It Might Get Messy

One of the critical points I hammer into the brains of my undergraduate students is this: money is the most important driver of human relations with the biosphere. Money is how and why we change the environment, and limitations on money constrain our abilities to direct such changes sustainably. Oddly, economics (from the Greek “oikos”, homestead, and “nomos”, to manage) trumps ecology (oikos again, + “logos”, to study) in the practical world. Which means, to understand and manage ecology, we need to understand money.

But think about that for a moment. As I challenge my classes: what the hell IS “money”? Bits of paper or metal bear no quantitative relationship to their impact on the environment. A few hundred grams of paper money can strip a pretty large area of forest, a process involving the shift of many tons of carbon, loss of much life, transformation of multiple habitats. 

On the Pacific archipelago of Yap, traditional “money” consists of large rings or donuts of stone:

The stone from which the money is carved is not local to Yap. It occurs only on islands hundreds of miles to the west. Perhaps you’re starting to see the picture here. People in dugout canoes took off across the ocean, balanced enormously heavy and unwieldy hunks of rock in them, and tried to paddle them home. I can’t imagine how many canoes full of people and rocks litter the ocean floor as a consequence of this Quixotic currency development. 

Oh yeah. The money stones are placed in traditional locations. They don’t move. Transactions are traditionally conducted by communal knowledge of who belongs to which piece of which rock. In other words, you might own a quarter of one stone. When it’s time to buy a couple pigs, you transfer your ownership of that quarter to the pig-seller. He can use it to buy more pigs from the breeder. All these transactions, and the stones just sit there and brood.

I bring this up because money proves to be a critical parameter in health care as well as the environment. And not small money. I have the three page bill for my hospital stay here. Let’s see…room and board in ICU, post-surgery, and regular room, total $23K. Operating rooms, around another $20K. Leeches, not broken out specifically. But the total hospital bill so far is around $88K. Note that this does not include individual doctor’s bills (for the regular physicians, it’ll run about 10% of that total each), anesthesia and anesthesiologists, the cardiac SWAT team, and other dribs and drabs. 

The total bill for the acute portion of my care—minus the longer recovery, nursing, therapy, office visits, drugs, etc., is going to be well north of $100K. And Republicans can’t figure out why the “private sector” health care system leaves hundreds of thousands of less wealthy individuals behind. Can you imagine a treatment program like this without insurance? Man, we’d have to compile every money stone on every Yap out-island and paddle them to the insurance headquarters. And we’d still be behind. 

Hang in there, everybody. STAY INSURED. In today’s America, the difference between insured and un- is incredible. 

Love you all!!!