What the Wolves of Yellowstone Teach Us about Complex Systems

The Complexity of Our Environment

A literacy textbook my wife and I use for homeschooling our son, in a unit teaching persuasive writing, featured two articles written from opposing points of view about the reintroduction of wolves into Yellowstone National Park. One argued it was bad because wolves threaten farm animals. The other argued that it was great to bring wolves back into their natural habitat, which has helped to restore balance to the ecosystem.

I asked my son which he felt was more persuasive, and he said the latter. I agreed. We both felt the argument against the reintroduction was very weak and shortsighted.

To learn more, I did a bit of searching online and came across some videos and other additional information to share with him, and we were both fascinated to learn that reintroducing wolves to Yellowstone not only changed the park’s ecology; it changed the landscape.

The wolves’ presence literally changed the course of rivers. Here’s a great video explaining how:

Here’s another one that’s well done:

Relatedly, I also stumbled on this interesting video about the importance of the wolves of Isle Royale in Lake Superior for maintaining a balanced ecosystem (this is closer to home since we live in Michigan):

I also found the transcript of an informative talk given by Michael Crichton, author of Jurassic Park and other science fiction books, about the wolves’ impact on Yellowstone’s ecosystem.

The point of his talk was to highlight how terribly the park has been managed by the national government.

See, policymakers at the National Park Service, in their great arrogance, thought they were smarter than nature and could fix the park up real good by shooting animals to control their population. Deer, cougar, lynx, and wolves were all victims of this policy.

At the same time, the elk were protected, and their numbers exploded. Their overgrazing caused population declines of other species, and the government’s solution to that problem was to double down on wolf extermination — even though it wasn’t the wolves killing off other animals but the elks’ overgrazing.

The aspen trees were decimated, which affected the beaver population since beavers used the trees to build their dams. The loss of water management by the beavers had further negative impacts on the environment.

For decades, the government denied that the policy of favoring the elk population was responsible for the disappearance of wildlife from the park.

The government also had a fire-suppression policy. The native tribes had actually managed the land with deliberate burns, and there were frequent natural burns due to lightning strikes. But due to the fire-suppression, there was a buildup of brush so that in 1988 when fire broke out, it burned very hot and sterilized the soil. One-third of the park burned.

I remember visiting the park after those fires as a kid on a family vacation and driving through forests decimated by fires. Everything was scorched. I remember stopping to take a photo of a single flower blooming by the roadside, a symbol to us at the time of hope and regrowth.

Continuing his talk, Crichton had these insightful comments:

What is the story of Yellowstone really telling us? I would argue that, in a phrase, we must embrace complexity theory. We must understand complex systems. We live in a world of complex systems. The environment is a complex system. The government is a complex system. Financial markets are complex systems. The human mind is a complex system. Most minds anyway.

By a complex system, I mean one in which the elements of the system interact among themselves such that any modification we make to the system will produce results that we can’t predict in advance.

In addition, a complex system is sensitive to initial conditions. You can get one result from it on one day, but the identical interaction the next day will yield a different result. We cannot know with certainty how the system will respond. Third, when we do something to a complex system, we may get downstream consequences that emerge weeks or even years later. We have to be watchful for delayed and untoward consequences.

Another example of how government harmed the environment through the sheer arrogance of the belief that policymakers could “fix” things was how policymakers caused the catastrophic drainage of the Everglades.

During the 1920s and 1930s, a project got underway to build levees along Lake Okeechobee to reduce the amount of flooding in the northern Everglades, which enabled urban development at the cost of severing the hydrological link that enabled the Everglades to sustain itself.

Compounding the problem were the government’s agriculture and “water management” systems that transformed wetlands to farmland and redirected water for human use, resulting in the drainage of over half of the Everglades.

There is no shortage of irony in this old propaganda poster shown below (a screenshot from the above video), on which the “Progressive” policy of “Reclaiming the Everglades” was promoted. As if it nature had somehow stolen the land from humans so that the land’s natural state represented a departure from what it should be according to the imagination of central planners.

What we need to happen is rather for nature to reclaim the Everglades from human interference.

