Radical Lichenology

I’ve talked about lichens before in a post about viruses, lichens, and slime molds, all things that don't easily fit into the usual biological categories. The easiest thing to say about lichens is that, although they aren't a single species, they act as if they are.  What lichens really are is a relationship.

In the book, Radical Mycology, which I’ve referenced in the last two posts,  there is a chapter on lichens called, naturally, Radical Lichenology.  It's written by Nastassja Noell, who apparently has a degree in Lichenology from Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington. She defines lichens as being at least “a symbiotic relationship between a fungus and algae and/or photosynthesizing cyanobacteria.”  She goes on to point out that a lichen often contains more than that--sometimes including many other microbes and even fungi, becoming a “miniature ecosystem.”

According to her, there are three ways of looking at lichens.   The first is the ‘Reductionist Perspective’, seeing a lichen as just a fungus and a photosynthesizer working together.  The second is what she calls the ‘Mycocentric Perspective’, seeing the fungus as being in charge and treating the algae as if it were a plant that the fungus is raising.  The third is the ‘Systems Perspective’, where the lichen is an ‘emergent property’, an ecosystem that includes all the living things that make up a lichen, as well as the light, and temperature, and gas levels, and nutrients involved.

Lichens grow very slowly, at the rate of perhaps a millimeter a year, but some of them last for thousands of years.  In dry times, they can go into a dormant, desiccated state in which they can survive for more than a hundred years only to revive when rehydrated. However, they are very sensitive to pollution, so much so that they can be used as indicators of the environmental health of an area.

The chapter contains a lot more about lichens, how to harvest them, how to cultivate them, and how to use them for food and medicine, but what interested me was the fascinating relationships involved in a lichen as well as the systems perspective  that Nastassja Noell takes in looking at lichens and talking about them.

Quote of the day: “Lichens are expressions of pure joy.  … Inside the ecosystem of a lichen are most of the primary components of life: fungi, bacteria, algae, and cyanobacteria, all living in a discrete synergistic system that can rarely be synthesized in vitro but can withstand the extreme conditions of outer space….  The fungal symbiont creates a thick protective skin around the algae to protect it from desiccation.  In exchange, the algae gives the fungus photosynthesized sugars. And together, they form shapes and pigments that help them survive and thrive in their other-worldly surroundings.” - Nastassja Noell

Four Scientific Minds

As I’ve been saying, I have been reading a lot of science over the past few years. Not just soil science and chemistry and biology, but mycology and nutrition and microbiology and social science and, of course, system theory.   While I have learned a lot from a lot of different people, I realized recently that I have had four major influences.  As I said at the end of my last post, they are all women and I don't think that is an accident.

I am not opposed to ‘reductionist science’.  I think there are a lot of things that can be learned from it.  But there is only so far that you can go with it, before you need to connect the dots.  System thinking is essential to understanding the world and system thinking is all about relationships.   And, no surprise, women are a lot better at thinking about relationships than men.

So,here are four women who have strongly influenced my thinking.

And the first, since I’ve been talking about soil science and ended my last post with a quote from her, is Elaine Ingham.

Elaine Ingham is a soil microbiologist who has studied and popularized the interactions of the inhabitants of the soil.   She uses the term ‘soil food web’ to describe these complex relationships that support the health of the soil, the plants living in it, and the food we eat from those plants. While a bunch of it concerns who eats who in this subterranean ecosystem, a lot of it is also about how plants interact with bacteria and fungi, trading with each other and literally feeding each other.   I love how she uses the term ‘soil food web’, rather than ‘food chain’, to point out that it is not a linear process.   It’s about relationships and interactions and, of course, systems. She has gotten many people to rethink how they garden and grow plants and treat the soil.

