There is a long-standing trade-off in bioculture between concentrating on h
igh-yield varieties and maintaining sufficient diversity to lower the risks
of catastrophic infection. The paper uses a simple ecology-based model of
endogenous disease to indicate how a local decision to plant more of a wide
ly grown crop creates negative externalities by increasing the probability
that new pathogens will evolve to attack the crop globally. Society's basic
issue concerns where to locate on an efficiency frontier between economic
profitability and a standard formula for ecological entropy-proved here to
be a rigorous measure of "generalized resistance'' to crop-ecosystem failur
e.