My point is not that we should oppose development but that we need to recognize the arrogance of policymakers who think they know better than nature and better than the rest of us how things ought to be done.

We need to advance human civilization by respecting our environment and learning to live in harmony with it rather than eradicating and trying to alter it to our liking.

We need to understand that interference in complex systems can have devastating unintended consequences.

Of course, the arrogance of central planners is not limited to ignorance about the need to maintain the delicate balance of nature. The same arrogance is perpetually on display in pretty much every other aspect of our lives, including the economy and public health.

The Complexity of Our Economy

Another area where this problem is omnipresent is our economy. We have nothing resembling a free market by virtue of the fact that our money itself is controlled and manipulated by people who think they know better than the market and better than all of us how things should be.

The Federal Reserve is a government-legislated private monopoly over the supply of currency, and its manipulations of the money supply and interest rates mess up the market’s pricing system in ways that cause terrible misallocation of resources and the cycle of periods of unsustainable “growth” turned to bust.

In 2012, I published a short book illuminating, for example, how the Fed’s policy of maintaining artificially low interest rates to fuel a boom in housing succeeded in its shortsighted aim, causing the housing bubble that, once burst, precipitated the 2008 financial crisis.

It’s titled Ron Paul vs. Paul Krugman: Austrian vs. Keynesian Economics in the Financial Crisis. The lessons it contains remain highly relevant today, particularly in the wake of the mad money printing that was done to try to conceal the costs of the COVID-19 lockdown madness.

Here is how Barron’s, the Wall Street Journal-owned financial weekly newspaper, described my book:

“Any work of economics that can make you laugh is at least worth a look. If in less than 100 pages it also informs you about a subject of great importance, it might just qualify as a must-read. Jeremy Hammond, a political journalist self-taught in economics and a writer of rare skill, has produced such a book…. This short work conveys more insight into the causes and cures of business cycles than most textbooks, and more about the recent business cycle than most volumes of much greater length.”

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One consequence of the Fed’s mad money printing is the current housing affordability crisis, which has negatively affected my own family by keeping out of reach my household’s goal of moving out of the home we rent into a property of our own, with ridiculously high prices coupled with high interest rates and higher costs for insurance and property taxes.

We look back on the prices of homes we saw and considered practical dream homes several years ago, which at the time were outside of our budget, and can only wish that we could find similar homes on the market today in the same price range.

We’ve been watching for many years now how prices just kept going up and up, which is price inflation caused by monetary inflation plus the market distortions resulting from years of pushing interest rates artificially low (which the Fed only allowed to rise to try to slow the rate of price inflation resulting from all its money printing). An example is the flood of money from institutional investors into housing, which has crowded out families seeking a primary residence, thus further contributing to the affordability crisis.

Years ago, when we first started looking for a home, we said if only we can save X amount for a down payment, then we’ll be able to afford such and such a home, and then a year or two down the road, by the time we’d reached our savings goal, we would now need to save an additional amount to be able to afford a similar home; and by the time we’d done so, now we needed to save an additional amount. Year after year, our goal has been kept frustratingly out of reach because of the government’s disastrous decision to shut down the economy and to try to paper over the devastating harms caused by creating trillions of additional dollars out of thin air.

No matter how hard they try, the bureaucrats just cannot legislate away the law of supply and demand, which is just as applicable to the price we call an interest rate as to prices for assets and consumer goods and services.

The Complexity of the Human Immune System

Another example of how arrogant policymakers think they are smarter than nature and smarter than the rest of us was the coerced mass vaccination endgame of the lockdown madness.

We all know that the COVID-19 vaccines were sold to the public on the basis of lies.

But beyond the false claims about how the shots would end the pandemic by stopping infection and transmission of SARS-CoV-2, these shots provide a useful example of how pricks with a God complex, e.g., Dr. Anthony Fauci, mistakenly believe they can outsmart nature.

The human immune system is a complex system that scientists still are only really beginning to understand.

We’ve always been told that the concept of vaccination is really simple: just get this safe antigen exposure so that your body can learn to develop antibodies so that when you encounter the deadly pathogen, you’ll be able to fight off the disease. But it isn’t that simple at all.