A second microbiologist who has had an influence on me, is Lynn Margulis. I think of her as a microbiologist because of all of her work with bacteria but, like many important thinkers, she would hardly stay in one category.  She studied genetics and zoology, taught in the Biology department at Boston University, the Botany department at the University of Massachusetts, and the department of Geosciences at Amherst College.  She came up with the theory of endosymbiosis (that mitochondria and chloroplasts were independent organisms that were incorporated into eukaryotic cells), and then spent decades fighting all the opposition to it.  By the 1980s, it was generally accepted science. She (along with James Lovelock) was one of the originators of the Gaia Hypothesis. She was an opponent of Neo-Darwinism, believing that life moved forward by cooperation rather than competition. I love the quote from her and her son, Dorion Sagan, “Life did not take over the globe by combat, but by networking.”  Sadly, she died in 2011.

My third influence is Donella Meadows,  who I have written about  several times here.  I’ve promised a few times to do a full fledged review of her book, Thinking in Systems, but have never done it.  It’s been an influence on me, nonetheless, especially her chapter on 'Leverage Points'. She was the principal co-author of Limits to Growth which was a major warning that capitalist growth couldn't continue indefinitely.  It seems obvious, but in 1972 it was a shock to many leaders and routinely criticized by people who couldn't believe it.  Now it seems prescient.  She left MIT and their computers and moved to Vermont where she founded the Sustainability Institute along with an ecovillage and an organic farm.  Unfortunately, she has died as well, in 2001.

Finally, I have recently grown to appreciate Elinor Ostrom, a political economist, who, ironically, was rejected from UCLA’s economics department (getting a PhD in political science, instead) and went on to become the first woman to win the Nobel Prize in economics.  She directly challenged the idea that a shared commons would always end in tragedy, doing research and field studies that showed examples of societies that successfully managed natural resources together.   She championed multifaceted, grassroots approaches, arguing against any single answer for social and ecological problems.  She outlined the basic principles involved in these sharing systems and you can actually watch her explain how to get beyond the tragedy of the commons.   And, while doing the research for this post, found out that she, too, died, in 2012.

In honor of these wonderful women, all of whom taught the benefits of cooperation and relationships, I would like to request that anyone who reads this, further explore the work of any or all of them.  Their ideas and thinking deserve to be spread. They were true pioneers and I think we can all learn from them.


Quote of the Day: “... communities of individuals have relied on institutions resembling neither the state nor the market to govern some resource systems with reasonable degrees of success over long periods of time.” - Elinor Ostrom  

The Next Society 3: The Process

Let me begin by saying again that the emergent process for a future social/political/economic structure is going to be organic--that is, messy--if it's going to work at all.  All the wonderful theories in the world have less influence than all of the many competing and divergent interests that slowly form organic structure. 

When I talk about communities like Twin Oaks, I often joke that "...no one in their right mind would create a community like Twin Oaks."  That's because no one 'created' Twin Oaks.  Twin Oaks is the way that it is because it evolved that way over time.  It certainly didn't become the little behaviorist community that its founders envisioned.

Likewise, as new structures emerge, they won't be exactly what anyone has planned.  And they will emerge.  Anyone who thinks that capitalism as it's currently practiced is sustainable, hasn't looked what it's doing to the environment, the growing anti-globalism sentiment, and the fact that it's only a recent player on the scene (as I laid out in my first article, Some Background).

And I'm not saying that a decentralized, diverse society is what's going to happen.  It's what I consider most likely and most feasible (and I also think most desirable).  But if we're talking about an organic process, we're talking about something that we can't control.  Unexpected things are going to happen and society will change as a result.

When I say that this corporate capitalist society is not sustainable, I mean that  it will bring down the planet if it continues--but I also know that it will continue for a while yet.  I see us in the place where the Roman empire was as it started falling apart.  Just as that process took a long time, I see corporate capitalism in a slow, incremental process of decay.

The feudal system that followed the fall of Rome was fairly decentralized (although anything but nonhierarchal) even though there were periodic attempts to recreate a centralized structure.  The irony is that the biggest, longest lasting attempt (the Holy Roman Empire) turned out to be rather patchwork and decentralized.  As Wikipedia puts it: "The empire never achieved the extent of political unification ... evolving instead into a decentralized, limited elective monarchy composed of hundreds of sub-units, principalities, duchies, counties, Free Imperial Cities, and other domains."

