Rule of the Thumb

 

TIME TO GLOBAL STRATEGY DEADLINE: 16 DAYS

I asked Sally to give me an example of the simple concepts and rules that WICO Secretary General Decatur mentioned during yesterday’s press conference.

“They’re more like rules of thumb,” she corrected. “One of the most basic ones can be easily remembered using a real thumb: There should be four times as much nature as people. Think of one of your hands as the environment. Your thumb is the people, and your fingers are plants and other animals. A hand is not a complete hand unless they’re all there.”

“What about the palm?” I asked.

“The palm is the raw resources converted by plants into resources, including other plants, that animals can use. Animals can of course use other animals as resources. The analogy breaks down there. Though if you think of fingers supporting other fingers and the thumb, then you can also remember that the thumb gets sicker as three of the fingers are removed, and dies if the remaining finger is removed.”

She explained that the “fingers” are like an economic supply chain, with each one adding value that the next one can consume. The problem facing the world is that the “thumb” not only consumes what the “index finger” produces, but also consumes what the others produce and the “fingers” themselves.

I knew there was more to it, but grasped her point that the top priority was that the basic rule needed to be remembered.

Reality Check

The rule is based on observations of how global variables change with the people/nature ratio as reproduced in the simulation. The analogy is very imperfect from an ecological perspective, but again the point is to communicate the rule.