Pollution and Harm to the Planet

Taleb proposes an ecological risk-management rule: where damage rises disproportionately with concentration, spread pressure across resources. Increasing damage corresponds to a concave environmental payoff. He argues that this provides a reason for ecological caution even under uncertainty about specific mechanisms, and applies the idea to diversifying sources of pollution.4 The argument depends on how the particular harm varies with concentration; diversification alone does not establish a reduction in damage.

Let’s look at naturelike ancestral mechanisms for regulating the concentration effects. We contemporary humans go to the stores to purchase the same items, say tuna, coffee or tea, rice, mozzarella, Cabernet wine, olive oil, and other items that appear to us as not easily substitutable. Because of sticky contemporary habits, cultural contagion, and the rigidity of factories, we are led to the excessive use of specific products. This concentration is harmful. Extreme consumption of, say, tuna, can hurt other animals, mess with the ecosystem, and lead species to extinction. And not only does the harm scale nonlinearly, but the shortages lead to disproportional rises in prices.

Ancestral humans did it differently. Jennifer Dunne, a complexity researcher who studies hunter-gatherers, examined evidence about the behavior of the Aleuts, a North American native tribe, for which we have ample data, covering five millennia. They exhibit a remarkable lack of concentration in their predatorial behavior, with a strategy of prey switching. They were not as sticky and rigid as us in their habits. Whenever they got low on a resource, they switched to another one, as if to preserve the ecosystem. So they understood convexity effects—or, rather, their habits did.

Note that globalization has had the effect of making contagions planetary—as if the entire world became a huge room with narrow exits and people rushing to the same doors, with accelerated harm. Just as about every child reads Harry Potter and joins (for now) Facebook, people when they get rich are starting to engage in the same activities and buy the same items. They drink Cabernet wine, hope to visit Venice and Florence, dream of buying a second home in the South of France, etc. Tourist locations are becoming unbearable: just go to Venice next July.