And that's what I think is going to happen again--this is the patchwork politics I spoke about in my last post.  However, I think that successful communities, co-operative networks, etc, can form a template that can be built on and can influence the structures of this new, decentralized society.  And building those communities and alternative structures is the work that we can and need to do.

Trying to build a whole new society from a some blueprint won't work. It's good to have some idea of where we want to go, else as a society we will simply drift, but we're not going to be able to control the process.  Letting things happen, trying to influence what happens when we can and letting it go when we can't, is what we can do.  I think we will need to have some idealism and a lot of pragmatism to get anywhere.



Quote of the Day:  "How did Twin Oaks get so far from its origins?
"When I tried to start a Walden Two community, I didn't expect it to turn away from the scientific and rational and embrace popular movements.  But we did not have a lot of choice in member selection.  Who was available to join the fledgling community of 1969-1972?  Hippies, that's who.  I know one group that was very serious about Walden Two and tried to build a community without any hippies in it.  It failed for lack of people." - Kat Kinkade

Chimps, Bonobos, and Tribes

Lately I’ve been thinking a bit about our primate relatives and what their social structure says about what human beings are capable of being.  

Way back at the beginning of this blog, I wrote posts about Bonobos and Chimpanzees (7/30/08) and about Peacemaking among Primates (a book by Frans de Waal) in a post entitled Peace on Earth  (12/24/08).  These bonobos and chimpanzees are our closest animal relatives.

In many ways the behaviors of chimps and bonobos couldn’t be more different.  In a very broad generality, chimpanzees are hierarchical, patriarchal, competitive, and violent, whereas bonobos tend to be more egalitarian, matriarchal, cooperative, and much less violent.  In books like Our Inner Ape (another book by Frans de Waal) they represent opposing tendencies that humans have--people perhaps are a bit of both.  But is there any behavior that both species have in common?

Here’s one.  Both chimps and bonobos are what’s called fission-fusion species.  Baboons, orangutans, and spider monkeys are as well--and so are humans.  What this means is that populations combine and separate.    Often during the day they split up and travel in little groups and at night they all get back together.  This is especially common among the chimps and bonobos.  To quote Iain Couzin and Mark  Laidre, “The most fluid societies of any nonhuman primate are found among chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes) and bonobos (Pan paniscus), humanity's nearest living relatives.”

The point is that chimps, bonobos, and humans are all tribal animals.  There is a bigger ‘parent group’ (which I will refer to as the tribe) and smaller subgroups (which I’ve heard called clans or bands).  Again, quoting Couzin and Laidre: “More than 99% of human history was spent in a hunter-gatherer existence, characterized by dynamically shifting social groupings at multiple levels. At the highest tier in hunter-gatherer societies is the ethno-linguistic group or ‘tribe’, formed by several local ‘bands’ that fuse together when resources like water are clustered during dry seasons. Bands themselves, which are made up of around 30 individuals, break up into smaller foraging parties during daily forays out from a base camp. While some individuals remain at the camp to watch over youngsters and tend the old or injured, the foraging parties gather edible plant material and hunt animals, afterward bringing the bounty back to a central place for sharing and redistribution.”

We are tribal animals.  We belong in tribes.  “...99% of human was spent…” in tribes and our closest animal relatives live in fission-fusion tribes.  It’s in our biology.  So current human civilization is an anomaly.  And we are constantly trying to reform into tribes.

Conservative Republicans know this--at least at a gut level.  Their loyalty is to their tribe--and they see themselves besieged by those who don’t fit: pinkos, queers, Muslims, and Mexicans.

I think small towns and villages are our tribes--and in the cities, neighborhoods.  There was a story about the Portuguese population of East Cambridge (MA) several decades ago, that if a kid misbehaved several blocks away, his mother would know about it (via a phone call) before he got a chance to get home.  The pluses and minuses of villages, towns, and neighborhoods was that most folks knew one another.  This was a problems if you didn’t fit in--if you were too liberal or radical or queer or whatever.  But a big problem with big cities is that few people know each other and that gives many folks the liberty to be anonymously rude or worse.  You can much more easily mistreat someone you are not likely to see again.

