[This is the second paper by Barkley Rosser I am posting to the Crashlist. Rosser
is concerned with two main questions: how are human societies embedded in wider
ecosystems, and what are the mechanisms of sudden, qualittative and/or
catastrophic change? Mark.]

[from Land Economics May 1995 71(2): 163-72]

[ Barkley Rosser is Professor of economics, James Madison University,
Harrisonburg, VA
The author wishes to acknowledge receipt of useful materials or comments from T.
F. H. Mien, Carl Folke, James J. Kay, Elias L. Khalil, Heikki Isomaki, Charles
Perrings, Carry Peterson, Tonu Puu, and an anony-mous referee.
Abstract. Human beings are both the slaves and the masters of the ecosystems in
which they live. This paper examines the interrelationship be-tween economic
decision-making hierarchies and ecological hierarchies Conditions under which
dis-continuous changes can occur are presented both for top-down and bottom-up
causes Appropriate institutional arrangements for minimizing ecological disruption
are analysed and depend on the nature of the relationship between the economic and
eco-logical hierarchies. In some cases this will involve self-managed economic
units operating at the appropriate level of the ecological hierarchy. (JEL Q20)]

I. INTRODUCTION

The concept, nature, role, and function of hierarchy has been much discussed in
both ecology and economics. There has also been much discussion of the nature and
functioning of combined ecological-economic systems. What has been much less
discussed is the role of hierarchy in such combined systems. That is the primary
purpose of this paper.

This paper will seek to explicate certain important dynamics of such systems, most
particularly how such systems come to expe-rience crises that lead to major
structural transformations or even complete break-downs of their functioning. Such
crises have been argued to underlie the collapse of civi-lizations and societies,
including the Mesopotamian empires as the fertile cres-cent was degraded and the
Mayan civiliza-tion with a combined social-ecological crisis of class conflict and
degradation of food production capabilities. More recent disas-ters have included
that of the decline of the Aral Sea in the former Soviet Union and the various
collapses of fisheries around the world. At the global level the possibilities of
greenhouse effects and ozone depletion threaten both the global ecosystem and
human existence as a whole along with it.

Ecosystems can collapse without the in-tervention or even the existence of human
beings, witness the apparently relatively rapid extinction of the dinosaurs,
albeit probably due to an exogenous event such as a large asteroid impact. And
human Societies can collapse or disappear with ecologi-cal factors playing an
insignificant role as with the fall of tsarist Russia. However the focus here is
upon combined systems where the elements are mutually interacting with the crisis
intimately arising from the nature of that interaction.
Two overriding facts present themselves to us. One is that ultimately the human
economy is embedded within the global ecosystem. Despite futuristic fantasies and
science fiction possibilities, so far we remain children of the earth and the sun,
integrally connected with the solar energy-driven global set of biogeochemical
cycles. For all its "crudity," Feuerbach's famous line that "we are what we eat"
contains a crucial truth. Materially we are ultimately sunlight and proteins, the
former as calories and the latter as combinations of the basic organic elements,
with both directly drawn from other plants and animals. If they die, we die.

The second is that human beings are able to consciously manipulate and intervene
in the nonhuman parts of the ecosystem. We are both limited slaves of the
ecosystem, yet simultaneously masters and directors of it. It is in this complex
interrelationship that the problem of hierarchy presents itself most compellingly.
The rise of a technologically changing humanity, consciously interacting with the
nonhuman ecosystem has created a completely new kind of system, what Vernadsky
(1945) labeled the "no�sphere." This entity is hierarchically structured, with
hu-manity both being subject to it as well as having an important element of
control over it.

