originally posted on eSkeptic , Wednesday, January 28th, 2009
by Kenneth W. Krause
As we soar into an inspiring new era of genomics, genetic manipulation, and, potentially, the directed evolution of our own species, naturalists urge us to remain partially grounded — to keep digging for long-buried evidence of key pre-historical developments. In so doing, however, the world’s leading anthropologists and primatologists have immersed themselves in a now-roiling debate over the origins of human morality in general and altruism in particular.
Some say that altruism — sometimes referred to as “other-regarding preferences” or “unsolicited prosociality” — is nothing more than a veneer, a cultural innovation humans alone have achieved in order to collectively restrain each individual’s natural proclivity to serve only herself, her close genetic relatives, and those who have demonstrated an adequate inclination to reciprocate to her eventual benefit. For these folks, no act can be characterized as wholly unselfish.
Others argue that altruism is more primitive than culture and, in fact, considerably more ancient than the human species itself. Other-regarding preferences, they say, are deeply innate, predating even the phylogenetic split that occurred six million years ago among the common ancestors of chimps and bonobos on the one hand and all species of hominid on the other. According to this camp’s credo, selflessness is as natural as appetite.
One line of experiments has confronted the issue directly, inquiring whether non-human primates will seize opportunities to assist others. In 2005, for example, UCLA anthropologist Joan Silk and others chose 18 chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes) as the subjects of two such experiments, conducted in Louisiana and Texas.1 Chimps are among the primates most likely to exhibit unsolicited prosocial behavior, they reasoned, because in the wild they regularly hunt, patrol, and mate-guard cooperatively.
In each study, subject chimps were allowed to deliver food to other chimps, or “conspecifics,” at no cost to themselves. The test apparatuses provided each confined subject with two options — the 1/0 choice where it could acquire food only for itself, and the 1/1 choice where it could obtain food for both itself and its separately caged partner. As an essential control, acting chimps were given the same options with no partners present (Figure 1).
Figure 1. A test apparatus providing a subject with two options: acquire food only for itself (1/0), or obtain food for both itself and its separately caged partner (1/1).
Silk’s team predicted that if chimps are truly altruistic they should choose the 1/1 option more often than the 1/0 option when a conspecific is there to benefit. But that wasn’t the case. In Louisiana, not one of the seven subjects chose the 1/1 option significantly more often when partnered. In Texas, the remaining 11 actors went with both the 1/1 and the 1/0 option an average of only 48 percent of the time when another chimp was present.
“The absence of other-regarding preferences in chimpanzees,” the authors inferred, “may indicate that such preferences are a derived property of the human species tied to sophisticated capacities for cultural learning, theory of mind, perspective taking and moral judgment.” Nevertheless, Silk’s team remained open to the prospect that altruism might be detected among primates that, in some crucial ways, were even more cooperative than chimps. We will consider that possibility later.
Altruism’s Alter-Ego
A closely related line of experiments has tackled the same issue from a different direction, asking instead whether primates display a rudimentary sense of fairness in some form of “inequity aversion” (IA). If an animal reacts negatively to its own relative overcompensation, we say it has demonstrated some sensitivity to “advantageous inequity.” If it merely responds to a conspecific’s superior gain, on the other hand, the animal has shown aversion only to “disadvantageous inequity.”
The former inclination probably evolved after (and, morally speaking, is emphatically more advanced than) the latter because an animal sensitive to its own advantage can demonstrate not only an egocentric expectation of how it should be treated, but also a communal expectation of how all members of its species should be treated. In either case, if test subjects attempt to restore equity by sacrificing their own gains — even if only to simultaneously and unceremoniously deny superior gains to their luckier partners — according to many (but not all) researchers, they have nonetheless acted altruistically.
In 2003, Emory University primatologists Sarah Brosnan and Frans de Waal developed token exchange experiments where tufted capuchin monkeys (Cebus apella) were measured for their reactions to situations in which their partners received greater food rewards.2 In the end, shortchanged subjects proved less likely to complete exchanges for identical tokens, and withdrew even more frequently when their partners received prizes for no tokens at all. These now-classic results have been widely interpreted as formidable evidence of disadvantageous IA in primates.
Two years later, Brosnan, de Waal, and Hillary Schiff released the outcomes of a similar study of adult chimpanzees.3 In order to distinguish the effects of social alignment, the team chose four animals that had lived continuously in pairs and 16 others that had been housed together at the Yerkes National Primate Research Center in Atlanta, Georgia for either 30 years or eight years prior to testing. As in the 2003 experiment, subjects were given tokens — in this case, rather useless and nondescript chunks of white PVC pipe — which they had been trained to return for either cucumber slices (the low-value reward) or grapes (the high-value reward).
During the inequity test, examiners initially allowed the partner chimps to exchange for a juicy, delicious grape — while eager subjects observed, of course — and then offered the subjects a relatively dry and no doubt disappointing cucumber slice. The examiners diligently recorded the subjects’ reactions, noting whether they had accepted or rejected their prizes. Brosnan discovered first that, when the tables were turned, subjects did not react negatively when given a superior reward and, thus, were likely not averse to advantageous inequity. Whether such a finding actually distinguished chimpanzees from humans in any meaningful way, the authors noted, was questionable.
Second, according to Brosnan, the results confirmed that disadvantageous IA was “present and robust” among chimpanzees, although to significantly different degrees depending on each subject’s social history. Chimps that had lived in pairs or in relatively novel groups reacted most intensely, while animals from older, more tightly-integrated groups appeared more accepting of inequity — all of which could be entirely consistent with human predilections to either “make waves” or “go with the flow,” depending primarily on their social milieu. Tolerance of inequity, Brosnan suggested, may be more a function of group size and intimacy than either moral choice or any isolated cognitive factor. So by the end of 2005, very little if anything had been truly settled. The experiments would continue and become ever more creative and exacting, but the already muddied anthropological waters would grow more cluttered and murkier still.
High Expectations
In 2006, three teams from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany published studies that in one way or another challenged these landmark outcomes from Yerkes. Julian Brauer’s group tested for IA among chimps, bonobos, gorillas, and orangutans — 30 individual great apes in all — and produced a pattern of food rejection that was opposite to that reported by Brosnan.4 In other words, instead of snubbing more food after seeing their partners receive tastier treats, Brauer’s apes actually rejected less food.
All the same, the authors did not infer that apes were necessarily insensitive to unfairness. In fact, at one point they questioned whether food refusal was a fair test of IA to begin with. Inequity-wary apes, after all, might decide to accept lower-quality spoils simply in an effort to offset the higher-quality gifts bestowed upon their partners. Citing a then-recently published study questioning chimpanzee altruism, however, Brauer’s team finally betrayed a clear inclination to attribute their results to the so-called “food expectation hypothesis,” which asserts that the mere act of witnessing a conspecific’s receipt of superior food will create an anticipation of acquiring the same food for oneself. Such an expectation might explain why Brauer’s chimps begged more vigorously and why many of her apes generally remained at their testing stations much longer after having witnessed partner overcompensation.
