Living with Bambi

US Route 20 originates in Kenmore Square, Boston, and proceeds westward over 2,300 miles to the east entrance of Yellowstone National Park. If you invest five days of driving, you can make the trip that took early explorers up to half a year.

The park, comprising nearly 3,500 square miles, is situated on the Yellowstone Caldera, the largest supervolcano in North America. As a result, it offers many geothermal features such as geysers (think Old Faithful), hot springs, fumaroles, and mudpots.

It is also home to 4,000 bison (American buffalo) and 20,000 elk, large herds which present huge pressure to the ecosystem. These ungulates (hooved animals) compete for grasses, bark, and leaves, and have actually changed the appearance of Yellowstone. This is largely due to the interventions of man as we, perhaps answering deep tribal fears, exterminated the only significant predator in the park – the grey wolf.

To hear the National Park Service tell it, “By the mid-1900s, wolves had been almost entirely eliminated from the 48 states.”

While farmers and ranchers and park game managers initially thought this a good thing, shockingly, we found that removing a natural predator cannot be done without effect.

As elk and bison stripped the river banks of shoots and leaves and grasses, the natural willow groves were decimated. Beaver populations plummeted and their dams disappeared. River banks collapsed during flood season and river courses straightened as the flow increased. Species of fish and songbirds declined as the biodiversity of the ecosystem became less robust. The ungulate herds became less healthy as starvation and disease ravaged their ranks.

Finally coming to their senses, park managers determined in the early 1990s to reintroduce the wolf population. Not without controversy (hunting outfitters and neighboring ranchers were staunchly opposed), a small number of Canadian wolves were captured and released into the park in 1994 and 1995. Initially numbering only 15-20 wolves, the several packs now total about 450.

In the nearly twenty years since this experiment commenced, what have we seen? First, the bison and elk herds have been trimmed and are, overall, much healthier. The wolves prey on the sick and the weak: only the strong survive. While this could be considered very tough love, the bison and elk are the better for it.

But more unexpectedly, the ecosystem itself has become healthier. The willow groves have rebounded and river banks solidified by trees and grasses and other plants. The rivers themselves have resumed their lazy, more curvaceous course. Beavers have returned with their dams creating pools, friendly conditions for fish and amphibians. Songbirds once again nest in the willows.

The park is, overall, much more balanced and healthy than it was twenty years ago. All due to the reintroduction of a feared predator.

What does this augur for our highly populated eastern regions? It is not likely that folks will be agitating for the return of wolves and cougars to Boston and Foxboro and the like. But we will pay the price.

Local homeowners are familiar with having their shrubbery stripped by deer during a hard winter. The deer herd itself suffers from malnutrition and disease. Anyone who has collided with a deer rues the damage to their car and mourns the poor animal they crippled or killed.

What’s the answer? Perhaps only to keep an open mind regarding human predation of the deer herd. Those few who choose to hunt are providing a service that we won’t allow wild predators to perform. We might consider the idea of harvesting deer and donating the venison to homeless shelters.

The lesson from Yellowstone is that predation, from wolves or otherwise, is necessary for a healthy ecosystem. Man’s intervention has been historically unwise. Let’s try to do better.

Knowledge is Power

Huge 3D printers will build houses.

In the 1961 film “The Errand Boy”, Jerry Lewis plays the part of a mailroom clerk serving a sprawling Hollywood studio. The movie depicts Lewis and his band of fellows as they deliver mail and scripts and revisions and memos between hundreds of offices. In typical Lewis fashion, there are lots of laughs as items are misdelivered and paper flies everywhere.

The mailroom was a classic entry opportunity into the business world. Mail clerks, if assiduous, could learn the business, gain knowledge, and begin to rise within the organization. The mailroom was a common feature of many businesses as disparate as banks, grocery chains, manufacturers, and hospitals. They all had in common the need to distribute information between knowledge workers in a variety of departments, a function the mailroom was designed to fulfill.

But the number of mailroom jobs is quickly dwindling and the culprit is obviously the rise of digital technologies. Email and text messages and a variety of other technologies have sharply reduced the need for human clerks to move physical representations of information from place to place. We now increasingly move information as bits over the internet, not physical pages made of atoms. Bits don’t require clerks as atoms do.

This is only the tip of the iceberg. The federal Bureau of Labor Statistics projects the fastest growing and most rapidly declining occupations over the next ten years.  Not really surprising, health care, computer, and construction jobs are ascendant. Equally not a shock is that apparel manufacturing, federal postal work, and sugar and confectionary production are on the decline.  A combination of dietary evangelism, technological shifts, and globalization has created winners and losers in the job market.

There is yet another technological revolution on the horizon which may wreak havoc with skilled machinists and a number of other occupations – 3D printing.

Everyone is familiar with the concept of metal working, where milling machine or lathes are used to manufacture precision parts. These parts are then combined with others, screwed, bolted or glued together to create a final product or component such as an airplane wing or an artificial limb.

3D printing turns this time honored approach on its head. The thing to be produced is first represented, in its entirely, as a  highly detailed computer file. This information is then processed by a machine which miraculously turns the description of the thing into the thing itself.

The machine, a three dimensional “printer,” is called such because the basic mechanism is reminiscent of the old dot matrix printer.  A dot matrix computer printer utilizes a print head which moves left and right across a page and deposits tiny dots of ink to create letters and numbers and graphics; patterns of dots which finally become your recipe for tomato soup or a letter to mom.

Now imagine a “print head” that can move in three dimensions – vertically as well as two horizontal directions – and instead of ink, exudes bits of material which harden on contact. Processing the detailed design file, the 3D printer patiently “paints” the thing itself, building up layers as it sweeps back and forth. It can take many hours, but an actual object, such as a coffee cup or piece of jewelry, finally emerges.

Long a curiosity of hobbyists, 3D printers were little more than expensive toys. But continued refinement has vastly improved their capabilities. For instance, Boeing now uses 3D printers to create certain airplane parts. Medical researchers are printing human body parts, such as kidneys and livers, and while this is still in the experimental stage, the prognosis is good.

A University of Southern California team is building a huge 3D printer designed to create buildings. Exuding concrete, this machine will be capable of creating houses or other structures, complete, from the ground up.

This technology is truly amazing and will revolutionize how we humans create objects in our world. But what does all this mean on the job front?

Like other disruptive technologies, it will destroy some occupations but create many others. It is difficult to precisely predict the job skills demanded in this new world. But for our children, a solid education including language and computers and mathematics seems a good bet. The successful worker of tomorrow will need to be literate in many ways.

As we were all taught, knowledge is, indeed, power.