Thus human beings possess a profound ecological responsibility for constructing
systematically viable institutional systems with appropriate hierarchical
structures. Williamson (1975) famously argued that there is a fundamental
trade-off between markets and hierarchies (large-scale firms or government
agencies) in economies. On the one hand, laissez-faire markets are not sustainable
ecologically in the long run, for reasons such as enernalities and the collec-tive
consumption nature of many ecological characteristics. On the other hand, pure
central planning is no guarantee of ecological health as the disasters in Eastern
Eu-rope and the former Soviet Union make clear. what is needed is an appropriate
structuring and balancing of the two.

More precisely what is needed is a pat-tern that in some sense conesponds to the
hierarchical structure of the nonhuman ecosystem. Human institutional units must
be able to operate properly with equivalently scaled ecological units. The famous
problem of controlling access to an open access resource is an obvious example.
The body which controls access, which may be an individual, a cooperative, a
corporation, or a government,1 must operate at the scale of the resource in
question. Thus we see many local units, such as the alpine grazing cooperatives in
Switzerland (Netting 1976; Stevenson 1991), that control access to cornmon
property resources quite effectively. At the other extreme has been the recent
emergence of global level entities such as the Montreal Protocols on ozone
depletion and the Rio Earth Summit, with its incom-pletely implemented emphasis on
the green-house effect, which deal with ecological issues at the global scale.

The remainder of this paper is organized as follows. In the next two sections
there will be respective discussions of ecological and economic hierarchies. Then
there will be an analysis of the various forms that combined systems can take and
the condi-tions under which dynamics for these forms may lead to crises. Possible
solutions to these problems will then be discussed.

II. ECOLOGICAL HIERARCHIES

The term "hierarchy" was invented by Denys the Areopagite in the fifth century
(Iannello 1992, 15). In Greek, "hieros" meant "sacred" and "arkho" meant "rule,"
with the term being applied initially to ec-clesiastical hierarchies. This element
of rule or command is important in strictly eco-nomic hierarchies, but is not
important in nonhuman ecological hierarchies. 2 A gen-eral view would be that a
hierarchy is an ordered structure consisting of ranked levels.

The ranking of levels implies a number of important aspects (Allen and Hoekstra
1992, chap. 1). One is that higher levels operate to constrain the behavior of
lower levels. Thus the condition of the global ecosystem, or biosphere, functions
as the ultimate con-straint on all the subsystems operating on the earth. Closely
following on this is the idea that lower levels operate on smaller space scales or
faster time scales than do higher levels. To the extent that there are measurable
and semi-regular fluctuation patterns,3 they oscillate more rapidly at lower
levels than at higher levels.

--------------------------------- Footnotes
1There has been a long tradition of identifying the problem as that of a "common
property resource" (Gordon 1954). thereby implying that the issue is the
establishment of private property rights. This view' was strongly reinforced by
Hardin's (1968) discussion of "the tragedy of the commons." More reoently
(Ciriacy-Wantrup and Bishop 1975) it has been realized that it is open acoess that
is the problem, control of which does not necessarily require private property
rights, per se.
2 An exception to this is the "organismist" school of thought which reaches a
culmination In the "Gaia hypothesis" (Lovelock 1988). In its extreme form, this
argues that a conscious Mother Earth (Gala) directs or controls lower levels of
the biosphere. In its weaker form, there is no such conscious control, but there
is still a global homeostatic mechanism that tends to maintain life on earth,
although it could be disrupted by human activities (Wallace and Norton 1992).
3Aperiodic fluctuations can arise both from pure randomness as well as from
deterministic chaotic dynamics.
--------------------------------- Footnotes