The study Brauer cited had been conducted by a second German team led by Keith Jensen.5 The key problem with Brosnan’s examination, according to Jensen, was that subject chimps were never allowed to convey their mind-sets by actually correcting unequal outcomes. Silk’s group had devised a somewhat more effective experiment in this respect, the authors commended, but even they had failed to test for anything more than selfishness (the 1/0 option) or mutualism (the 1/1 option). In Jensen’s experiments, by comparison, 11 chimps participated in three separate studies collectively designed to reveal expressed tendencies toward altruism and spite as well.
In study one, each subject was allowed to pull one of two tables toward itself. The first table contained bananas accessible to both the subject and its partner; the second table held fruit accessible only to the subject. Either way, subjects received the same reward. But because Jensen’s chimps predominantly chose the mutually accessible table in both the test (partner present) and control (partner absent) conditions, the results were inconclusive as to selfishness and mutualism. Nevertheless, Jensen vied, this initial phase of the experiment did show that his chimps were not averse to disadvantageous inequity, at least with regard to relative effort expended.
Studies two and three tested for spite and altruism. In neither case could any subject receive a reward for pulling any table closer to itself or its partner. In experiment two, acting chimps could have conveyed an other-regarding preference by pulling tables accessible only to partners, or passive spite by doing nothing at all more frequently in the test condition than in the control condition. But they did neither.
In experiment three, the scheme was altered slightly such that, in order to deny food to their partners, subjects needed to actively draw those partners’ trays away. But, once again, the Leipzig chimps were as likely to do nothing in one condition as in the other, thus failing to demonstrate active spite as well. The authors noted, however, that two of their six chimps did express potential signs of altruism. But these animals also tended to beg or harass their partners following delivery of the fruit, thus raising the possibility that they intended to only benefit themselves.
Food for Thought
Felix Warneken and Michael Tomasello, also from the Planck Institute, decided to examine the issue through an entirely different type of experiment. If altruism exists among our primate cousins, they judged, it might more readily be elicited with something less critical to individual survival than food. So Warneken and Tomasello tested both human children (24 18-month-old infants) and three young chimpanzees (34, 54, and 54 months old) for their willingness to help human caretakers (quite familiar to the chimps) with some task absent of any possible expectation of reward.6
As predicted, the children assisted experimenters more often and in a greater variety of tasks than the chimps. Nonetheless, each of Warneken’s chimps reliably helped a reaching human obtain apparently desired objects. Although young humans clearly cooperate to degrees found in no other species, the authors concluded, “our nearest primate relatives show some skills and motivations in this direction as well.”
By the summer of 2007, Warneken had assembled another team and published the results of similar “instrumental helping” experiments calculated to address several important and yet unanswered questions — in particular, whether 36 semi-free ranging chimps would spontaneously help unfamiliar humans and genetically unrelated conspecifics in addition to their caretakers, and whether they would do so at some significant cost to themselves.7
Again, as expected, infant children helped more quickly. But the chimps performed just as reliably regardless of their partners’ familiarity or species, even when they had to expend a little extra effort to do so. “The roots of human altruism may go deeper than previously thought,” Warneken ultimately concluded, “reaching as far back as the last common ancestor of humans and chimpanzees.”
Later that year, however, Keith Jensen’s team cast a skeptical eye on Warneken’s conclusions in two well-focused examinations of potential IA among chimps. The first pair of experiments probed 11 animals’ capacities for spite — altruism’s evil twin, if you will.8 Jensen reasoned that Chimps might be characterized as altruistic, at least in a punitive sense, if they choose to act out against conspecifics due to an abstract sense of fairness. In the first study, caged subjects were allowed to pull ropes to collapse food-laden tables drawn away by humans toward different enclosures that either contained other chimps (test condition) or were empty (control condition). In the end, the chimps appeared to be indifferent. Actors were just as likely to collapse the platforms when they approached empty cages as when they neared hungry conspecifics.
In the second study, subjects were exposed to three conditions. In conditions one and two, much as before, human experimenters pulled the tables away from subject animals and toward partners or empty cages. In the last condition, however, it was the partner chimps that were allowed to drag the tables away from subjects. Between the first two conditions there was no real disparity, indicating again that subjects didn’t really care whether their partners benefited inequitably. Between the first two and the third conditions, on the other hand, subjects were significantly more likely to drop the tables when other chimps, as opposed to humans, began drawing them away. From these combined results, Jensen concluded that although chimps are certainly vengeful, “[s]pitefulness may thus be a peculiarly human phenomenon.”
Ultimatums (and more Expectations)
Hailing it as the “benchmark test for examining sensitivity to fairness and other-regarding preferences,” Jensen then unleashed his 11 subjects on a chimp-friendly version of the celebrated ultimatum game.9 Proposer animals were permitted to make one of two possible offers to their receiving partners, potentially retaining either 100, 80, 50, or 20 percent of the spoils for themselves in each trial. If the receiver accepted the offer, each party got what it wanted. But if the receiver rejected the offer — having noted what the proposer intended to keep for itself — neither animal received any reward.
Presumably out of some concern for fairness, humans proposers tend to make equitable offers of 40 to 50 percent or, as receivers, to reject offers of 20 percent or less, thus confounding the economic model of rational self-interest (so-called Homo economicus). This was not how the Leipzig chimps reacted, however. Proposers chose not to make fair offers and receivers opted to accept all nonzero offers without hesitation or perceptible sign of irritation. While the authors cautioned that these outcomes “may be in part be a reflection of the fact that active food sharing is rare among the species,” they were clearly inclined to attribute such behaviors to the chimps’ absent sense of justice.
Figure 2. A monkey returns a token to the experimenter while using her left paw to steady the human hand. Her partner looks on. In this “hidden-reward exchange” the monkey does not see the reward she is to receive before successful exchange. (Redrawn from an illustration done from a video still by Gwen Bragg and Frans de Waal.10)
In late 2007, Megan van Wolkenten, working with Brosnan and de Waal, finally published a narrowly tailored response to Brauer and others addressing the alleged preeminence of food expectation over IA.10 They used the now-familiar token exchange experiment — this time enhanced with an additional condition where food rewards were shown to subjects well prior to exchange — on 13 capuchin monkeys (Figure 2). But, contrary to the predictions of various expectation hypotheses, behavioral changes did not depend on either greed or frustration. Rates of refusal among subjects, in fact, increased not when higher-value grapes were merely visible, but only when they were actually bestowed upon partners.
Importantly, van Wolkenten’s subjects also made significantly fewer exchanges when forced to expend more effort for the same lower-value cucumbers received by partners. As the food value increased, however, effort became secondary, indicating that capuchins are willing to reprove inequity only when the cost of doing so is slight. This appreciable yet limited brand of IA, the authors proposed, “likely evolved in conjunction with cooperative enterprises,” and “may characterize a great variety of social animals.”
More Monkey Business
By the end of 2007, then, the combined body of research had established mixed results at best, especially with regard to the great apes. Recalling Joan Silk’s suggestion that true altruism might be discovered among primates even more social than chimpanzees, Swiss anthropologist Judith Burkhart’s team decided to test 26 common marmoset monkeys (Callithrix jacchus) in two studies — one for related, one for unrelated pairs — involving hungry partners and subject-operated food trays (Figure 3).11
Figure 3. The donor has the choice between two trays representing the payoff distributions (0,1) (upper tray with a cricket in the left food bowl) or (0,0) (lower tray). If the donor pulls the tray with the (0,1) payoff distribution, it results in a payoff to the recipient but none to itself. 11
The experimenters provided each actor with a 0/0 option and a 0/1 option only, thus eliminating all potential for subject rewards. Because marmosets are cooperative breeding New-World monkeys, Burkhart predicted that if any primate should display an unsolicited prosocial tendency capable of overcoming any penchant for envy, it would be this species, despite their theory of mind deficit and general cognitive shortcomings.