I think intentional communities are part of what I will call the re-tribalization movement.  Even at large communities like Twin Oaks, or Dancing Rabbit, or Ganas,  I feel more at home since as I walk around I realize that I know most of the people I walk by.  Since being in community, I often feel bewildered by walking city streets and realizing that I don’t know any of the people I see.  It feels wrong somehow.

And, in larger communities, I see smaller subgroupings happening--which some of us (ironically given the info I have above) call ‘finding our tribe’.  I think these subgroups are reenacting our history of clans and bands within a tribe.  This fissioning and fusing is in our genes.

What else can we learn from primates?  I’ve talked a lot about bonobos and chimpanzees.  In my next post I want to focus on a study done with baboons.

Quote of the Day:  “...why is gossip necessary? Far from being mere small talk, gossip serves myriad vital functions within our fission–fusion societies, both at the individual level and at the group level. Gossip can facilitate social cohesion in the face of repeated separations, reminding individuals of the bonds they have with distant others. And it can also allow information to percolate through the group about the trustworthiness of each member, enabling listeners to keep track of others despite limited first-hand observation. Gossip, therefore, and maybe even language more generally, may have evolved specifically as an adaptation to the highly fission–fusion-oriented societies of our hunter-gatherer ancestors.”  - Iain Couzin and Mark  Laidre

Statified, Nesting, and Hierarchy

Oops. I thought I’d done that review of Donella Meadow’s book Thinking in Systems that I promised long, long ago but I can’t find it looking through this blog.  Unfortunately, this won’t be that review.

Thinking in Systems is a pretty good book.  I reread it regularly and I still hope to review it, but one thing that bothered me about the book was Donella Meadow’s use of the word ‘hierarchy’ to describe what I think of as nested systems.  Here’s an example:

“The world, or at least the parts of it humans think they understand, is organized in subsystems aggregated into larger subsystems, aggregated into still larger subsystems.  … This arrangement of systems and subsystems is called a hierarchy.”

She goes on to say: “Corporate systems, military systems, ecological systems, economic systems, living organisms, are arranged in hierarchies.”

I have just been rereading parts of Fritjof Capra’s The Turning Point (which I reviewed almost seven years ago in a post called Capra 1:The Turning Point, 8/23/08).  I wasn’t that impressed with much of it (I think it was more of a turning point for Capra’s thinking and work than anything out in the world) but I really liked his take on the use of the word hierarchy to describe what happens in systems.  I’m going to quote liberally from his book:

“The multileveled structure of living organisms, like any other biological structure, is a visible manifestation of the underlying processes of self-organization.  At each level there is a dynamic balance ... between systems levels.  Systems theorists sometimes call this pattern of organization hierarchical, but that word may be rather misleading for the stratified order observed in nature.  The word ‘hierarchy’* referred originally to the government of the Church.  Like all human hierarchies, this ruling body was organized into a number of ranks according to levels of power, each rank being subordinate to the one at the level above it.  In the past the stratified order of nature has often been misinterpreted to justify authoritarian social and political structures.

“To avoid confusion we may reserve the term ‘hierarchy’ for those fairly rigid systems of domination and control which orders are transmitted from the top down.  The traditional system for these structures has been the pyramid.  By contrast, most living systems exhibit multileveled patterns of organization characterized by many intricate and nonlinear pathways along which signals of information and transaction propagate between all levels, ascending as well as descending.  That is why I have turned the pyramid around and transformed it into a tree, a more appropriate symbol for the ecological nature of stratification in living systems.  As a real tree takes its nourishment through both its roots and its leaves, so the power in a systems tree flows in both directions, with neither end dominating the other and all levels interacting in interdependent harmony to support the functioning of the whole.

“The most important aspect of the stratified order in nature is not the transfer of control but rather the organization of complexity.”

(The asterisk (*) in the fifth line of this quote refers to the following note: “From the Greek hieros (‘sacred’) and arkhia (‘rule’).”)

