Wolves, externalities and finding balance

Externalities are not something most of us understand or have ever had to concern ourselves about, until now.

The idea of putting a cost on carbon was just a small step toward helping us understand that an externality is a real cost that someone, somewhere has to burden.

The Yellowstone National Park - the
 return of wolves brought new
life to all aspects of the park.

Corporations and businesses of the world, including all those in Australia, have for centuries cheerfully ignored, to the benefit of their bank balances, the real cost of externalities.

Of course, it is unfair and irresponsible, to lump responsibility for ignoring externalities upon only business, as individuals, you and me, are equally liable for how the machine, that is the economy, works as we are also intimate players in the activity.

Speaking on a panel at Shepparton’s Eastbank before the naming of the winner of the 2014 Indigenous Ceramic Arts Award, Arts Victoria’s Liz Little said “Everything affects everything else”.

Liz was obviously speaking about art, but she could have been talking about externalities for everything we do clearly impacts everything else.

A clear and obvious example of that comes from America’s Yellowstone National Park where wolves, which had been missing for 70 years, were reintroduced in 1995.

Although a predator, the wolves controlled the size of deer herds, forced them to different parts of the park, allowing amazing regrowth or trees, plants and shrubs encouraging the return of birdlife; beavers began damming streams and rivers again encouraging the return of various species that thrived in the pools; and balance was returning to the park.

Ms Little wasn’t talking about wolves in Yellowstone Park and nor was she talking about externalities when she said “Everything affects everything else”, but her comment was prescient.

Her truism takes us direct to the problem and until we are prepared to put a cost on our externalities, those things we dump in our atmosphere, our oceans, our rivers and many landfills, we will continue to soil our own nest, making it ultimately unliveable.

Australia’s “great big new tax” (the carbon tax) was a first, and timid step toward seeing people here at least acknowledging that “Everything affects everything else”.

It was also a somewhat apprehensive move toward having us understand the real costs, financial and otherwise, of externalities and the complication of ignoring the rather brutal reality that “Everything affects everything else”.

Solutions to this dilemma are straightforward and simple, but as they require significant changes to our behaviour they are not socially palatable.

However, necessity will soon override any reservations as our abuse of those externalities will brings changes to what we see as normal.

Maybe it is time we familiarized ourselves with the idea behind the Yellowstone Park wolves and brought the balance back into our lives.