On the contrary, vaccines mess with people’s immune systems in ways that scientists either barely understand or are completely clueless about.

I happen to have accurately predicted one of the harms of COVID-19 vaccines, which is a phenomenon known in the literature as “original antigenic sin” (or as “immune priming”, which is a stupidly non-descript term for it since priming of the immune system is typically beneficial, and plenty of immune priming occurs that isn’t the same as “original antigenic sin”).

On September 14, 2020, a UN General Assembly document was published titled “Vaccine Mandates Violate the Right to Informed Consent”. I authored that document on behalf of the NGO that submitted it to the UN Human Rights Council, and in it, three months before COVID-19 vaccines received emergency use authorization from the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA), I warned of the potential risk of original antigenic sin.

Here is what I wrote (bold emphasis added where I’ve applied an economic term to highlight a central fallacy of so-called “public health” policymakers):

In immunology, there are phenomena known as “original antigenic sin” and “linked-epitope suppression”. Essentially, what can happen is that, once the immune system is primed to respond one way to a pathogen, it will continue to respond that way in the event of subsequent exposures, even if this means that the originally trained response is suboptimal for the newly infecting strain.

If such a phenomenon occurs with the immunity conferred by COVID‑19 vaccines, given the opportunity cost of natural immunity, the result for the vaccinated individual could be an increased susceptibility to SARS‑CoV‑2 infection throughout their lifetime.

At the population level, mass vaccination could also theoretically end up driving the evolution of “escape” mutants—variants that escape the suboptimal immunity conferred by the vaccines.

In the long-term, due to the opportunity cost of natural immunity, mass vaccination could end up impeding rather than contributing to the development of population or “herd” immunity that serves to protect those at highest risk of severe disease and death.

Ultimately, the right to informed consent for these pharmaceutical products is being systematically violated.

My warnings proved prescient because scientists subsequently confirmed that original antigenic sin is a real problem with the mRNA COVID-19 vaccines, as I have documented at length, including in my freely available e-book The FDA, COVID-19 Vaccines, and Scientific Fraud: How the US Government Puts Children’s Health at Risk in Service to the Pharmaceutical Industry, which you can get access to by signing up for my newsletter here:

One of the best illustrations of the dangerous ignorance of “public health” policymakers is the consistent finding that so-called “non-live” vaccines are associated with an increased risk of childhood death.

Top researchers in the field of study into the “non-specific effects” of vaccines have pointed out, for example, how the diphtheria, tetanus, and whole-cell pertussis (DTP) vaccine, which is associated with in increased rate of childhood mortality and appears to detrimentally affect children’s immune system so that, while they might be protected against the three target pathogens, they become more vulnerable to other diseases and so die at a higher rate than they otherwise would in the absence of vaccination.

While the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has long refused to do the type of studies that so many parents have long been demanding, a comparison of long-term health outcomes between children vaccinated according to the CDC’s routine childhood schedule and children who’ve remained completely unvaccinated, independent researchers have forged ahead, and it has become increasingly evident that unvaccinated children are healthier.

I illuminate the reality of just how unscientific public vaccine policies are and how the government has been waging an assault on our right to make our own decisions about our own health in my book The War on Informed Consent: The Persecution of Dr. Paul Thomas by the Oregon Medical Board, which features a Foreword by Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.

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We need to end the government’s shortsighted interference into complex systems that policymakers are totally clueless about. That starts with an awareness of the problem of bureaucrats who favor central planning deluding themselves into the belief that they know best how our environment and our lives — and indeed our very bodies — ought to be managed.

The medial ethic of “first do no harm” ought to actually be applied, yes, to health care, but also to pretty much everything else, including the environment and our economy. Unfortunately, politicians tend to favor meddling in everything.

And, what do you know? I just realized as I’m wrapping up this blog post that today happens to be Tax Day: our deadline for complying with the government’s demand to forcibly expropriate the fruits of our labors so clueless politicians can redistribute it how they like because they think they know better than we do how our hard-earned dollars ought to be spent.

What examples of harms resulting from central planners arrogantly meddling in complex systems they do not understand can you come up with? Share your thoughts in the comments below!