I totally agree with Capra’s take on systems and hierarchy except I would use the term nesting (like Russian dolls) rather than stratified to describe systems within systems within systems.  The hierarchies of corporations and the military are completely different from the way that living organisms and ecological systems are organized.  There is no one at the top of a living system that gives commands.  Rather you have decentralized systems enfolded within decentralized systems and things are worked out by emergence.  (See my last post.)

I understand what Donella Meadows is saying about the need for system to work within systems, but I agree with Fritjof Capra that we need a different word rather than ‘ hierarchy’ to name this process.

Quote of the Day:  “Hierarchies evolve from the lowest level up--from the pieces to the whole, from cell to organ to organism, from individual to team… Life started with single cell bacteria,  not with elephants. The original purpose of a hierarchy is always to help its originating subsystems do their jobs better.  This is something, unfortunately, that both the higher and lower levels of a greatly articulated hierarchy easily can forget.  Therefore, many systems are not meeting our goals because of malfunctioning hierarchies.”  - Donella Meadows

(Add:  I would say the beginning of this as ‘Nested systems emerge from the lowest level up….’)

Emergence

Emergence by Steven Johnson is a wonderful, frustrating book.  

It starts off talking about slime molds, which are sort of the mascot of the self-organizing systems world.  These are tiny single celled creatures that, when threatened, coalesce into a multicellular organism.  For years scientists searched for the ‘pacemaker’ cells that started the process.  It turns out there are no pacemakers.  Slime molds have a completely decentralized method of coalescing.  

I’ve referenced Steven Johnson before--way back in a post on Clustering and Coping (8/13/08).  Even then I mentioned he had a book called Emergence.  I just hadn’t read it until recently.  I picked it up in the bookstore that I’m now working in when I visited it in November.  I’ve now read it twice.

One of the things it reminds me of is Ori Brafman and Rod Beckstrom’s book, The Starfish and the Spider, which I’ve talked about in two early posts: Catalysts and Network Weavers (8/31/08) and Decentralization (12/9/08).  The big difference is that Brafman and Beckstrom’s book focuses on the phenomenon of decentralization, where Johnson focuses on emergence which is a decentralized process.  In some ways this is the most important process in self-organization.  And, in many ways, it’s unpredictable.

What’s wonderful about Emergence is how clearly Johnson spells out what’s involved in the process.  What’s frustrating is that he seems seduced by its uses in corporate culture, cybernetics and the internet, and particularly entertainment systems.  However he does cover (briefly) cell systems and immune systems, and spends more time with cities as organisms (which I find very interesting) before he gets caught in the morass of the world wide web and online games.

However, just when I was about to give up on the book, he steers into emergence and decentralization in politics and gives the WTO Seattle protests of 1999 as an example.  (Of course, this type of organizing was going on long before this--I see it dating back to feminist and anarchist organizing in the 1970s.  For more about what was happening back then, see my post Social Movements in the Seventies, 3/30/09.)  I wish he spent more time on this.

This is a good book to read in conjunction with other systems books and books on decentralization.  By itself, it’s only a small (but significant piece) but it’s incredibly useful in understanding the whole.  I’ll end with the warning at the end of the book: “...it is both the promise and the peril of swarm logic that the higher level behavior is almost impossible to predict in advance.  You never really know what lies at the other end of a phase transition until you press play and find out.  That is the lesson of Gerald Edelman’s recipe for simulating a flesh-and-blood organism: you set up a system of various pattern-recognition devices and feedback loops, connecting the virtual organism to a simulated environment.  And then you see what happens.”

That’s emergence.

Quote of the Day:  “This emphasis on rules might seem like the antithesis of the open-ended, organic systems… but nothing could be further from the truth.  Emergent systems... are rule governed systems: their capacity for learning and growth and experimentation derives from their adherence to low-level rules…  If any of these systems… suddenly started following their own rules, or doing away with rules altogether, the system would stop working: there’d be no global intelligence, just a teeming anarchy of isolated agents, a swarm of without logic.  Emergent behaviors… are all about living within the boundaries defined by rules, but also using that space to create something greater than the sum of its parts.” - Steven Johnson

Community as a Living Organism

At one of the visitor’s nights here, a young man was asking for details on how Ganas functioned.  He was curious about whether it could be replicated.

