Yellowstone wolves and media-determinism
Yes, a single factor can disrupt and re-establish the equilibrium in an ecosystem
Explaining the incredible complexity of social, political, cultural, and economic life through the clay tablet or papyrus was sometimes labelled techno-determinism. In turn, techno-determinism was condemned for the alleged reductionism of complex social issues to a single factor. An excerpt from Digital Future in the Rearview Mirror: Jaspers’ Axial Age and Logan’s Alphabet Effect.
In ecology, however, a single factor can indeed have deterministic power. The leading global ecological discourse, global warming, is heavily “techno-deterministic” – its determining medium (the “agent of change”) is carbon dioxide, which is excessively released to the atmosphere because of human activity.
The equilibrium in any ecosystem can be disrupted and re-established in a new way by a powerful enough single factor.
In the 1970s, Colombian drug lord Pablo Escobar ordered one male and four female hippos for his private zoo. By the 2020s, a herd of 140 animals had changed the regional ecosystem. They spoiled lakes and rivers, changed flora and fauna, caused fish to die, ruined fishing, and disrupted the entire habitus of the locals.[1]
From 1995 to 1997, forty-one wolves were reintroduced in Yellowstone.[2] Wolves changed the number and behavior of elk and restored the balance of plants. Wolves affected other predators, which led to the restoration and increase of the diversity of birds and rodents. Without wolves, elk suppressed riverside plants, and this drove away beavers. After wolves returned, beavers returned, too, which altered the water system and even the landscape and microclimate. The return of wolves transformed the entire regional ecosystem.[3]
Can the changes in the Yellowstone ecosystem be “reduced” to wolves? Hardly. But wolves have certainly become the determinant of changes. Scientists pointed out that a new equilibrium has been formed in the phenomenon called “trophic cascades,” or how species interact within a food web (i.e., how nature is organized, if one can characterize the near-impossible complexity!).[4] In other words, the wolves caused a cascade ecological effect.
The entire ecosystem can be affected not only by the addition but also by the removal of a single factor.
In India, farmers used to give their livestock diclofenac, an anti-inflammatory drug that was harmless to farm animals and humans. But the presence of diclofenac in the corpses of farm animals killed 99% of the vulture population. Vultures were a crucial sanitary element in the ecosystem, they served as a natural animal disposal system. The vultures’ metabolism trapped and killed pathogens thriving in carrion, thus preventing the spread of these pathogens. Vultures also suppressed other scavengers who spread diseases. This is particularly important in the conditions of the Hindu religion, in which 80% of the population does not consume cow’s meat and dead cows are left to nature.
After the vultures were almost gone, a huge number of animal carcasses were left to rot. They became a feeding ground for infectious germs and also for feral dogs and rats that spread other diseases, such as rabies. As the vulture population plummeted from 40 million to just 19 thousand, India’s feral dog population increased by at least 5 million, resulting in over 38 million additional dog bites and more than 47,000 extra deaths from rabies.[5] Studies showed that the loss of vultures in some regions raised all-cause human death rates by more than 4%.[6] This is now called the “Indian vulture crisis,” and the country is struggling to restore the vulture population.
In 1958, the communist regime in China announced the Four Pests program aimed at the extermination of rats, flies, mosquitoes, and sparrows. The “Smash Sparrows Program” led to particularly dramatic consequences. Sparrows were guilty of eating grains, seeds, and fruits, so the Communist Party sentenced them to death to increase agricultural productivity during the so-called Great Leap Forward. Millions of Chinese, especially school pupils and youth, were mobilized to kill birds and destroy their nests. In 1958, in just one day of national anti-sparrow action, 310,000 sparrows were killed in Peking and an estimated 4 million across China, according to the victorious reports of Radio Peking. Sixteen-year-old Yang Seh-mun became a national hero for killing 20,000 sparrows.[7]
The extermination of sparrows disturbed the ecological balance and resulted in surging locust and insect populations that destroyed crops. Along with other governmental policies within the Great Leap Forward, including massive deforestation, the reorganization of farming, and inefficient food redistribution within the planned economy, this led to the Great Chinese Famine, one of the deadliest famines and the largest man-made disaster in human history. The estimated death toll was 15 to 50 million.[8] In some provinces, up to 18% of the population died.
