To T. McDonough:
Actually it is a discussion in ecological theory, and
so far Alan McGowen, an ecologist very active on the ecol-econ
list has not responded to my latest message. Very briefly
there is a theory about ecological hierarchies with a lot of
subpoints, such as that higher levels constrain lower levels
and that higher levels oscillate on lower frequencies than lower
levels. This is supposedly an outcome of the operation of the
law of entropy and is argued by people such as Tim Allen at the
University of Wisconsin-Madison where I am for the summer.
McGowen, who is very anti-economics and thinks that global
human population should be much much lower than it currently is,
presents these arguments as if they are natural laws on the order
of Newton's laws of motion, rather than reasonable hypotheses with
some empirical support. I presented a counterexample, that a spruce
forest subject to 50-year spruce-budworm cycles might have individual
trees that survive the crash and thus operate at a lower frequency
despite being at a lower ecosystemic hierarchic level.
Hope this has not been too distracting for most. For those
interested in more on this with a link to economics, you can see my
"Discontinuous Changes in Hierarchical Ecological Economies" in
_Land Econmics_, May 1995 where much of this theory is laid out in
more detail and a lot of sources are provided.
Barkley Rosser