Earlier a few people were talking about the differences between Twin Oaks and Ganas.  After the visitor made the remark about replicating Ganas, I pointed out that one of the similarities between Twin Oaks and Ganas is that each is a unique community, in many ways different from just about any other community out there--and, naturally, different from each other.  And that was because each of them had changed significantly to be what they are.  Neither is what they were planned to be, each is what they grew to be.

People have mentioned in meetings that I’ve been in that Ganas was not even intended as a community.  It started as a group of people who were experimenting with a process (‘Feedback Learning’) and began living together in order to do this together.  It was only when a visitor remarked that they were an intentional community that Ganas took on this identity.

Twin Oaks was started as an attempt to replicate the fictional community described in BF Skinner’s novel Walden Two.  While a sharp eyed student of psychology could probably spot a few behavioral components to Twin Oaks even now, I doubt that Skinner would want to claim it if he was alive and few Twin Oakers think of themselves as behaviorist.  It’s more what you’d get if you took the behavioral paradise and turned it over to the care of a bunch of new age hippies and then let it mellow for nearly fifty years.

Both Mildred Gordon and Kat Kinkade (the more famous founders of Ganas and Twin Oaks, respectively) left the communities that they helped start, were often critical of what they became, and literally returned to their communities to die.  (Kat Kinkade was buried at TO.  Mildred Gordon died this past January and there was a memorial held for her in Manhattan in February.)

The point is that the communities didn’t turn out the way the founders thought they would.  Each community (and I think this is true of many other communities--Sandhill, Acorn, Dancing Rabbit, East Wind, The Farm, etc, etc) evolved and grew in its own fashion, in ways that the founders didn’t anticipate or even want.  And I think that this is what healthy communities do.  They develop a life of their own.

This is why mature communities aren’t replicable.  They have grown to be what they are.  No one would design a community like Twin Oaks or Ganas, just as they weren’t designed to be what they are.  They grew into it.  They evolved.

And this is important to remember.  Communities have life cycles, the way that people do and even the way that ant colonies do.  As a community matures, it changes.  It’s got to change.  If a community doesn’t change, it dies.

Quote of the Day:  “...life ... repairs, maintains, re-creates, and outdoes itself.” - Lynn Margulis and Dorion Sagan

Food Chain!

One of the many cool things that they do at Ganas is to organize a chain of people to get stuff up from the truck on the street that they use to get food to the pantry (or other places) in the houses way above.  (Since Ganas is on a hillside, you need to go up a long flight of stairs to get from the street to the houses.)  It’s sort of like one of those old fashioned bucket brigades.

Someone yells, “Food chain!” at dinner and anyone who feels strong and abled bodied goes out and helps.  Groceries are passed from one person to the next on their way to the pantry.  

I was watching the behavior of the chain with a systems theorist’s eye.  It was amusing seeing the people bunch up on one end and then on the other.  The whole thing reminded me of a slinky stretching back and forth in waves.

Fortunately, most folks are in a good mood while doing it and it really does make what could be a difficult task fairly easy and fun.  As a result, the whole thing works very well.  And then it’s done before you know it--and folks go back to dinner.  And all the food is now up the hill and in the pantry.

It’s pretty amazing what you can accomplish with a little co-operation.

Quote of the Day: “Obedience may have its uses, but it is no substitute for willing, uncoerced co-operation.” - Eleanor Roosevelt

Is Everything Connected?

