Supply chains are critical. This is not up for debate.
Through famines, pandemics, civil unrest, natural disaster and war, supply chains are the unifying factor that can accommodate relief if not resolution, whether whole or in part.
No military power can succeed without them. In transport and logistics there’s a common adage: “No day is the same.”
Changeability is the precondition of entry. Outsourced production, a commonplace practice of international corporations to cut costs, boost quarterly profits, and enhance scalability, has helped increasingly centralise global networks which have been fine-tuned to adapt to the endless cycles of this supremely indeterminate state.
The socio-economic outcomes have been both profound and also dubious.
Austerity measures implemented in the wake of the Global Financial Crisis have led to no end of perspectives offered on how businesses and communities can at once develop and employ a range of resilience strategies to help creatively navigate the market and flexibly adapt to the long-term effects of intense and long-standing crises.
In a borderless world, where international trade barriers have been removed, the new Prometheanism of the counter enlightenment, whereby nature’s terms are rejected contra naturam, don’t quite fit.
Some cargo makes this more apparent than others.
There exists between Colombia and Panama an insect border.
Vigilant inspectors cover thousands of square miles by motorcycle, boat, and horseback, searching for stray screwworm infections to keep the insect out of North America.
Maintenance involves dropping 14.7 million sterilised screwworms over the rainforest every week.
To streamline supply a screwworm rearing plant operates 24/7 in Panama.
One of Argentina’s chief exports is responsible for a prodigious supply chain expansion unrivalled by anything in shipping. You’ve probably never heard of it even as it grows right under your nose.
Invasive colonies of Argentine ants have formed supercolonies across the globe. There is one with a trillion workers that stretches from San Francisco to San Diego.
It’s generally understood that the colony formed over a century ago when ants were accidentally transported from Buenos Aires in the 1890s to Louisiana on steamboats and then California, likely by train.
Through the use of ports, the Argentine ant has extended its dominance by exploiting sea lanes.
The California colony now controls the port cities of San Diego, Los Angeles, Long Beach, Richmond, Oakland and San Francisco. In Japan the port of Kobe is in the grips of an ongoing conflict between three supercolonies.
Meanwhile a new supercolony in Nara prefecture has reportedly mastered rafting on the river to increase their nest budding and dispersion mechanisms.
Somewhere a corporate Goliath is running this all through AI analysis.
But as Aristotle warned, “You Ain’t Seen Nothing Yet.”
A supercolony associated with southern European dwarfs almost all others. It extends 6,000km with few pockets of resistance.
These are embodied by two smaller rival colonies in Corsica and, unsurprisingly, Catalan.
The scale of the main colony has led to human intervention, with the aim of playing off the supercolonies against one another.
But there’s a twist. More recently it’s been discovered that the supercolony in California and the main colonies in Japan, Europe, New Zealand, Hawaii and Australia are indeed the same colony.
The workers recognise one and other and do not attack.
While international trade operates under the aegis there’s no limit to growth the march of the Argentine ant might be a case study in sustainability and portend to things to come.
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