Not only do economists and ecologists tell stories, but so do the systems of which they speak, as organisms communicate or societies announce policy. Investigators listen to the narratives of biosocial systems and then pass them along as stories about what is being studied. Ecologists’ narratives often see resources ending in depletion, as in gloom and doom scenarios. Economists’ narratives say you don’t run out, things just get expensive, giving an incentive for resource substitution and technology; often a better story. The narratives are about the way the system updates the meaning it transmits to its context (e.g. what organisms tell their mates or competitors, and what societies mean to each other) . The story comes from interaction of two aspects of biosocial systems: dynamics of processes (e.g. metabolism) versus planned constraints operating through stasis. The plans and codes updated as processes show new self-organized emergence that has significance. The narrative biological or societal systems tell is of that emergence, complicated by coding for new stable conditions. Similarly, the story of a tennis match ties together the dynamics of the play and the critical changes in the coded discrete scores. The story moves forward at the rate at which the situation of the biosocial system changes (e.g. the meaning of losing a set point). The new economic ecological story may be: efficiency notwithstanding, the renewable resource stream has diminished anyway. So plans must change, or the system becomes unsustainable. In that situation, the default narrative ecologists pass along is of death or extinction. In the economists’ default narrative, the coded plan changes to increase efficiency that effects some sort of substitution (e.g. wood to coal). Each narrative has limits.
Results/Conclusions
Ecologists must learn to include changing returns on effort and efficiency, as when systems economize or work harder and different. Those responses are manifested in things like the nuanced statements of “The Ghost of Competition Past.” Economists must learn that sometimes there is no magic substitute “technology.” Both extinction and non-sustainability occur in nature and society quite often. In a challenging future, economic ecology should tell, as a unified narrative, both the story of responding to context and the story of lost sustainability. A bad end may be inevitable, but we can learn to postpone or ameliorate it.