MegaCorporation Econosystems are like Ancient MegaFauna Ecosystems

The smallest dinosaurs were not actually very small, and most were pretty big, while some were huge. During the days of the megafauna, there were small creatures like insects, lizards, snakes, crustaceans, and many others, but the landscape was dominated by large animals.

Velociraptor, an example of ancient megafauna, photo from California Academy of Sciences

Some dinosaurs were herbivores, eating only plant material, others were entirely carnivorous acting as major predators, while still others were in between and omnivorous. We do not have really good descriptions of the landscape, but it was probably a mixture of forest and sweeping grasslands. The forest was mostly an open forest with some undergrowth, but only a few places were great tangles of jungle. We know from present day systems, that if you have large herds of megafauna roaming a savanah or grasslands, the herbivores stop tree growth by nipping off and eating the newly sprouting trees. So grasslands with large herbivores tend to last a long time. To get to this megafauna ecosystem required about 100 million years of evolution after the first plants and animals made their way onto the land from the water.

Many of the capitalist countries and even some of the centrally controlled economies are like these ancient grasslands with herds of herbivorous dinosaurs grazing on them occasionally attacked and devoured by massive predatory dinosaurs, the quintessential top predators. In this metaphor, the herbivorous dinosaurs are equivalent to the massive industrial farm complexes, enormous forestry giants, and the mega mining, gas, and oil industries. These are the primary consumers of the econosystem, and in this picture, they are mega-lucrespecies. The mega secondary consumers in the econosystem (equivalent to predators) are the industries that feed on the products of the mega primary consumers. The most familiar are the giant automobile industries, the giant pharmaceutical construction, electronics, engineering, food and beverage, plastics, telecommunications, textile manufacturing, pulp and paper, and transportation. Just as in the grassland and savannah ecosystems, in these econosystems with the species that have formed tentative alliances with the megafauna, such as the oxpecker birds that take parasites from the skin of the large animals, there are some specialized service industries that feed into the needs of the mega corporations in tentative alliances, but the entire landscape is dominated by the megacorporations.

In biological systems, there is a constant competitive boundary area between low-growing shrub areas and more open grasslands. If the mega herbivores begin to run out of resources in the areas where they dominate, they investigate the edges of the shrubby and low-growth forests. If there are suitable plants to graze on, they will ultimately transform that low shrubby areas into grasslands. Any farmer to day will tell you that if cattle are allowed to roam free in a field, they will nip off any small trees. If the grass dries out in the summer, they will drift into nearby shrub and forest cover where they both eat and trample the undergrowth.

The same is essentially true of the spread of mega-corporations. Anyone who lives in a relatively small community or in an older neighborhood of a city can probably relate stories of the conflict surrounding the proposed building of a mega mall where large chain corporations can out-compete and displace the smaller local companies. The net result is reduced diversity of industry and general reduction of the number of independent businesses in the area. The mega corporations build massive infrastructure in highly localized areas, just like the massive bodies of the dinosaurs.

Are these bad tendencies? No, it is just what we observe to happen in the econosystems that are roughly of the same evolutionary stage as the ancient dinosaurs. No doubt the earliest humans understood a concept of ownership, but it was probably the great crunch period when humans of our species (Homo sapiens) were nearly wiped off the face of the earth by climate change — in this case a cooling period. Forced to the southern tip of Africa, they were so few in numbers — about 15,000 — that they shifted from family troops to the first of the mixed family tribes. This happened about 100,000 years ago. This was the point at which the beginnings of “economy” as we now know it began, where an mixed family group would cooperate in subsistence hunting and gathering.

The biological systems took about 100 million years to reach the mega-fauna stage, human economy has taken about 100,000 years to reach the mega-corporation stage.So there is still a long way for human economy to evolve to reach the more sophisticated levels of biological evolution, especially those seen in coral reef, rain forests, and kelp forests where there is an extensive biological infrastructure allowing many strategic alliances, dependencies, commensalisms, symbioses, and extensive parasitic relationships to occur. We see many examples of plants that have been able to combine their photosynthetic abilities with predatory activities. At least in the present econosystems, we do not see this same type of system, but we do see the first examples of some pre-adaptation taking place where the Internet and some communication and distribution systems are beginning to create an infrastructure that could, if it continues to grow, allow the development of and proliferation of the same kinds of types of relationships in corporations and small businesses.

Evolution in biology is highly variable. Sometimes it takes a very long time for a species to evolve, other times, it is much quicker, but at least so far, we have never seen an example where it is essentially accomplished in one generation. If we use biology and the past evolution of economy as our twin guides we can deduce that it is likely to take a very long time before we will see a highly developed system like a rain forest in the economic sector. On the other hand, we can take a lesson from this and think about how we as individuals inside both the biological and economic systems could behave to better the chances of our personal and familial survival, as well as how to begin to nurture the required condition into which a more diverse econosystem might evolve.

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