Escobar’s hippos, Yellowstone’s wolves, veterinary diclofenac, and the killing of sparrows were “single factors” that disrupted the ecological equilibrium and altered the ecosystem through the cascade effect. Similar to the domino effect, even a slight disturbance of the balance can release significant forces. These forces belong not to the initial factor or agent but to the masses that come into motion after the triggering factor disturbs the equilibrium. A small domino piece, when pushed in the right place in the system’s equilibrium, can eventually move incomparably larger masses.
The domino effect is mounting but linear. The cascade ecological reaction can also be overlapping (and enlarging because it is overlapping). The next events are affected not just by the previous events but also by the cumulative or reverberating impacts of earlier events. This is called the “ripple effect.” Ripples of different speed and potency can cross, overlap, and turn into rogue waves that reshape ecosystems and civilizations. So, yes, behind a simple media deterministic statement, such as “The wolves changed Yellowstone,” there are complex ecological mechanisms, some hard science, and even some sophisticated math.
In this light, Lance Strate in his 2017 Media Ecology, a must-read textbook in the field, suggests considering “For Want of a Nail,” a rhyme that has been a longstanding part of English folk tradition:
For want of a Nail the Shoe was lost;
For want of a Shoe the Horse was lost;
And for want of a Horse the Rider was lost,
Being overtaken and slain by the Enemy,
All for the want of Care about a Horseshoe-Nail.
Strate also mentions another variation that includes a message as part of the events: “For want of a rider the message was lost, for want of a message the battle was lost, for want of a battle the kingdom was lost, and all for the want of a horseshoe nail.” He writes:
“For Want of a Nail” tells the story of a series of causal events, each one escalating in importance, in a manner that we might refer to as a snowball effect, or butterfly effect, the idea that small changes can reverberate and grow into much larger ones, especially if they become part of a positive feedback loop.[9]
Further, Strate comes up with a possible explanation of the “reductionist” accusations against media deterministic concepts:
But what happens when we collapse the chain, and express the same idea in a more economical, less poetic, summary fashion, that the loss of a nail caused the loss of a kingdom? This sort of abbreviation results in a statement that strains credulity, that most would consider an exaggeration at best. The same might be said of a statement such as, the stirrup caused feudalism.[10]
Strate quotes Neil Postman (his professor in the 1980s), who repeated after Huxley that we all are “Great Abbreviators.” Strate offers samples of such abbreviations:
We might say that evolution caused humans to stand erect, that gravity causes objects to fall to the ground, and that entropy causes systems to seek equilibrium, statements that are properly understood as a kind of shorthand for more nuanced scientific theory.[11]
McLuhan was, of course, among the greatest abbreviators. He did not hesitate to make statements that cut out boring nuances and jumped right to the key points. Strate quotes some McLuhanisms from The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962):
“The interiorization of the technology of the phonetic alphabet translates man from the magical world of the ear to the neutral visual world.”
“Schizophrenia may be a necessary consequence of literacy.”
“The alphabet is an aggressive and militant absorber and transformer of cultures, as Harold Innis was the first to show.”