Within a given level there will be stronger links than across levels. This is
central to the idea that a level has some identifiable existence.4 Simon (1962)
presented this as the idea of the "partial decomposability" of a hierarchy. Each
level behaves semiau-tonomously within itself, while being part of the larger
structure, This idea of the dual-ism of a hierarchical level is captured in
Koestler's (1967) term, holon, which implies this Janus-like character of
subsisting as a whole unto itself while also being part of a larger whole.
A special case of hierarchy is one which is nested, meaning that the lower levels
are completely contained in the higher and that, indeed, the higher consist of the
lower. Gunther and Folke (1993) label ecological hierarchies of this sort,
holarchies, that is consisting of a set of fully nested holons. They present
ecosphere, ecosystem, organ-ism, and cell as four levels of holarchy and reject
the idea that managerial economic hierarchies are holarchic, because, for cx-ample
the boss is not actually made up of the workers in the way that an organism is
made up of a bunch of cells. They are distinct entities relating in a ranked
struc-ture. However many analysts of economic hierarchies also define them as
nested, if not strictly holarchic (Radner 1992). Allen and Starr (1982) allow for
non-nested ecological hierarchies as well.

Ecological hierarchies presumably build up over time as a result of deep
evolution-ary processes. Boulding (1978) defined the emergence of a new level of
hierarchy as the process of anagenesis.6 For a level to maintain itself once it
has emerged has been strongly argued to depend on autopoiesis (Varela, Maturana,
and Uribe 1974), or a process of self-replication.

The anagenesis of autopoiesis depends on the openness of biological systems. The
issue here is that of the law of entropy and the flows of energy through
ecosystems.7 In a famous argument Schroedinger (1944) ar-gued that life is
fundamentally a locally anti-entropic process within a larger space in which
entropy increases, although there are locally anti-entropic processes that are not
life as we think of it, such as some astronomical ones (Wiener 1948, 32). Living
systems must draw energy and matter from outside of themselves into themselves to
create the order of their structured biological processes.

This implies that living systems must be open and dissipative, following on
funda-mental arguments from systems theory (von Bertalanffy 1968).8 Applying this
to ecological hierarchies, Gunther and Folke (1993) argue that the creation of
order at one hierarchical level implies the increase of entropy and hence of
disorder at another level.9

Rolling (1973,1986) has analyzed dynam-ics for a given level of ecological
hierarchy according to a stability-resilience tradeoff in-volving a series of
stages. In the first stage the system is unstable in the sense that there are
large fluctuations of populations but it is resilient in that exogenous shocks
will not cause a general structural reorgani-zation or collapse.10 This is a
high-growth stage as "invader species" enter and estab-lish themselves in an
environment. Later the system reaches a climax stage where the species grow more
slowly and species popu-lations vary little. The system becomes very stable,
entering into a long-run equilibrium.
4. it is possible to have hierarchies that are continuous in form 'without any
identifiable levels other than a top, as in the rank-size measures in urban
hierarchy analysis (Auerbach 1913). Within ecology there is con-siderable debate
regarding whether hierarchies have distinct, scale-defined levels or not, with
Holling (1992) strongly arguing that they do for most terrestrial ecosystems.

--------------------------------- Footnotes
4. Khalil (1992) warns against simplistically applying biological theories of
hierarchy to economic hierar-chies, a sin hopefully avoided in this paper.
6For a discussion of the dynamics of the anagenetic moment, when a new level
actually emerges, see Rosser et al. (1993).
7 Goeorgescu-Roegen (1971) has argued that the law of entropy is foundational to
analyzing economic systems, although this argument has had its critics (flurness
et al. 1980).
8Stokes (1992, chap. 2) argues that an important precursor of systems theory and
its application to both ecology and economics was Bogdanov (1925-28).
9Kay (1991) has shown how such an approach can he used to analyze ecosystem
integrity and catastrophic changes in ecosystems.
For more precise mathematical definitions of "stability" and "resilience" see
Common and Perrings (1992).
--------------------------------- Footnotes

However, now it loses resiliency and be-comes susceptible to exogenous shocks,
such as when a climax forest bums down in a forest fire. The system can completely
col-lapse. It then goes into a regeneration stage before repeating the cycle.
An important part of Rolling's argument is that at the time of collapse and
regenera-tion there can be a more profound disconti-nuity and structural
transformation, for example with an evergreen forest shifting over to deciduous
trees.11 In a nested hierarchy, or holarchy, such a dramatic change at one level
will generally trigger changes at the lower levels as well as constituting
con-straint set shifts. Under certain circum-stances, such a change at a lower
level can trigger changes at higher levels as well (Rosser et al. 1993), a
situation discussed later in this paper. In a nonhuman ecosys-tem such structural
transformations can happen "on their own," as it were, either from an exogenous
shock, or through an endogenous working-out.

