Geoscience Reference
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reflected the assumption that given a rich and seemingly empty continent
free for the taking, the scarce resource was people. In other words, the con-
straining economic input was labor.
At this point, a critical qualification must be raised. We referred to the
continent as “seemingly empty.” In actuality, it was not. It was rich in nat-
ural ecosystems and a vibrant indigenous American culture. Nonetheless,
European settlers behaved as though it was empty for the taking. The history
of the domination and destruction of these native ecosystems—human and
nonhuman—is a long, familiar, and dismal chapter in our national history. 3
Moreover, this repetitive human behavior contains lessons that are pertinent
to our current economic malaise.
For our purposes, however, the dominant American character, and thus
the typical mindset of its citizens, was formed during an era of voracious
competition for the plentiful resources. As long as one is unconscious of a
material value, one is free of its psychological grip. However, the instant one
perceives a material value and anticipates possible material gain, that person
also perceives the psychological fear of potential loss.
The larger and more immediate the prospects for material gain, the
greater the urgency and the willingness to use political power to expedite
the object's exploitation, because not to act is perceived as losing the oppor-
tunity to someone else. And it is this notion of loss that people fight so hard
to avoid. In this sense, it is appropriate to think of resources as controlling
people, rather than the reverse. 4
Historically, then, any newly identified resource is inevitably overex-
ploited, often to the point of collapse or extinction. Its overexploitation is
based, first, on the perceived rights or entitlement of the exploiter to get his
or her share before someone else does and, second, on the right or entitle-
ment to protect his or her economic investment. There is more to it than this,
however, because the concept of a healthy capitalistic system is one that is
ever growing and expanding, but such a system is not biologically sustain-
able. With renewable natural resources, such nonsustainable exploitation is
a ratchet effect , where to ratchet means to constantly, albeit unevenly, increase
the rate of exploitation of a resource. 5
The ratchet effect works as follows: During periods of relative economic
stability, the rate of harvest of a given renewable resource, say timber or
salmon, tends to stabilize at a level that economic theory predicts can be sus-
tained through some scale of time. Such levels, however, are almost always
excessive, because existing unknown and unpredictable ecological variables
are converted, subconsciously if not overtly, into known and predictable eco-
nomic constants in order to better calculate the expected return on a given
investment from a sustained harvest.
Then comes a sequence of good years in the market, or in the availabil-
ity of the resource, or both, and additional capital investments are encour-
aged in harvesting and processing because competitive economic growth
is the root of capitalism. When conditions return to normal, or even below
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