Burkhart was right. Kin or no kin, marmoset subjects — fully schooled with the test apparatus and, thus, aware of the experiments’ consequences — pulled the 0/1 tray more often when their partners were present in adjacent cages than in the control condition when their partners were absent. Remarkably, the disparity widened significantly when female “helpers” — which, despite this distinction, tend not to carry other monkeys’ infants in the wild — were eliminated from the analysis. Because humans and New-World monkeys are the only primates that behave as cooperative caretakers, Burkhart proposed, strong altruism may have evolved within such groups independently, and not necessarily among the ancestors common to chimps, bonobos, and humans.
More Food for Thought
The thick, swirling waters of controversy have spilled largely unabated into 2008. Working with Brosnan, Silk, and others, American evolutionary psychologist Jennifer Vonk published a detailed study of low-cost, conspecific-directed altruism among 18 chimpanzees at the University of Louisianna’s Cognitive Evolution Group laboratory.12 In two separate experiments involving two different apparatuses and two distinct groups of chimps, actors were given the options to trigger rewards for themselves alone, for their partners alone, or for both themselves and their partners.
The team chose these three options in order to address important criticisms of previous experiments involving food. Because her chimps were allowed to act prosocially only after having fed themselves, Vonk argued, this method avoided the possibility that subject animals might be distracted from an otherwise spirited altruistic tendency by the potent and ever-present need to feed.
If chimps are really other-regarding, the authors reasoned, subjects should deliver rewards to partner enclosures at some point during the experiment, but more often in the partner-present test condition than in the partner-absent control condition. By contrast, if chimps are indifferent to the welfare of others, actors should minimize their personal costs by obtaining rewards only for themselves. Ultimately, the presence of awaiting partners in other enclosures had no significant effect on subjects in either experiment. At first, actors consistently released both rewards. But delivery rates to other cages always decreased as subjects learned that such efforts would not benefit them.
Notably, one of the 11 chimps tested in the second experiment did choose to act prosocially, but these results could not be replicated. “[W]hile chimpanzees’ behavior is consistent with standard evolutionary models based on kinship and reciprocity,” Vonk insisted, “human cooperation and prosociality may require an emerging class of evolutionary models, rooted in the coevolutionary interaction of genes and culture.”
Agreeing to Disagree
Despite these equivocal results, some scientists still see altruism as a considerably more ancient impulse, born of the intense parental and, thus, empathic instinct. Frans de Waal, as one prominent example, appears to be thoroughly convinced that some skeptics of primate altruism have their arguments backwards — at least in one crucial respect. “[E]mpathy evolved in animals as the main proximate mechanism for [individually] directed altruism,” he explained in a recent review, and it is empathy — not self-interest — that “causes altruism to be dispensed in accordance with predictions from kin selection and reciprocal altruism theory.”13 Although gene propagation and benefit exchange may be the evolutionary or ultimate cause of altruism, only a spontaneous emotional response to another being’s situation can possibly trigger or proximately cause an altruistic impetus.
In his latest study of non-cooperatively breeding monkeys, de Waal discovered that brown capuchins will predominantly choose the 1/1 mutual option over the 1/0 selfish option, depending on the subjects’ familiarity with their partners.14 Although his monkeys’ other-regarding tendencies clearly turned on social closeness, de Waal nevertheless concluded that because kinship was critical and because his subjects had no means of predicting return favors, only empathy could explain this study’s results.
When I asked him about the persisting debate, de Waal proposed that the scientific community has become polarized between evolutionary biologists on the one side and, on the other, a discrete group of economists and anthropologists that “has invested heavily in the idea of strong reciprocity,” which absolutely demands discontinuity between humans and all other animals. As for the results obtained by Silk and others, de Waal offered, experiments such as these involving repeated trials and frequent rewards are vulnerable to “side-biases” that can skew outcomes.
Sarah Brosnan, a former student of de Waal’s and now Assistant Professor of Psychology at Georgia State University, remains ambivalent. Her subjective though surely copious experience with both apes and monkeys informs her that at least some of these animals do seem altruistic. Even so, she told me, “there is not too much evidence for this outside some of Frans’ and Felix Warneken’s work.” But cooperation in all species, she emphasized, “is much more likely to be based on emotion and relationships than on cognitive calculations.”
Both de Waal and colleague Keith Jensen are doubtful that even chimpanzees possess the cognitive capacities requisite for delayed reciprocation. But for Jensen, the added conclusion that chimps must be altruists simply doesn’t follow. “De Waal’s use of the term ‘empathy’ is somewhat contentious,” he told me, “and the evidence he provides for empathy is [anecdotal and] not very robust.”15 More evidence is needed, he admitted, but, like Jennifer Vonk, his “working hypothesis” is that other-regarding preferences emerged at some point during human evolution only.
Even so, both Brosnan and Jensen conceded that the distinction between food exchange and instrumental helping is a potentially crucial one. Indeed, Jensen and Felix Warneken are now collaborating on a new project to determine whether food rewards might interfere with genuine other-regarding preferences. Although “food exchange is not a bad test for altruism,” Warneken reminded me, it explores “only one type of potentially altruistic behavior.” In the more sensitive context of instrumental tasks, he added, chimpanzees have repeatedly demonstrated solid helping tendencies.
When I asked Warneken about Vonk’s latest attempt to neutralize the nutritional imperative, he warned that Vonk’s chimps might not have fully understood how the apparatuses worked during that experiment’s altruism phase. “The pattern of results,” he argued, “still suggests that the subjects had a tendency to try to obtain the reward for themselves.” Plugging Jensen’s 2006 study as the most convincing presentation to date of limited prosociality among chimps, Warneken recommended that future researchers follow that team’s lead, at least with respect to designing an apparatus that animals might comprehend more intuitively.
Where to Go from Here
Everyone agrees that more work needs to be done, and that no research could be more germane to achieving a competent grasp of who we are as a species and where we might be headed. If altruism is in fact deeply innate to humanity’s collective being, we may have to rethink a number of things, including some of our most established political and economic assumptions.16 Jensen summed it up pretty well when I invited him to characterize his work’s significance:
This research is interesting to the question of what makes humans special, if, indeed, they are. Most research in the past has focused on “cold cognition” such as abstract reasoning, language and tool use. Social motivations and emotions — “hot cognition” — are just as important, and may even be central to the emergence of human ultrasociality. Holding a lens up to ourselves after focusing it on other species will help us see ourselves more clearly.
So it looks like we’ll be hearing a great deal more from these and other esteemed authorities during the coming years. Sadly, however, the indispensable subjects of these investigations seem to be living on borrowed time, the African great apes especially. If scientists can ever clear the dim, shadowy depths of altruistic origins, they’ll have to act quickly before our own dark natures drive our ancestral cousins into extinction.