iii. ECONOMIC HIERARCHIES
There are at least two ways of consid-ering the concept of economic hierarchy. One
has to do with different levels of aggre-gation in the economy and the
decision-making institutions associated with these levels. The other has to do
with decision-making structures within an economic orga-nization such as a firm.
Clearly these two can be related to each other as, for example, in the case of the
centrally planned com-mand economy where the entire economy is essentially a
single firm.

The first way of considering economic hierarchy may correspond more clearly with
the view of ecological hierarchy just pre-sented, possibly even the nested
holarchy type. Thus we can conceive of the hierarchy of macroeconomy, firm,
individual, or per-haps even more precisely, world economy, national economy,
regional economy, local economy, and individual economy, as firms may be
transnational and operate across different levels. Indeed, from the standpoint of
decision-making institutions in the latter version, one may be encountering
different levels of some firms as one moves from headquarters decision-making to
decision--making at lower, more localized levels of the firm.

An important variation of this view is to consider intensity of economic
activities in different locations as measured by rent per land unit generated and
the property and decision-making institutions associated with these different
degrees of intensity. Bromley (1991, chap. 7) argues that there is a natural
hierarchy of property regimes that is associ-ated with such gradations within
predomi-nantly market economies. Land generating the highest rent per acre will
generally be privately owned. Next down the hierarchy will be commonly owned
property, "the commons," but with some restrictions placed on access by the common
owners.12 Then will be state property, as in the federally owned lands in the U.S.
West. Finally will be true open access land, often beyond the extensive margin,
which may be completely unowned.'3
Clearly reality is more complicated than this sometimes. Thus we find state-owned
property in the middle of cities in high-rent districts and some open access
locations may be highly economically productive as in a fishery that is very
abundant but for which access is difficult or impossible to control. Also we have
the problem of different levels of government as well as different forms of
private ownership. Thus corporations can be viewed as a type of "common
ownership," albeit very different from that cited in the literature on traditional
management of common properties (McCay and Acheson

--------------------------------- Footnotes
11. For a discussion of the role of catastrophe theory in analyzing such shifts
see Rosser (1991).
12 Anderson and Hill (1977) stress the role of agency costs of privatization in
determining the line between privately owned property and commonly owned property.
Thus the invention of cheap barbed wire made it easier to enclose and privatize
western U.S. grazing lands. Such an invention has not yet been made for open-sea
fisheries.
13. Hardie (1991) refers to unowned territories as the "last Commons," giving the
high seas beyond all 200-mile limits, Central Antarctica, and deep space as the
clearest examples.
--------------------------------- Footnotes

1987), but often they will own and control the most valuable land in market
capitalist economies. 14

The second view focuses on intrafirm hi-erarchy. The modern theory of intrafirm
hierarchy derives significantly from the work of Simon (1957, 1962). In the latter
piece he presents a parable of two competing watch-makers, one who decomposes the
produc-tion process into a set of subassembly pro-cesses and one who does not, and
then proceeds to argue that the former will be more efficient than the latter.
Efficiency arguments for top-down managerial hierar-chies have focused on
minimizing transac-tions costs that would otherwise occur in arms-length market
transactions (Arrow 1969; Williamson 1975) or on maximizing information flows
through organizing decen-tralization (Radner 1992). Thus economic hierarchy
corresponds more closely to the original meaning with Radner (1992, 1391) defining
one as a "ranked tree" with a sin-gle "root" (the top boss). This is the form we
find in the typical market capitalist firm and also the traditional command
socialist planning structure.