“Print created national uniformity and government centralism, but also individualism, and opposition to government as such.”[12]
From this angle, Strate analyzes the role of the stirrup in forming the socio-economic conditions of feudalism in Medieval Europe, as suggested by Lynn White in his 1964 book Medieval Technology and Social Change.[13] In McLuhan’s interpretation, White “explains how the feudal system was a social extension of the stirrup.”[14] To pinpoint the issue, Strate suggests that if he were to make the claim that the “stirrup caused feudalism,” it would come across as incongruous and perhaps even absurd, despite (or because of) its likeness to a scientific formulation. But it might also “perform a heuristic function, leading to further discussion and investigation.”[15]
Of course, there is a chain of more nuanced and overlapping occurrences connecting the stirrup and feudalism. The stirrup allowed a mounted warrior to use heavy weaponry and the power of a galloping horse for attacks. This created a superior battle technique and allowed extended conquest and expanded military gains. But this military technique also required the production of expensive heavy weaponry and armor. The assistance of servants and foot soldiers was also required. They would help the horseman mount the horse, but they would also fight on his flanks, precisely in the manner of modern infantry accompanying a tank on the battlefield. So mounted warriors simultaneously became the captains of these military units.
Therefore, it can well be said that the new combat technique led to new socio-economic relations. Mounted warriors received a well-deserved share of the war gains and, in return, were obliged to maintain their military units. This entailed knighthood and the vassalage system, with respective economic, military, and political relations between the vassals and the sovereign. Knighthood also created the ethics and aesthetics of chivalry, with its poetry, rituals, and even gender roles: chivalry, in French, meant cavalry or horsemanship. And here we have, finally, the complete picture of feudalism.
This is what Postman meant when he said that technological changes are ecological: “I mean ‘ecological’ in the same sense as the word is used by environmental scientists. One significant change generates total change.”[16]
Within the ecological framework, media determinism is not reductionism. Media determinism is “inductionism.” It represents the inducing—formative, terraforming—power of media. Media determinism is not the order of things but an optic for looking at this order. Rejecting media determinism means declining a goldmine of insights. And vice versa: as soon as you accept the optic of media determinism, your life becomes a captivating ethnographic expedition.
Karl Marx was a latent media determinist. According to him, “The hand-mill gives you society with the feudal lord; the steam-mill society with the industrial capitalist.”[17] On another occasion, in a passage written a century before McLuhan, Marx asked:
Is Achilles possible when powder and shot have been invented? And is the Iliad possible at all when the printing press and even printing machines exist? Is it not inevitable that with the emergence of the press bar the singing and the telling and the muse cease; that is, the conditions necessary for epic poetry disappear?[18]
Vladimir Lenin reworked the media determinism of Marx into media ecological engineering. His famous formula of communism stated: “Communism is the power of the Soviets plus the electrification of the whole country.”[19] As steam engines, according to Marx, brought capitalism, electricity, according to Lenin, should have brought communism. It was not, of course, some “linear” naivety of reductionism. Lenin understood that electricity would favor large industrial enterprises, the cradle of the proletariat, and thus would disturb the small-holding economic structure that suited the agricultural economy based on the peasantry with its small-proprietor consciousness, then the predominant demographic of Russia. The peasantry was receptive to the bourgeois mentality and therefore posed a threat to communism.[20] So electrification was tasked with reshaping the peasant country, much like the wolves in Yellowstone. The ecologists in Yellowstone were ecological engineers, too. For them, wolves were the medium of ecosystem engineering, terraforming (whereas hippos were a medium of entertainment for Escobar, and their reshaping of the ecosystem was an unintended consequence).
Terraforming is the ultimate environmental power of media, whether applied by an ingenious mind or unleashed by itself naturally. New media, when spread widely enough and massively used, transform from an instrument into an environmental force.[21] As soon as people start using a medium, they become a part of the environment created by this medium. The terraforming power of media is not a figure of speech. Humans with their media have physically reshaped the planet and even near space, with both intended and unintended outcomes.
Read more in: Digital Future in the Rearview Mirror: Jaspers’ Axial Age and Logan’s Alphabet Effect.