References
- Silk, J. B., Brosnan, S. F., Vonk, J., Henrich, J., Povinelli, D. J., Richardson, A. S., Lambeth, S. P., Mascaro, J. & Shapiro, S. J. 2005. “Chimpanzees Are Indifferent to the Welfare of Unrelated Group Members.“ Nature, 437, 1357–1359.
- Brosnan, S. F. & de Waal, F. B. M. 2003. “Monkeys Reject Unequal Pay.” Nature, 425, 297–299.
- Brosnan, S. F., Schiff, H. C. & de Waal, F. B. M. 2005. “Tolerance for Inequity May Increase With Social Closeness In Chimpanzees.” Proc. R. Soc. B, 272, 253–258.
- Brauer, J., Call, J. & Tomasello, M. 2006. “Are Apes Really Inequity Averse?” Proc. R. Soc. B, 273, 3123–3128.
- Jensen, K., Hare, B., Call, J. & Tomasello, M. 2006. “What’s in it for me? Self-regard Precludes Altruism and Spite In Chimpanzees.” Proc. R. Soc. B, 273, 1013–1021.
- Warneken, F. & Tomasello, M. 2006. “Altruistic Helping In Human Infants and Young Chimpanzees.” Science, 311, 1301–1303.
- Warneken, F., Hare, B., Melis, A. P., Hanus, D. & Tomasello, M. 2007. “ Spontaneous Altruism By Chimpanzees and Young Children.” PloS Biology, 5(7), e184.
- Jensen, K., Call, J. & Tomasello, M. 2007. “Chimpanzees Are Vengeful But Not Spiteful.” Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci., USA, 104, 13046–13050.
- Jensen, K., Call, J. & Tomasello, M. 2007. “Chimpanzees are Rational Maximizers In an Ultimatum Game.” Science, 318, 107–109.
- van Wolkenten, M., Brosnan, S. F. & de Waal, F. B. M. 2007. “Inequity Responses of Monkeys Modified by Effort.” Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci., USA, 104, 18854–18859.
- Burkhart, J. M., Fehr, E., Efferson, C. & van Schaik, C. P. 2007. “ Other-Regarding Preferences In a Non-Human Primate: Common Marmosets Provision Food Altruistically.” Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci., 104, 19762–19766.
- Vonk, J., Brosnan, S. F., Silk, J. B., Henrich, J., Richardson, A., Lambeth, S., Schapiro, S. & Povinelli, D. J. 2008. “Chimpanzees Do Not Take Advantage of Very Low Cost Opportunities to Deliver Food to Unrelated Group Members.” Animal Behavior, 75, 1757–1770.
- de Waal, F. B. M. 2008. “Putting the Altruism Back Into Altruism: The Evolution of Empathy.” Annu. Rev. Psychol., 59, 279–300.
- de Waal, F. B. M., Leimgruber, K. & Greenberg, A. R. 2008. “Giving Is Self-rewarding for Monkeys.” Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci., USA. 105, 13685–13689.
- See also, Silk, J. B. 2007. “Empathy, Sympathy, and Prosocial Preferences In Primates.’ In: The Oxford Handbook of Evolutionary Psychology. (Ed. by R. I. M. Dunbar & L. Barrett), pp. 115–126. Oxford: Oxford University Press (“ Current claims for the existence of empathy, sympathy, moral sentiments, and other-regarding preferences in other primates rest on an insecure empirical foundation.”).
- See, e.g., Bowles, S. 2008. “Policies Designed for Self-interested Citizens May Undermine ‘the Moral Sentiments’: Evidence from Economic Experiments.” Science, 320, 1605–1609 (“Economists, psychologists, and others … are well on their way to constructing an economic psychology of the interplay of self-regarding and other-regarding motivation that may eventually enlighten mechanism design and public policy.”).
Contributed by R. Chavid
Two Kinds of Knowledge and the Health of Human and Natural Systems
13 03 2009Speech written and delivered by Steve Harrell at the University of Washington Global Health Seminar, 06 March 2009
“I am honored to be invited to come speak to you today; honored and a little bit puzzled. Global Health? I don’t do global health. I don’t do health at all. I’m an anthropologist with an interest in ecology and geography.
But we want you.
Want me to do what?
Want you to talk about resilience and resurgence.
I only do resilience; still waiting for the resurgence to happen.
So talk about resilience.
Resilience in ecosystems?
Yes?
OK, here goes….
So perhaps I come to you out of an interest in health after all. Not the health of individuals, as in medicine, or even the distribution of human health through geographic, temporal, and social space, as in public health. But the health of the systems in which humans are embedded, the health of the political, social, economic, and in particular the ecological systems in which people live their lives. I can’t prove that the health of the systems has any direct relationship to the health of the people in them; that is something for the biostatisticians to work on—though I can’t imagine that it doesn’t. So let’s assume that it does, that a healthy, resilient ecosystem gives people a better chance of maintaining or recovering health, and go from there. I will spend my time today talking about a what makes a healthy, resilient ecosystem. At the end of my talk I will make some suggestions as to how this kind of thinking might contribute to an approach to health problems, and invite your comments and discussion.
I will organize my presentation today around three dichotomies: productivity vs. resilience, traditional knowledge vs. technological knowledge, and command-and-control management vs. golden-rule management. Each is an aspect of the larger dilemma that faces us in the 21st century.
Productivity vs. Resilience
Productivity and its twin, efficiency, are all around us. We measure our success by GDP growth, worker productivity, just-in-time manufacturing, energy efficiency of our economy. We are committed in most of what we do to a principle of maximizing output per unit of input. In some ways this is justified. It has given us our modern economy, including not only a comfortable material standard of living, but also the surplus over subsistence that allows us to develop non-material resources, and to spread beyond the privileged elites of society those things that we consider make life worth living, including not only arts, literature, and culture, but also science and medicine.
In fact, it is possible to see human history over the long term as the story of the growth of productivity. Since the dawn of Homo sapiens sapiens perhaps 120,000 years ago, the amounts of goods and services that we have managed to extract from the earth and cycle through our bodies and our social institutions has increased by several orders of magnitude. In pure natural selection terms, this was inevitable, at least until the last few decades. Those individuals who produced more could rear more children to adulthood; those societies (if we believe in group selection) that could marshal resources more efficiently could prevail over those who could not, and so expanded at the expense of their less efficient rivals.
But even several hundred years ago in many places, making societies more productive, managing resources for maximum efficiency of output per unit of input, sometimes caused ecological and social collapses because of lack of resilience. The case studies that Jared Diamond narrates in his popular book Collapse provide some well-known, if occasionally disputed, examples. Easter Islanders maximized timber production for monuments, boats, and weapons, and ended up using up the forest faster than it could restore itself by natural growth. Mayans managed irrigated agriculture to maximize the surplus available for ritual, governance, and the living standards of the upper classes, and when prolonged drought came, they were unable to deal with it. In a more recent and less disputed case, the cod fishery in the northwest Atlantic, which was being managed for something called maximum sustainable yield, all of a sudden collapsed in the early 1980s. The message of these cases is clear: when we manage our resources for maximum output over the short term, the system in which the resources are embedded loses the ability to deal with large-scale shocks or disturbances: it loses its resilience.
