News stories that you hear from the mainstream that are not negative tend only to revolve around new positive technological innovations. That is the creativity that excites us. We get excited by things that work well and improve conditions. Yet, the many positive stories that show social systems where people are the most important ‘product’ are ignored. If you want to hear positive stories read the news from ‘Yes magazine (https://www.yesmagazine.org/)’ or other independent news outlets. The mainstream call them biased because they report news they will not. If you are a true skeptical and critical thinker, read the articles and make your own mind up – warning: “Critical thinking can destroy your dogma’s.”
When I still lectured,I always used the natural world as a model for how we could live sustainably. After all, nature has had over 3.5 billion years of research and development to get it right! The currency of nature is energy, which drives everything – literally. We know that energy drives our lives and our modern world, BUT we use this human invention called money to control who and what uses energy. In nature, if a species can find its niche to use energy, it is theirs to use. For a great many decades, biologists saw this as a competitive war with energy as the prize. In just the last decade, what is becoming apparent is that nature doesn’t run on a competitive model. Yes, there is lower level competition where a predator will protect its kill, but it doesn’t rule out other predators taking other prey. In many predatory species,the group hunts a prey and then either all share the feast or have a pecking order when other members of the group will eat, but the rule seems to be that the whole group will share the kill. It is a collaborative system. We used to think that all species were in competition with each other, but now we see that even then it is a synergistic system where multiple species interact for the benefit of the ecosystem.
Biologists have long known that many species exhibit some kind of synergy (e.g. pollination) but it has always been considered as a survival mechanism in a competitive world and not a collaboration mechanism. When one looks at a human body for instance, is the synergy of all 100 trillion cells simply each cell struggling for existence or a marvel of wholistic synergy at work for the Gestalt benefit of the whole body? After all, the individual cell is a whole system in itself that interacts with all the other cells of the body. Some would claim that the ecosystem called a body is different than the larger ecosystem we might call the planet. But is it? More and more we are finding that ecosystems are collaborative synergy’s that bind multiple species in similar ways to a human body or even a cell with all components being a part of the whole not just parts in the whole. If that sounds atad confusing, think about it. We are talking Gestalt not just interaction. Biologists love to quote the hierarchy of life from the molecular to the global but usually in a highly mechanistic fashion. What is becoming apparent is that when you move away from the reductionist approach that science has been so obsessed with for nearly 200 years and more, you begin to see a beautiful set of connections between all things that spell out ‘universal synergy.’ As Naturalist John Muir noted over a hundred years ago, “When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the Universe.” Science for too long has clock mechanism to explain life and the world around us. If you take a clock and dismantle it to its component parts, you can rebuild it and it will work again. If,however, you take a living organism and dissemble it to its component parts and then try to reassemble it, it is not possible and whatever made it ‘live’ has gone – that life is the uniqueness of the universe that science, until recently was unable to explain. Life is the consciousness beyond the ability of a reductionist paradigm.
As an example of how synergy works, recent studies about the Wolf reintroduction to Yellowstone National Park in 1995 shows how one species (in this case a keystone species) has created a trophic cascade of ecological change in the Park. It wasn’t that the reintroduction of the wolf restored the Park to what it once was, but more that the wolves showed how the fine balance between multiple systems adjusted to the presence of the wolves. The Wolves restored the prey-predator sequence as expected, but then other species suddenly became more abundant as the physical changes in the park started appearing opening up new ecological niches that had not been present for over a hundred years. The cascade was much more involved than simply one or two species making a difference. It was almost chaotic in how fast it all came together as so many ‘things’seem to happen simultaneously – synergy at work. The arrival of the wolves changed the grazing habits of the elk and the hunting habits of the coyotes. This caused changes in floral distribution,especially trees, and the arrival Beaver. This in turn allowed other species to come back and a whole food chain cascades occurred. The readjustment of water filtration also changed the erosion patterns, and so on. An ecologist colleague I knew in The Ohio State University studied how to rebuild a wetland. He set up two ponds, one that was restored by adding plants to the wetland according to the best knowledge of the day, and then left the other to do it naturally. The idea was that the human restored wetland would come back faster. As you may surmise by my telling of this, the ‘natural’ wetland pond recovered quicker than the human designed one. The human design simply created dominant species that took longer to balance out, while the natural pond became synergistic in its development.
What I suppose I am trying to get at in this post is that we too often have to ‘plan’ our way forward. What we need to do is let it all happen ‘organically.’ Quit looking for the bulleted list of what we need to do and simply start doing something different that grows itself into the system we desire. That is why I always say Principles of Sustainable Living, not rules for sustainable living. Having broad goals is good, but specific objectives are not always the correct path to take, no matter how much planning might be wished. I taught planning for many years and know the value of clear measurable objectives, but sometimes the path to take is not a clear plan, but a broad set of goals with organic adaptability built into the projects.
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