Boom & Bust

The boom and bust cycle seems to be everywhere:

• The dot-com boom
• The housing bubble
• Tulip mania. The Dutch banned short selling of tulip futures... in 1610.
  
• After the South Seas Bubble burst in 1720, "A resolution was proposed in parliament that bankers be tied up in sacks filled with snakes and tipped into the murky Thames."
• During the Panic of 1837, 250 business houses failed in New York in three weeks, 343 out of 850 banks closed, and the economy did not recover until 1842.

And not just in economics.  Populations of snowshoe hares, voles, grouse, and lemmings also increase and decrease rapidly in cycles.

People's tendency to "be fruitful and multiply", like their tendency to overexploit public resources and to favor short-term over long-term advantage, doubtless derives from evolutionary imperatives.  A lemming can be forgiven for having as many baby lemmings as it can; a herd of reindeer can be forgiven for eating all the lichen on an Arctic island.  They are only animals obeying their instincts.  But humans have at least the potential to anticipate the effects of their actions.

I think the key question facing humanity is whether we will collectively keep our heads in the sand regarding the long-term effects of our individual selfish actions, or whether we can muster enough rationality to agree to regulate or restrict ourselves -- all of us.  To quote Garrett Hardin in "Tragedy of the Commons":

As James Madison said in 1788, “If men were angels, no Government would be necessary” (Federalist, no. 51). That is, if all men were angels. But in a world in which all resources are limited, a single nonangel in the commons spoils the environment for all.

Spring Ruminations

Regardless of what the calendar or the groundhog says, I always think spring arrives when the first flowers appear.  Last week my daughter saw the first snowdrops of the season.

The other day I was strolling on the Bronx River trail and noticed some crocuses about to unfurl.

As you may guess, the trail follows the Bronx River, more or less, for about five miles from the Kensico Dam in Valhalla south through White Plains and on to the Hartsdale train station.  It also follows the Bronx River Parkway and the Metro-North Railway's Harlem line, so it isn't as peaceful as you might wish.  But it's pleasant to be able to get out of the office and see some trees, running water, and wildlife.  Ducks are common (mallards, mergansers), as unfortunately are Canada geese; on a couple of occasions I've seen snowy egrets wading in the river or gliding along just above it.  Parts of it are quite scenic, even when the trees are bare.

At this time of year, however, what is most in evidence is the trash.  A good bit of it seems to have been ejected by motorists (the parkway is only a few yards away in many places), but a large amount is carried along by the river until it snags in a tree branch dangling in the water or washes up along the banks.

At one point a culvert carries runoff into the river.  When I passed, the water was a bright viridian color, whether some chemical effluvium or an algae bloom I don't know.

What is it about human nature that makes us so careless of our waste products?  Did we inherit this trait from our distant arboreal ancestors, whose refuse, once dropped out of the tree, simply disappeared?  Or perhaps we should blame our more recent hunter-gatherer ancestors, who didn't stay in one place long enough for their garbage to accumulate to problematic levels.

Humans are certainly not the only offenders, as anyone can attest who has walked through a cow pasture, or for that matter a trail frequented by Canada geese.  Certain Pacific islands were covered several yards deep with guano until humans began harvesting it as fertilizer.  In fact, nearly every life form now extant on Earth owes its existence to the cyanobacteria (blue-green algae), which 2.5 billion years ago began polluting Earth's atmosphere with a toxic chemical called oxygen as a by-product of photosynthesis.  For all the justifiable concern over global warming, humans haven't done anywhere near as much damage to the environment as these ancient one-celled creatures.  Not yet, anyway.