See also books by Andrey Mir:
The Viral Inquisitor and other essays on postjournalism and media ecology (2024)
Digital Future in the Rearview Mirror: Jaspers’ Axial Age and Logan’s Alphabet Effect (2024)
[1] See for example: Drost, Philip. (2022, October 25). “Why this doctor is castrating the offspring of Pablo Escobar’s escaped hippos.” CBC.
[2] Smith, Douglas W., et al. (2019, April 25). “Wolf Restoration in Yellowstone: Reintroduction to Recovery.” Series: Yellowstone Science. Volume 24, Issue 1: Celebrating 20 Years of Wolves.
[3] The metaphor of wolves changing an ecosystem was also used by Paolo Granata in his course on media ecology at the University of Toronto. Granata refers to Dennis Cali’s 2017 book Mapping Media Ecology, and Cali in the book refers to an interview with T. David Gordon. The Yellowstone wolves are indeed a compelling example of ecological determinism and a strong response to accusations of “reductionism”.
[4] Smith, Douglas W., et al. (2019, May 16). “The Big Scientific Debate: Trophic Cascades.” Series: Yellowstone Science. Volume 24, Issue 1: Celebrating 20 Years of Wolves.
[5] Burfield, Ian, and Bowden, Chris. (2022, September 28). “South Asian vultures and diclofenac”. Cambridge Core Blog.
[6] Frank, Eyal, and Sudarshan, Anant. (2023, January 21). “How human and ecosystem health are intertwined: Evidence from vulture population collapse in India.” VoxDev.
[7] Time. (1958, May 5). “Red China: Death to Sparrows.”
[8] According to various sources listed in Wikipedia: “Great Chinese Famine”.
[9] Strate, Lance. (2017). Media Ecology, p. 155.
[10] Strate, Lance. (2017). Media Ecology, p. 155.
[11] Strate, Lance. (2017). Media Ecology, p. 154.
[12] Strate, Lance. (2017). Media Ecology, p. 156-157.
[13] In his 1964 book Medieval Technology and Social Change, Lynn White advanced the theory that feudalism in Europe developed as a result of the introduction of the stirrup to cavalry. The theory spurred the so-called “Great Stirrup Controversy” and many accusations in techno-determinism and reductionism.
[14] Strate, Lance. (2017). Media Ecology, p. 156.
[15] Strate, Lance. (2017). Media Ecology, p. 157.
[16] Postman, Neil. (1992). Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology, p. 18.
[17] Marx, Karl. (1847). The Poverty of Philosophy. Chapter 2.1, Second Observation, Para 2.
[18] Marx, Karl. (1859). A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy. Introduction, Appendix 1, Section 4.
[19] Lenin, Vladimir. (1920, December 22). “Report on the work of the Council of People’s Commissars.” in V. I. Lenin, Collected Works (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1964), Vol. XXXI, pp. 513-518.
[20] Mir, Andrey. (2022). “Media-ecological engineering of the Soviets.” Explorations in Media Ecology, Volume 21, Issue 2-3, Oct 2022, p. 143 – 155.
[21] Miroshnichenko, Andrey. (2021). “Media and Responsibility for Their Effects: Instrumental vs. Environmental Views”. Laws, 10, no. 2: 48.
The "inductionism" framing is smart, and the wolf example works precisely because it highlights what abbreviation conceals: the wolves didn't just add a factor to Yellowstone. They changed what kind of system it was. The elk weren't only reduced in number, they started behaving differently. Fear itself became an ecological force.
This suggests media determinism might be even stranger than the cascade model implies. Cascades are still basically linear, even when they overlap. But media often produce recursive loops. The printing press didn't just cause the Reformation. Luther's pamphlets changed what printing was for, which changed who became printers, which changed what got printed next. The medium and its effects co-evolve.
Borges wrote about a map so detailed it covered the territory it mapped. Digital media may be producing something weirder: territories that reshape themselves to match the map. Social media doesn't just reflect or distort social reality. It creates environments where people optimize for the medium's reward structures. We're all elk now, grazing differently because we sense the wolves.