We need to define resilience carefully here. The founder of resilience ecology, C. S. Holling, divides resilence into two types: engineering resilience, the time it takes for a system that has been disturbed to return to its original state, and ecosystem resilience, the magnitude of shock that a system can absorb without changing the basic variables that control the state of the system. Here I am concerned almost entirely with ecosystem resilience, defined in another way as the ability of a system to maintain its basic nature in the face of outside shocks or disturbances. A good example comes from the famine-relief system of late 17th and 18th-century China, the heyday of the Qing dynasty. China by this time was already a highly populated country, with a population during this period that grew from about 200 million to about 350 million people. Realizing the danger of famine in a land that was subject to frequent floods and droughts, the Dynasty established a system of granaries and grain reports to deal with the eventualities of crop shortages. Every county had a state-managed granary that was kept full and kept fresh—as it became clear each fall what the current year’s harvest was likely to be, a suitable proportion of the previous year’s grain was sold off while it was still edible. And local officials, in addition to keeping the granary full and fresh, were also charged with making regular reports on the grain prices in the local markets. If they found the prices to be rising too rapidly, they would dump grain from the granary on the market, so as to prevent hoarding and speculation and make sure that there was a supply of grain for people if their own harvests came up short, and to make sure that prices did not rise to the paradoxical point where people would starve even though there was grain around, because they could not afford it. In this way, despite the frequent floods and droughts, and despite the high population density, there were very few famines; the system was resilient in the face of outside shocks.
But toward the end of the 18th century and into the 19th, the granary system, along with the administration of the dynasty in general, began to decay due to corruption, fatigue, lack of leadership at the top, and perhaps too much population growth to be accommodated even by such an admirable and well-designed mechanism as the granary system. Granaries began to be left empty, price reports were sometimes not based on real data, or not made at all, and all the grain that was produced was consumed directly or went into the markets rather than into emergency storage. There was no mechanism to put surplus grain on the market, because there was no saved surplus, and thus no mechanism to keep prices at an affordable level. So when drought or flood hit for several years in a row, prices rose, there was no way to keep them down, producers could not buy to supplement their own harvests, and the frequency of famines went up, despite the fact that overall production continued to rise, and production per capita remained steady.
What had changed from the late 17th century to the mid-19th was not that the production of the system had gone down; in fact it had gone up. Nor was there a decline in productivity, defined in terms of output to input ratio; it had at least stayed steady. And of course the frequency of abnormal weather had not gone up or down. What had changed was that the resilience of the system had decreased, the buffer against calamity had come down, the ability of the system to absorb disturbances and still function had gone down. Or in strict mathematical terms, the size of the disturbance that the system could absorb and still retain its basic functions had decreased. Even a short-term drought or a one-season flood, in some areas, could lead to famine. The controlling variables in the system had also changed; no longer was preventing famine locally a matter of keeping the granaries full and fresh and monitoring market prices; with the granaries no longer full, monitoring market prices became an empty bureaucratic exercise.
You will notice that all the examples I have given so far have been cases where human societies are coming up against the limits of their production capacity given available technology. Islands of course are prime examples of environments with finite possibilities to expand their resource bases, and so are technologically advanced, densely populated societies like 18th and 19th- century China. And we have to admit, the simple logic of natural selection says that, in the short run (a few generations), those who produce more will prevail over those who produce less, and the logic of maximum production, like a genetic trait that confers reproductive fitness, will be passed on to the culture, the ideology, the morals of the next generation.
So we should not be surprised that productivity and efficiency will win out in the short run over resilience. And for most of the earth’s history, in favorable environments at least, this has come at little cost. The loss of resilience was usually trivial compared to the gain in productivity, though there were always local examples of systems that became brittle and unresilient, and reached thresholds or tipping points which, once crossed, no longer enabled them to operate as before. But now we are in a different kind of world, where our current level of productivity is clearly unsustainable on a global scale. And science, as it has developed in the service of economic growth, development, and increases in the standards of material well-being, has typically been productivity oriented. This certainly has to change, but given that we have nearly 7 billion of us, we can’t just give up productivity in the interests of building a more resilient system. What to do?
It seems to me that we can draw a partial lesson—and I emphasize that the lesson is only a partial one—from communities who have managed their resources for resilience over centuries or millennia. Such communities that still exist today are often those we have come to label “indigenous,” living in small enclaves on the borders or margins of more productive polities and populations, with low population densities and relatively low levels of productivity and resource consumption, but with high levels of resilience. These peoples have developed not only practices, but also forms of knowledge that we often call TEK—Traditional Environmental Knowledge or Traditional Ecological Knowledge, and on the basis of this knowledge have succeeded in managing their marginal environments in ways that have preserved their resilience. Let’s take a closer look at TEK and the ways it contrasts with, and perhaps ultimately can be made compatible with, modern scientific knowledge.
Traditional Environmental Knowledge vs. Scientific Knowledge
Traditional Ecological Knowledge, whether it is employed by a community that we would now call indigenous or not, must come from a community that has been in the same place, or the same kind of place, for a long time, long enough that empirical observations of the environment and how to manage it have become part of the received wisdom that is passed down from generation to generation, that has come to be assumed to be the way the natural world works. There are several important characteristics shared by systems of TEK the world over, and these characteristics are its common strength, at the same time they are its common limitation and the reason it cannot replace, but must be used alongside of, modern scientific knowledge.
First and foremost, TEK is place-based. On the whole, unlike science, it is not based on the deduction of universal principles and applying them to particular situations, but rather on deep, detailed, and long-term observation of particular phenomena and the relationships between them. It is not devoid of general principles, but these general principles are expressed in the form of particulars. For example, the science of population biology tells us that if we remove too many reproductive-age individuals from a population, the population will not be able to reproduce itself, and this could be applied to any population, including for example the caribou herds in the north of Quebec. The TEK of the native Cree, by contrast, tells you that if you shoot more than you can use, and if you don’t use every usable part of the animal you shoot, the caribou will get angry and not allow themselves to be shot. Different rules apply to fish management, though a population biologist would probably say they were applications of the same principles.
Second, TEK is applied. There is no “pure research” in traditional societies, or if there is, it is a matter of speculation about the cosmos, and even then it is often done with respect to real human and natural communities. So TEK principles are guiding principles, they are, in Clifford Geertz’s terms, models for as well as models of behavior. The Nuosu people in Southwest China with whom I work have a prohibition against cutting conifers during the growing season between the blooming of the first rhododendrons in the Spring and the harvest of the last crop of oats in the fall. Anyone who violates this prohibition will bring lighting and hail upon the community. There are, to be sure, perfectly good, completely material reasons for not cutting trees during the rainy season when they will cause erosion, and Nuosu people understand the relationship between bare ground and erosion perfectly well. But the point is made in terms of what one should and should not do, in terms of the moral as well as the ecosystemic consequences of violating the prohibition.