The critics are legion. A central argu-ment has been that hierarchies exist so
that owners can control workers and extract rents (Marglm  1974; Gintis 1976), an
argument that clearly goes back at least to Marx.15 To the extent employers must
expend resources in controlling workers, then profit-maximi-zation may not be
technically efficient (Bowles 1985). Radner (1985) recognizes that there may be
multiple equilibria out-comes in the long run when there is imper-fect information
leading to principal-agent relationships. Although advocating a hierar-chy of
incentives, Aoki (1990) argues that it should be combined with a horizontal
coor-dination of control as in some Japanese firms.

The most dramatic alternative to both the typical market capitalist firm and the
command socialist planning structure is the worker-owned and managed firm or
cooper-ative. Worker motivation may be higher in such firms (Horvat 1982) and
there is evi-dence of less resources spent on managerial intensity as workers
monitor each other
(Greenberg 1986). Mthough these types of firms have been subjected to a variety of
criticisms (Bonin, Jones, and Putterman 1993),16 the kinds of entities which have
controlled access to common property re-sources in traditional and even some
mod-ern market economies have looked a lot like worker-owned and controlled
cooperatives,'7 although sometimes relying on some rein-forcement by some level of
government as well.

IV. DYNAMICS OF ECOLOGIC-ECONOMIC HIERARCHIES
Let us consider an abstract form of a combined ecologic-economic hierarchy. It has
n well-defined hierarchy levels, where each level may be a purely ecologic system,
a purely economic system, or a combined system. Higher levels constrain more
rapidly oscillating lower levels. This can be de-scribed by means of the
synergetics method of Haken (1977).

--------------------------------- Footnotes
14Another issue is that spatially the "lower" levels of this property hierarchy
are often larger than the higher ones.
15The analogous argument for command socialism refers to control by a nomenldatura
elite, made by Djilas (1957).
16Criticisms of such firms include that they may have backward-bending supply
curves, that they may misuse scarce managerial talent, that they may under-invest
due to lack of access to equities markets, and that they seem to be far
outnumbered by standard firms in market capitalist economies. For a discussion of
worker-managed-but-not-owned firms in the former Yugoslavia see Rosser and Rosser
(1995, chap. 14).
17 Gilles and Jamtgaard (1991) present discussions of "unabused commons" in
grazing environments in the Upper Andes and parts of Africa, as well as the mod-em
example of the Swiss alpine pastures. These cases involve zones of low and
variable yields where herds may need to be moved over large distances to find
edible pastures. Cordell (1989) presents numerous cx-amples of fisheries managed
successfully as traditional commons as well as the modern example of Japanese
fishing villages. Ostrom (1990) discusses many of these cases as well as modern
ones involving voluntary pri-vate associations dealing with such things as
groundwa-ter usage.
--------------------------------- Footnotes

At any given level a separation can be made between "fast dynamics" (variables at
that level or below) and "slow dynamics" (variables from higher levels that act as
con-straints). If fast dynamics are given by a vector q and slow dynamics are
given by a vector F, then the system at that level can be given by
4 = Aq + B(F)q + C(F) + e(t),
where A, B, and C are matrices, and E(t) is an i.i.d. random fluctuation. Haken
argues that the system can be simplified through "adiabatic approximation" to show
the fast dynamics depending purely on the slow dy-namics, a condition he labels
slaving. This is given by
4 = -(A + B(F)fl1c(F),  [21

which can be derived by rearranging [1] to show q solely as a function of F. The
con-trolling variables are called order parameters and can be arrayed in a rank
order in in-verse order of the absolute value of vari-ables in A + B(F).
Curiously, order param-eters are unstable in the sense that they possess positive
real parts of eigenvalues, whereas slaved variables are just the oppo~ site.
There are two principal sources of major structural change in the Holling sense of
resilience breakdown. One is bottom-up, a lower hierarchical level undermining
those above it. The other is top-down, some major change at a higher level
restructuring the entire system. The former is given by a fast variable's
eigenvalue becoming positive, that is the variable destabilizing. Diener and
Poston (1984) have described such dynamics as the "revolt of the slaved
variables." Haken (1977) has argued that this is a cen-tral key to the emergence
of chaotic dynamics in structured systems.

