Oct 062014
 

I want to share one of the most interesting short videos I’ve seen in a while, originally posted by Yonatan Zunger.

It’s about the idea of trophic cascades: how a small change to an ecosystem can lead to tremendous consequences, in this case good. The change was the reintroduction of wolves to Yellowstone in the 1990’s, after a 70-year absence.


Check it out on Amazon – Wolf Totem

The direct effects of the wolves were small: the wolves eat a few deer, but apart from that mostly keep to themselves. But the indirect effects were huge.

It started because the deer, who had been running roughshod over the entire park, quickly figured out that places like valleys were not good places to be a deer when there are wolves about. This led to trees being able to grow in those areas for the first time in decades.

The effects of that are complex and profound, and I encourage you to watch the video, because I can’t possibly summarize it better than it does. Everything from the animals to the plants to the very physical geography of the rivers was changed.

The key lesson of this is that ecosystems are connected. You can’t make a single change to one and expect it not to have consequences, including very far-reaching ones of a sort you couldn’t ever have predicted. This is a general property of all large, strongly-interacting systems, including societies, and it’s worth keeping in mind whenever things change.

I would like to recommend a wonderful book to you which really explains the positive role of wolves on the grass lands of Mongolia. It is called “Wolf Totem” by Jiang Rong, who writes of his years living in Mongolia and what he learned from the Nomads about wolves.

Check it out on Amazon – Wolf Totem

 Posted by at 12:57 pm

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