BOOK REVIEW
Ecology as an Economy
Richard Bambach
Nature: An Economic History. Geerat J. Vermeij. xvi + 445
pp. Princeton University Press, 2004. $35.
Describing the interactions of organisms in nature as an economic
system is not new. For example, in 1838 Charles Darwin, making the
first mention of the concept that became natural selection, wrote in
his notebook that "One may say there is a force like a hundred
thousand wedges trying [to] force every kind of adapted structure
into the gaps in the economy of Nature, or rather forming gaps by
thrusting out weaker ones." But however common it may be to
mention the economy of nature, it is novel to construct a full
theory that characterizes the history of life and the evolution of
ecosystems as an economic system. In Nature: An Economic
History, Geerat Vermeij does just that. The book summarizes
economic ideas about ecosystems and evolution that he has been
developing for several decades. In his representation, the phenomena
that make up the forces and connections responsible for the history
of life are economy in action. It is a viewpoint that deserves
serious study.
Vermeij is one of the master naturalists of our time, and his
command of the subtleties of animal interactions is exceptional. I
think anyone can learn a great deal from this book. But it isn't an
easy read: It is intense, data-rich and packed with interlocking
conceptual models that require concentration to absorb.
The first three chapters give a general overview of Vermeij's
theoretical argument. He makes the point that he is not using
economy as a metaphor. Vermeij views economy as an organizing theory
for analysis of the evolution of the biosphere, a theory capable of
providing a full description of natural, as well as human, systems.
Although I was initially skeptical, I now regard his main argument
as convincing. The difference between human and natural economies is
only that people can plan how to manipulate the system—but we,
too, must work within the limitations and constraints of supply and
demand and must adjust to the feedbacks and modifications generated
in an interactive system. There is merit in moving beyond a limited
view of nature as simply being so many pathways of energy flow or
chemical systems explicable by parsing stoichiometry among the
participants. Although there is much to learn from such reductionist
perspectives (indeed, energy does flow through ecosystems, and life
is a chemical system involving particular ratios of elements), the
whole of nature is complex. Full understanding of the relations that
govern the biosphere and its changes over time requires a
theoretical framework in which all aspects of the interaction of
living systems are given a place. Competition, cooperation, trade,
performance, energy, adaptation, imperfection, specialization,
diversity, feedback, inequality and scale are all concepts that play
an economic role, not just supply and demand.
The next four chapters of the book are devoted to consumption and
enemies, production and resources, technology and organization, and
the environment. This is the most straightforward section, placing
many particulars of natural history into the various factors that
form the structure of the economic system Vermeij has outlined.
Examples are abundant, and Vermeij fully explains his sense of how
economic concepts work in natural systems. For instance, in chapter
6 he elaborates on the idea that the best measure of the performance
of living things is power (energy or work per unit time),
not simply efficiency ("the quantity of output relative to the
quantity of input"). He comments that "Power makes for
prolific producers and demanding consumers with a wide reach."
To make the point that power yield is more important than
efficiency, Vermeij observes that highly efficient brachiopods and
bryozoans with a low metabolic rate dominated Paleozoic seas,
whereas later geologic time saw the rise of active mollusks and
arthropods with a high metabolic rate and a greater demand for food,
illustrating the tendency for the power of dominant animals to
increase over time.
The next three chapters, which summarize and generalize on the
preceding material, are devoted respectively to the geographic
distribution of power and innovation, with the tropics and tectonic
change as the centerpieces; the role of disturbance, with an
emphasis on extinction events; and the idea that evolution has had a
trajectory of escalating the concentration and reach of power. A
chapter on the economic limitations that humankind must eventually
face concludes the book.
The concept of nature as economy is a powerful one and is almost
surely correct in principle. Many of the specific examples Vermeij
cites are clear demonstrations of the idea. By casting natural
activities in economic terms he shows, for instance, that
high--performance animals (those with greater power) extend their
reach and tend to dominate species that are more efficient but less
powerful. When resources are limited, efficiency is selected for,
but when they are plentiful, it is power that counts. In Vermeij's
well-known escalation theory, a natural "arms race" occurs
as more powerful predators drive prey organisms to become more
powerful so as to resist predation (by burrowing to escape, for
example, or secreting a stronger shell than before)—and this
in turn requires the predators to become more powerful. Such
interaction puts the priority on power, rather than efficiency,
something that is not clear if one considers only energy expenditure.
Despite the high quality of thought and scholarship that went into
the book, I do have several warnings for the general reader. First,
although the principles are reasonable, the book is entirely
descriptive. We do not yet know the quantitative balance among the
multiple factors of competition, cooperation, trade, performance,
specialization, feedbacks, inequalities and other interactive
connections that go into any local, much less global, ecology that
is described as an economy. Rather than coming up with a full-scale
understanding of what the actual controlling influences are on the
history of life, Vermeij has instead set an agenda for future quantification.
In the three generalizing chapters, many conclusions seem more to be
assertions than deductions from demonstrated phenomena, although
Vermeij's claims are often based on logical extrapolation. The
problem is, in part, the difficulty of scale, of moving from the
local or regional ecosystem to the global level. In the chapter on
geography and innovation, Vermeij's view of the significance of the
tropics as the locale of enhanced performance seems well supported,
but his argument that tectonic activity (mountain building) is
ultimately responsible for increases in productivity is a hypothesis
that has not been fully tested and is not universally supported in
the profession.
A second issue is that in some cases Vermeij depends on the logical
pathway he selected and does not always account fully for the range
of possibilities that his own theory leaves open. This is most
apparent in his discussion of disturbance (extinctions). In this
chapter he focuses on "bottom up" disruption and argues
that every general extinction event from the largest to
more minor ones was probably caused by productivity collapse, and he
suggests that most were triggered by a combination of volcanism,
extraterrestrial impact and methane release from sequestered methane
clathrates in ocean basins. Unfortunately, when the most precise
dating of extinction events and other phenomena is available, as in
the Cenozoic era, few direct correlations of these phenomena with
each other are seen. For many more ancient events (with larger
dating errors, too), evidence is often weak or nonexistent. I
frankly was puzzled that Vermeij advocates a single causal system
for all these disturbance events, because as I see it, his
full-scale view of economic structure could accommodate a variety of
ways of stressing the system.
I mention the disagreements I have with some of the interpretations
Vermeij makes only to warn the general reader that this book is not the
final word on cause and effect in the history of life. But I believe
that his conceptual viewpoint is of great value and that anyone will
profit from learning how the biosphere functions as an economic
system.—Richard K. Bambach, Botanical Museum, Harvard University