An example of such bottom-up break-downs, besides the obvious purely
socioeco-nomic examples involving revolutionary up-heavals, might be the role of
epidemic out-breaks such as the Great Plague in ecologic-economic systems. We note
that the destabilization in such a case does not come out of the blue, although
the specific disease might. Rather the preparation for the desta-bilization builds
up slowly to a critical point, for example by a long process of malnutri-tion
weakening immune systems among a critical mass of the population, as appar-ently
happened prior to the Great Plague (Braudel 1967).
[1]     For top-down changes a mechanism may be the emergence of a new higher
level of the hierarchy, the anagenetic moment. The details of this closely follow
Nicolis (1986) and are presented in Rosser Ct al. (1993), but we shall describe
the essentials here. At the top level let the complete set of dynamics be given by

dr/at-f(x1,t) + w(t)
+       S f'x(t')w~(t' + )dt',    [31 i-I 0

where wi(t) is an i.i.d. random environmen-tal fluctuation. The third term on the
right is a cross-correlation operator with i11.(t) representing a weighting matrix
of environ-mental feedback operators. It is either "off," in which there are
unconelated oscillations, or "on" indicating some kind of frequency entrainment
among variables.

Frequency entrainment is triggered by the real part of the eigenvalue of the third
term becoming positive. This can generate a new hierarchical level derived from
the phase coherence of a subset of the variables at that level. This is a case
where the emer-gence of positive feedback creates some-thing which did not exist
before. In a strictly ecological context we have the evolution of multicellular
organisms out of single-cell ones as the cells cohere in an entrained manner. In a
strictly economic context we have the emergence of a new level of urban hierarchy
as a particular city adopts a new larger scale industry not previously present in
other cities as various related industries within the city expand through external
scale economies. 18

--------------------------------- Footnotes
18Rosser (1994) presents the example of New York's emergence in the early
nineteenth century as the domi-nant city in the U.S. as a result of the expansion
of a series of related industries such as wholesaling and banking after the
opening of the Erie Canal.
--------------------------------- Footnotes

The new level can then operate as a constraint on the next level down. But the
result may well be the destruction of var-iables not aligned with the frequency
entrainment. An example in a combined ecological-economic system may well be the
impact on ecosystems of the emergence of global ocean-going international trade
which carried species from one "ecological realm" into another, thereby generating
catas-trophic collapses and explosions of various populations (Elton 1958).

V.      APPROPRIATE INSTITUTIONS

Clearly some of these kinds of situations are beyond our ability to prevent. But
others are not, and here the question arises as to how we can develop appropriate
institu-tions to minimize the damage that we do to the environment. Much will
depend on the nature of the hierarchical interactions be-tween the nonhuman
ecosystem and the human economy.