Third, TEK is resilience-oriented, rather than productivity oriented. In all long-abiding small-scale societies, we find both ecological and ethical injunctions not to use more than one needs. Koyukon salmon fishermen in central Alaska, for example, have a rule that when you have what you need, you stop fishing. Anything more is greed, and greed will be punished—ethically as well as ecologically—by diminished availability of fish in the next season. In modern times, people use outboard motors, and they don’t have to consume everything they produce; they can market some of the fish to meet some of their daily needs. But to use them to get rich is to risk the implicit contract between people and the species they consume—if people consume them wisely, morally, without greed, then the species will allow themselves to continue to provide food or other resources for humans. Thus there is always leeway; there is always something left, and this renders the system resilient in the face of unexpected shocks.
Fourth, and we can see this embodied in the three principles I have talked about already, TEK does not distinguish natural phenomena from moral phenomena. Scientists, of course, also argue over the question of whether or not science is value-neutral, and the consensus, I’m sure, in a room full of public health professionals is that it is not. What you study and how you use the results have moral consequences. But the morals are not inside the science itself—science cannot determine whether something is moral or not, and only philosophy, ethics, and politics can determine whether science is moral or not. But in the TEK view of the world, the way components of an ecosystem—human and non-human—relate to each other is itself moral. Shooting too many caribou or cutting pine trees in the summertime is itself an act with moral consequences, in this case negative ones. There is no option to decide that, even though we know a particular practice will diminish the population of a particular resource, to go ahead and do it anyway. The fact that the salmon population will fall and the fact that greed in fishing is wrong are one and the same fact.
When approaching TEK for the first time, especially coming from a background that includes some critique of science, it is natural to want to embrace all these good principles of place-based, practical, resilience- based, morally connected knowledge. But they have their limitations. Because TEK is so tied to time and place, there are questions about whether it is generalizable or exportable, and indeed about whether the system of knowledge is itself resilient enough to deal with the widespread disturbances that occur in the form of the imposition of modern science, particularly in the service of developmental projects conducted by state or NGO organizations. If a previously subsistence-oriented community becomes tied to the market, if its children are formally educated for the first time in government schools, if commercial interests extract community resources in the name of development, these may all bring about problems that a community did not face previously, and whose solutions are not readily apparent in the TEK of the community. In addition, as the world becomes more interconnected economically, ecologically, even microbially, problems may arise that are beyond the scope of TEK to conceptualize or handle. In other words, even though it emphasizes resilience and resilience is a good thing, TEK is not equal to a lot of problems in which local communities are now embedded. We need science. But we need science that embodies resilience thinking, not just science that embodies productivity thinking. Let’s see if we can explore what the difference between these two kinds of science might be.
I think we need to begin with the idea of “high modernism.” This began as a concept in literature and the arts—Picasso, Bauhaus, Stockhausen and all them—but expanded to cover the attempts in the late 19th and early 20th centuries to engineer the social and ecological world in the same rational way that Stockhausen manipulated the chromatic scale, Picasso the space on the canvas, or the Bauhaus architects the living space of modern citizens. James Scott used the term “high modernism” in his book Seeing Like a State, whose brilliant subtitle refers to a kind of science that emphasizes productivity: why certain schemes to improve the human condition have failed. Scott includes the great rational developmental projects of the early 20th century—colonialism, Stalinism, fascism, and after the second world war, the ideology of development espoused not only by first-world agencies like USAID, but also by the governments of what have successively been called “poor,” “underdeveloped,” “third-world,” and now, in that most maddening of euphemisms, “developing” i.e. poor, countries.
So many of these state-instigated schemes that have failed have invoked science as their guiding principle. But I would venture that it is not the science that most of the scientists on the UW campus would recognize as such. The science that scientists do involves hypothesis testing, experimentation, controlled observation. Above all, it involves skepticism, inquiry, and verification or, if we are strict Popperians, falsification. But science, as used by developmental regimes, has little to do with these admirable principles of intellectual inquiry. It involves taking the results of such inquiry and transforming them into schemes for rationalizing the world. Stalin’s scientific socialism and the development of the mechanized collective farm, British colonial land surveys and stock rationalization programs in Africa, US colonial land surveys and stock rationalization programs in the American southwest, the introduction of high-yielding varieties of grains in the Green Revolution in Asia, management of fisheries for maximum sustainable yield, all of these have been attempts to use the results of science to engineer societies and economies, without the feedback loops of real science that monitors results, continually tries to formulate new hypotheses, and adjusts its applications of the results to real situations accordingly.
As Scott ruefully points out, because he like most academics is more sympathetic to the goals of the political left than to those of the political right, most of the extreme examples of trying to engineer the world have been perpetrated by socialist governments. Inspired by the Marxist dictum that materialism means changing the world by changing the relationship of humans to the means of production, they have undertaken grand schemes of engineering directed both at society and at the ecosystem. The great sociologist Franz Schurmann, himself a leftist, characterized the Chinese revolution as the attempt to replace culture, an organically grown system of symbols and ideas, with ideology, an invented system of symbols and ideas, and to replace society, an organically grown system of relations among people, with organization, a similarly invented or engineered system of social relations. As we know, the Chinese revolution culminated in the retreat back into the exploitative, unfair, socially amoral system we call capitalism, whose rules and structures, however exploitative, unfair, and amoral, were organically grown and thus likely to have something to do with the realities they served to understand and to organize.
This kind of engineering, the application of scientific results generated under laboratory conditions to attempt to control complex systems in the real world, brought us Hetch Hetchy dam, palm oil plantations for biofuels, soil-bleeding wheat monocultures in the Palouse, levees that allowed New Orleans to grow, the air polluting steel mill, and antibiotics that would kill just about any bug except the one that mutated to be resistant to it. But let’s not be ridiculous. It also brought us clean, safe drinking water, inexpensive ways of moving goods, including those that can serve for famine relief, the pluot, the iPhone, and the anaesthesia that makes most modern surgery possible. The problem is not science; the problem is science in service of the hubristic mentality that there is no system it cannot engineer, no problem it cannot solve, nothing so complex as to be beyond the reach of its methods to understand and control. It would by silly to think we should be giving up science for the modern equivalent of TEK, some sort of touchy-feely, place-based, organic system of local knowledge, and try to run our lives with it. In the first place, there is no TEK for us to go to. We have not been in one place long enough, we cannot create place-based knowledge that informs a large area, let alone the whole earth, and we have to be able to communicate across national, regional, geographic, and cultural divides. What we need is a more humble form of science, one that recognizes the complexity of natural and social systems, and that can and should try to influence their structure and functioning, but not to control them, because it recognizes that they are more complex than the models that science can formulate to understand them, or than the prescriptions that science can dictate to control them. It is what Robert Francis of our own School of Aquatic and Fisheries Sciences, using ideas adopted from Holling’s and his colleagues’ resilience ecology, calls “second stream science.” In contrast to “first-stream science,” which assumes that natural and social systems are knowable and predictable, and seeks to make predictions and to manage the systems based on those predictions, instead recognizes that these systems have unknowable and unpredictable elements, and seeks to understand rather than to predict, and to manage based on promoting, or just leaving in place, those aspects of the system that promote resilience.
