, and particularly in the rather vapid piece by Michael Crozier on Western Europe, there is an unstated other, some degree of liberty-drunk citizens who desire anarchy. Samuel Huntington’s argument is more well-crafted, and goes a little something like this: There had been a sharp rise in political participation in the 1950s and 1960s, as well as a rise in the amount of turmoil in the government; the former factor caused the latter, since too vigorous a democracy leads to political polarization and “democratic distemper”; the way to cure this distemper is to reduce the power of the masses.

It’s an odd argument, foremost because Huntington himself grudgingly admits that more “rational” explanation for the crises of the 1960s and 1970s “could conceivably be the specific policy problems confronting the US… and its inability to deal effectively with those problems.” With the distance of almost 40 years the book also seems somewhat incongruous, as the specific problems it worries about are long gone. Still, I’ve been mulling it over in my head, and the fundamental issue- how to structure a republic so the will of the majority doesn’t trample on the rights of the minority- will always remain a bit of balancing act.

In an odd way, this debate reminds me of the explorations in ecology of how species diversity affects stability. Such studies, both theoretical and empirical, are common in ecology. Generally, more species doesn’t equal more stability in species composition, and in fact the introduction of a new species inevitably changes the species composition to a lesser or greater degree (this is hard to predict, actually). However, having more species around does tend to increase the stability of (at least some) overall properties of the system like productivity simply because, in the event of a perturbation to the system, there are more entities to fill any gaps. In a similar way, I think Huntington is frustrated because the introduction of new political actors is changing the distribution of power among actors. This does not, however, necessarily imply that things like the constitutional process in the US are at risk. In fact, the broader distribution of power among more actors may increase the checks and balances in the system; this is, after all, what the Locke tradition is all about.

Posted by ecologist at 08:14 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)