At least three possibilities present them-selves. One is what can be described as
a single hiemirhy. In this case human and non-human levels can be seen as
alternating, each constraining the other in succession. Thus a human farmer can
constrain a herd of cattle, but he or she is in turn con-strained by the broader
ecological condi-tions within which the herd exists. Here the human levels must
have a stable relation-ship both upward and downwards, preventing destabilizations
at lower levels while not creating destabilizations at higher levels.
A second is the bi-hierarchy wherein an ecological hierarchy is closely connected
with a parallel economic hierarchy. In this case we would seem to have a
straightfor-ward situation. The institutions of manage-ment should be appropriate
to the level of the ecological hierarchy to which the eco-nomic level is related.
Local institutions, whether public, private, or cooperative, should manage smaller
ecological units or resources. Global institutions should man-age global
ecosystems, as in the question of ozone depletion. This might seem obvious, yet
failure to follow this is deeply related to the problem of the "tragedy of the
com-mons." Thus the breakdown of previously successful locally managed common
property regimes has often resulted from the intrusion of, or a mandate from, some
higher level of the economic hierarchy. Thus the original "tragedy of the commons"
can be seen to have arisen from the very process of enclosing previously open
fields in response to outside market pressures which then led to overgrazing of
the remnant commons.19
Finally we have the complex matrix form (Davis and Lawrence 1977) in which
rela-tionships may cut across levels in complex ways. Here we have a greater
chance of the conditions described for a destabilization of equations [1] and [2]
being fulfilled, namely a lower hierarchical level event triggering a higher level
systemic transformation or col-lapse, the "revolt of the slaved variables." In a
fully complex matrix situation this can involve very involved relationships over
long distances and up and down hierarchy levels.

A possible example has been discussed by Rolling (1994), who has warned that
de-struction of tropical habitat by human activ-ity has sharply reduced songbird
migrations, which in turn control the spruce budworms in western Canada, thus
possibly allowing a catastrophic outbreak of the budworm and a collapse of western
Canadian forests. Clearly such a case involves numerous externalities and does not
admit of an easy property, management, or institutional solution.

Going back to the simpler first two cases we might argue that self-managed units
may have an advantage over others in managing common property systems. Evidence on
worker-managed firms suggests that one of their major advantages is the lower
monitor-mg costs due to the workers monitoring each other. That is the essence of
what has gone on in the successful traditional common property management systems,
herders or fishermen enforcing the mutually agreed-upon access restrictions on
each other. Often this has involved some local element of hierarchy, for example a
village headman to adjudicate disputes between parties over access rights.

--------------------------------- Footnotes
19 Bromley (1991, chap. 6) documents how colonial regimes in Africa and Asia
displaced local common property management regimes and how their successor
governments have continued to hold authority at the center with the result being
no proper control of access and overexploitation of previously well-managed
ecosystems.
--------------------------------- Footnotes

In the modern setting where newer tech-nologies, outside panics possibly from
other nations, and expanding global market inte-gration are operative, these kinds
of systems may need the support of governmental units at a higher level for them
to work. A reasonably successful example of such a case is that of the Icelandic
fisheries as discussed by Durrenburger and Palsson (1987). The Icelandic
government in effect has come to play the role of the village headman for the
disagreements among the normally self-enforcing fishermen. Also it has defended
their interests against foreign intruders. Of course this is made easier by the
small size of Iceland with only a little over 200,000 people and its deeply
entrenched traditions of egalitarianism and democracy making the government
credible with the fishermen. In many countries, fishing communities contain ethnic
minorities alienated from the broader society and its governmental structures; not
a good setup for the necessary cooperation if such reinforcement is to succeed.

In all of these cases we are dealing with the essential no�spheric problem:
humanity is simultaneously master and slave in the global biosphere. Previously we
were just slaves. But our technological advances and increasing population have
transformed the nature of nature. We are now a crucial driving element in the new
structure and bear a profound responsibility for the devel-opment of the
no�sphere, even as we re-main the subjects of Gaia. Only by being true to
ourselves can we be true to her.

VI. CONCLUSIONS

We have seen how ecological and eco-nomic systems can be respectively
hierarchi-cally structured. We have seen that com-bined ecological-economic
systems can ex-hibit dynamic instabilities and collapses. The ability of human
institutions to minimize such outcomes at all levels from the local to the global
depends on the emergence and development of appropriate institutions that are
neither exploitive of humans nor of the environment. Such institutions are most
likely to be those that are nonhierarchically self-governed at the appropriate
level of the relevant level of the ecosystem. With or without property rights, per
se, control of access and management by such entities is the most hopeful approach
yet available to us for the productive and effective develop-ment of the global
no�sphere.

-------------------------------------
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