I’m getting abstract here; perhaps an case study from my own work in the mountains of southwest China will bring us back again to empirical reality. In the Cool Mountains of southern Sichuan, the Nuosu and other indigenous peoples have lived sustainable livelihoods in a harsh mountain environment for over a thousand years. Material resources were few, weather and crops were unpredictable; the standard of living was not high. But the cultures managed to flourish in this environment, I think, because they recognized the principles of resilience, redundancy, and sustainability that are so important to understanding ecosystems as they actually functioned. They not only developed an intricate and detailed catalogue of plant, animal, and fungus species in their environment, where each one grew or roamed, when it bred or blossomed, what it was good for or what was dangerous about it. More significantly, they developed a systems understanding of how the ecosystem worked, how the social system worked, and what were the parallels and connections between the two kinds of systems. One of the ways in which they taught this ecosystem knowledge to their children was through a series of parallel proverbs, called lurby. A couple of examples will illustrate how these worked to transmit knowledge about the nature of systems and the need to preserve their resilience.
Aqu mu, aqu zze. Do the white, eat the white. White here refers to the white wood of the pine tree, a species that is central to people’s lives providing poles and boards for house construction, branches to protect mud walls from rainstorms, branches and needles to mix with manure to make fertilizer for the fields. As many of you no doubt know, te kie shot ap fa, when you cut the pine, it doesn’t regrow. You can’t prune a pine (or a Doug Fir, for that matter) back to the ground and have it grow again. So if you have cut the pine, it’s not going to come back. This doesn’t mean don’t cut the pine. You need pine trunks to build houses. It means realize the consequences if you cut the pine; consider the long-term consequences for the forest, rather than just the short-term consequences for the house you are building.
Onyi abbo mi, yy ke lo ji she. Mother’s brother gives to father; water flow is maintained. This one took me awhile to understand. But what it does is draw an explicit and beautiful parallel between two complex systems: the social system and the ecosystem. The social system is composed of patrilineal clans, which of course need to reproduce a new generation. And the only way they can do so, since the virtually universal incest taboo proscribes marriage within the clan, is to ally with another clan by accepting its gift of a bride who will be mother and reproducer for the original clan. What does this have to do with the flow of water? Well, in order for the clan to produce the material things it needs for its present and future existence, it must have a variety of natural resources, but the key to all these is water. Water not only feeds the people, it feeds the crops and the livestock. So as with the flow of descent within the clan, the flow of water must be maintained. And water must be kept clear, which means that, according to yet another proverb, ssy zzu i pa mu, yy zzu i pa mu, trees are parents, water is parents. The water will be clear and suitable for feeding people and animals if it has trees next to it to prevent erosion and keep down the sediment load. The water without the trees will be muddy, unsuitable for production, just as the clan will be sterile without the wife’s clan to help it reproduce.
There is no time here for further details of Nuosu ecological thinking. But consider what happened when the Chinese revolution came to this area and, in
Schurmann’s words, attempted to replace culture and society with ideology and organization. For the Communists, productivity, development, and national strength stood alongside social justice as pillars of the revolution. And these ideas were summed up in a series of slogans with form not unlike those of the Nuosu lurby, but with very different content. For example, population needed to increase, in light of the Marxist principle that it was human labor that built wealth and transformed the world. In a slogan, 人多力量大 “The more people, the greater our strength.” Also, labor would lead to the complete transformation of the natural world for the benefit of humans, or in a slogan, 人定胜天 “Humanity is destined to conquer nature.” In fact, it was only lack of courage that stood between us and the management of the world for almost infinite productivity, in a slogan, 人有多大胆，地有多大产 However courageous people are, that is how productive the land will be. In the Cultural Revolution, this was encapsulated in a slogan that located not only victory, but existential joy in human struggle against nature (as well as against other people), 与天斗，与地斗，与人斗，其乐无穷，Struggling against heaven, struggling against earth, struggling against people—the joy is boundless.
In light of these “scientific” principles, Nuosu, as a minority people at a low level of “development” along the Stalinist historical scale from primitive to slave to feudal to capitalist to socialist societies, were thought of as backward (their productivity was low) ignorant (only the priestly clans new how to read and write), superstitious (they believed in the animistic principle that there are spirits everywhere, in all things), and above all unscientific. They needed to replace their scattered compounds with concentrated villages where they could better be mobilized to take part in the revolution; they needed to replace their low-productivity, diversified, un-rationalized system of mixed fixed and shifting agriculture with a high-productivity system of modern crops; they needed to replace their exploitative clan and caste system with a just, rational system of people’s communes and agricultural production cooperatives. More than anything else, they needed to boost the productivity of their ecological system. As a consequence, a whole series of attempts to engineer the system were brought to the land of the Nuosu. The results were mixed.
On the one hand, I continue to strive to avoid romanticizing other, simpler ways of life. One thing that the revolution brought was elimination of smallpox and a few other epidemic diseases. This was done by forcing everyone to be vaccinated—no religious or moral objections. More endemic things like leprosy took a lot longer to cure. Another positive benefit was the opportunity to go to elementary school and become literate in the Chinese language, the key to success in the wider society in which Nuosu people were now embedded. And there were some roads, which made getting places easier, as well as serving their primary function of improving mobility for administrative and military personnel.
But on the whole, most changes did not improve people’s living standard very much, though they did decrease the resilience of the system. In the Great Leap forward, large swaths of forest were cut down, to fire the kilns to bake the tiles for new houses in concentrated villages, to plant more crops and raise productivity, and for a short time to fuel the steel mills that every county was required to build in China’s initial drive for industrialization. Initially, the results were disastrous. As resilient as the original system was, it could not survive the shock of precipitous communization, and 20 or 30 people starved to death.
But the radical experiment did not last long; by 1961 or so, collective agriculture had been established as an alternative stable state, and the long-term net results were two: biodiversity loss and more erosion. Both of these meant that the new system was a lot less resilient than the old. Forced to grow crops on marginal land, there was less watershed protection, and the river began to flow in a braided course, with much more seasonal flooding and a higher sediment load. With nearby forests cut down, people had to travel farther to gather firewood and other forest products. Many species with symbolic or aesthetic meaning became difficult to find. And all through this, people did not have any more to eat, and continued to live a subsistence existence. In other words, the attempt to boost productivity did so only marginally, at the price of a huge drop in resilience.
Command-and-Control vs. Golden Rule Management
These two forms of science—first-stream science that takes the results of observation and experimentation and attempts to apply them to engineer social and ecological systems, and second-stream science that recognizes that these systems are too complex to be commanded or controlled—have their equivalents in two kinds of management strategies. In their important work on the “pathology of resource management,” C.S. Holling and Gary Meffe name these command-and-control management and Golden Rule management. Command and control management means trying to manage a system for maximum output, and in doing so to minimize the variation that is natural to the system, but that makes production amounts less reliable. Golden Rule management takes into account that the resilience of systems is dependent on their diversity and complexity, and manages with one “golden rule” in mind—“strive to maintain critical types and ranges of variation in natural systems.” I will begin with some examples of command-and-control management as applied to systems somewhat different from those I have dealt with so far.
