The Ratchet Effect

Everyone agrees that “sustainable” management of our farms, forests, and rangelands is desirable, but it is hard to find a definition of sustainability upon which everyone agrees. An extreme view is that the only kind of resource harvesting that is sustainable is that of aboriginal hunter-gatherers in the rain forest. They live in a closed ecosystem. Nothing is artificially imported into the ecosystem, so there is no pollution. Nothing is transported out of the ecosystem, so there is no depletion. Everything is recycled, and natural soil erosion is so slow that losses are replaced by natural soilforming processes.