First, corn. I am guessing that many of you have read Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma, but if not, and you are interested in questions of resilience, you should read the first section, on corn. Agriculture in the American Midwest is to a large extent based on three crops—corn, wheat, and soybeans—but more than anything else on corn and its secondary products, from beef and pork to cornstarch and high fructose corn syrup to corn ethanol—don’t call it booze—to run our cars. The ecological effects of having such a monocrop regime are noteworthy—single crops, managed for maximum output, eliminate genetic diversity in crops. Solution—command and control. Establish seed banks to keep the currently non-favored varieties from extinction. Also monocrops are susceptible to pest outbreaks that put the whole crop at risk (we might contrast this to what happened when a hailstorm hit our valley in Southwest China in summer, 2004. It wiped out the corn, but didn’t hurt the buckwheat or the potatoes, so people had a hard time, but they didn’t starve). Command-and-Control solution to pest outbreaks—pesticides. Pesticides hurt humans and may further diminish crop variety. Command and control solution—GMO. Engineer the pesticides right into the crop—we have bT corn. Genes from BT corn may invade the genome of other varieties, but there is probably a command-and-control notion to that, also. Chasing our collective tail.
But the ecological effects of the monocrop are perhaps no more important than the economic ones. Everyone is dependent on the price of corn; if there is too much, according to the laws of supply and demand, the price will drop. Command-and-control solutions? Two. First, since the price is so low, get farmers to grow more, so their gross income will not drop. This, of course, violates the assumptions of classical economics and will drive the market price even lower, but there is a command-and-control solution—create a subsidy price that the government will guarantee. Right now, farmers are dependent on these subsidies, and it remains to be seen whether President Obama’s considerable persuasive powers will be enough to persuade Congress to eliminate them for farmers making over half a million a year.
Another example of the pathology of resource management, an even more pathological one. The Soviet Union. The whole thing. Lenin and Stalin and their bureaucratic successors had engineered a completely artificial social and political system, whose economy was planned entirely according to command and control principles. Realizing at some level that the system was pathological, they developed a dual apparatus to command and control it. The first was of course the famous security apparatus—prohibit free expression and free flow of information, and punish those who attempt to violate the prohibition. The second was the propaganda apparatus—command the categories of thought that can circulate publicly. Berkeley linguist Aleksei Yurchak analyzes the linguistic aspect of late Soviet society in an aptly titled article called “Everything was forever, until it was no more,” and shows that late Soviet propaganda language had no verbs. The ideological and organizational system was commanded not only into the linguistic equivalent of a monocrop, but into complete immobility. It had so little resilience that all it took was Mikhail Gorbachev to nudge it just a little bit to try to make it work better, and the mighty edifice fell apart.
Now I’m going to venture, with some trepidation, into your field. Several possibly related phenomena come to my own non-expert mind. First is chasing antibiotic-resistant microbes. A resistant strain evolves, whether it is falciparum malaria or MRSA or whatever the next one is. Eventually we get a drug for it, and then some other strain evolves that is resistant to that drug. The second is our preoccupation with antisepsis and the recent reports that allergies and asthma have risen in prevalence in this country in the past few decades, perhaps due to the phenomenon of disinfecting everything all the time. I have no proof, but something that an organic dairy farmer in Whatcom County said to me may have a bearing here. I asked him why he pasteurized his milk, since it is legal and possible with meticulous attention to standards of cleanliness to sell raw milk in the state of Washington. He said he had no proof, but he thought our current society was too clean for people to be able to tolerate even the low levels of infection that are normal in raw milk, and which were tolerated in milk from Daisy the family cow a hundred years ago.
What about management according to the Golden Rule strategy: allow possibilities, maintain diversity, keep some resilience in the system? The TEK-based systems of management I mentioned above certainly do this, but there are other examples that occur on larger scales and are more appropriate to our contemporary world. I think first of all about not building in floodplains. Despite the human suffering involved with Hurricane Katrina, I think New Orleans will end up a much more ecologically healthy place if areas susceptible to breaks in the highest levees remain as natural wetlands instead of being restored as residential districts. Here in Washington, the floodplains of major rivers seem to bear the same lessons. Build buffers against agricultural chemicals seeping into the stream, grow a diversity of crops suited to different micro-environments, better yet, control pests by diversifying the crop, not growing too many things too close together, and you won’t need so many agricultural chemicals. It is very interesting to talk to apple farmers in Eastern Washington who have switched from “conventional” agriculture, controlling pests with chemicals, to organic methods where they encourage the predators who feed on the pests (and would otherwise be killed along with the pests by the agricultural chemicals). They report that pest infestations go up right after the switch, but then they go down again, and they end up having fewer pests with the organic regime—no chemicals—than they originally had when they were spraying regularly. Predators—birds or parasitic insects—are part of the natural diversity, and if you follow the golden rule and manage for diversity, the net outcome is less trouble with pests.
Again, I hesitate to venture too far into the public health field, but I am thinking of the history of AIDS in Uganda as a lesson in something like golden-rule management. I got in interested in this case through learning from Martina Morris about transmission networks, and through learning from a very gifted UW microbiology undergraduate, Carly Cox, about the conjunction between the disease and the social changes there. As you all know, Uganda is widely regarded as the greatest success story in the fight against AIDS, with prevalence declining from a high of at least 15% in the early 1990s to an estimated 5 percent today. And the USAID report “What Happened in Uganda” provides two conclusions that link the relative success in Uganda compared to many other African countries with originally comparably high HIV prevalence: First, “The most important determinant of the reduction in HIV incidence in Uganda appears to be a decrease in multiple sexual partnerships and networks.” AIDS spread in a system where people routinely had multiple, short-term sexual partners, itself a result of a breakdown in traditional social order during and after the Amin regime. To address this problem, a coalition of government, international NGOs, and local activists undertook a social and educational campaign to restore some order to sexual behavior. Rather than attack one single variable, they worked to minimize the whole nexus of systemic factors that caused the problem, something analogous to allowing the apple pest predators to come back into the system or not crowding livestock to the point where they need antibiotics. They created, in a sense, a system with its own controls, rather than trying to control problems that were originally caused by unwise alterations in the system. Secondly, expenditures over a 10-year period on the education campaigns that are reported to have led to changes in sexual behavior are estimated at about $2.50 per adult. How much would it have caused if prevalence stayed high and everyone were provided with ART therapy? And current worries that the US-supported abstinence-only programs might be responsible for a possible recent rise in incidence once again remind us of command-and-control management. Rather than a system-wide approach that tries to keep dangerous sexual behavior in check, the abstinence-only programs concentrate on maximizing (or in this case minimizing) a single variable. Just like feeding antibiotics to cattle instead of giving them enough room, like planting corn everywhere and then developing the pesticides to control the inevitable outbreaks that you have caused yourself.
Some concluding thoughts
I hope I have managed to suggest ways in which managing whole systems for resilience rather than for maximum productivity reduces the chances of calamity, whether it is famine, corn blight, epidemics, or even total system collapse. But of course we can’t always ignore productivity, not when there are nearly 7 billion of us, there will soon be close to 9, and many of us are still poor compared to the few wealthy ones. We can’t go back to maximum resilience and all second-stream science. Confucius spoke of the Doctrine of the Mean, and Buddha of the Middle Way. Both were reacting, 2,500 years ago, to extremists, and perhaps we ought to react the same way to extremists on the side of technological fixes and also to extremists on the side of the “natural,” unforced functioning of systems. To find a middle way between productivity and resilience is the great challenge of the 21st century.”
Contributed by R. Chavid
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Categories : Commentary, Humanities, Public Health