Last year, when I thought that I was going to be moving to a Lyme-ridden area of New York state, I started reading everything I could find on ticks and Lyme disease.  When I found that the library had a book on the ecology of Lyme, I knew I had to read it.  And it was a pretty good book, covering aspects of the disease I hadn't found in other places.  But one statement in the book, a little section about ecology rather than Lyme, irked me.  Here's part of the passage:

"Just as I began my research on the ecology of Lyme disease in 1991, I read what to me was an astonishing statement by leading scientists about ecological systems.  The statement was published in Science magazine as a part of what was called the 'Top 20 Greatest Hits of Science'.  This was a list of the 20 most important, fundamental, and enduring generalities, or 'laws,' in all of the sciences...  The science of ecology was represented by one entry, listed as number 20: 'All life is connected.'
"Of course, this statement  in no way represents a universal law of ecology and does not belong on a list intended to foster scientific literacy.  The main reason is that it's too vague to interpret unequivocally or to evaluate rigorously.  ... 'All life is connected' is either a false statement (think about trying to detect the effect of an oak tree falling in Delaware on a blue whale in the South Pacific) or utterly untestable."

(Richard S. Ostfeld, Lyme Disease: The Ecology of a Complex System, Oxford University Press, 2011, pp 5-7)

As someone who does believe that 'All life is connected', I was bothered by this statement.  I suppose from a strictly scientific view, this is an untestable proposition.  He later quotes John Muir: "When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe."  He says that this "is lovely poetry, but it is not science."  Well, poetry or science or faith, I do believe that everything on earth is connected.  And, personally, I feel like Richard Ostfeld had thrown down the gauntlet when he talked about "the effect of an oak tree falling in Delaware on a blue whale in the South Pacific."  Is there an effect?  What is it?  Can we show it?

I do believe that I can show the effect of that tree falling on the whale that's so far away.  But before I try to demonstrate, I'm going to ask you, my unseen reader, to take a moment to see if you can figure out what effects the tree might have on the whale.  It's a puzzle, if you will.  I saw an answer rather quickly.  What do you think?

(These images are here to give you a chance to stop and take a bit of time to see what you can figure out.)

Okay.  Here's my thinking:

I think that the oak tree falling would have an effect on the blue whale but it's so small that it would be hard to detect.  For purposes of this thought experiment, let's amp it up--instead of one tree falling in Delaware, what would happen if all of them fell?  Let's clear-cut the state.  (This isn't so preposterous as it seems.  A lot more timber than that gets cut down yearly in the Amazon and the estimates I've seen would make the amount of forest lost around the world in a year about 25 times the size of Delaware.)  One of the immediate effects of this tree loss would be a significant lessening of oxygen in the air and an corresponding increase in carbon dioxide.  (See my last post on The Most Important Chemical Equations for more on this.)  But the whale is in the ocean.  How does the change in atmosphere effect her?

The increasing amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is a large contributing factor to ocean acidification.  The more CO2 in the air, the more acid the oceans.  And, of course, the increase in carbon dioxide is contributing to global warming and particularly the rising ocean temperature. I doubt that the whale would enjoy either the warming temperatures or the more acid waters.

So, yes, a single oak tree falling in Delaware would have an effect (very small) on a blue whale in the South Pacific--and clear-cutting the state would have an even bigger effect on the whale.

Okay,  so once again, I still believe that everything is connected--and especially all life on earth.

Quote of the Day: "We are all together in this, we are all together in this single living ecosystem called planet earth." - Sylvia Earle

System Design and Construction

Way back in my life, when I was considering getting out of hospital work, I decided to learn computer programming.  Although I had mixed feelings about computers, I was good with them and I enjoyed the logic of computer programming as well as the fact that if you did it right, you could make a computer do something.

Unfortunately, I realized that I was thinking about programming all the time and didn't like the way I felt-- sort of like I was trapped in computer thinking.  So I stopped studying computer programming, but every so often I find myself attracted to computer books.  Since one of the folks that I'm staying with works with and teaches about computers, he has some computer books lying around.  I picked up one and started to read it and was surprised to realize it was useful--not just for work with computers, but a lot of what the author is talking about seemed applicable to any type of design and planning work and seemed very systems oriented.

Of course, it isn't really surprising when I think about it because, just as the human body is a system composed of subsystems (see my last couple of posts), a computer program is a system composed of subsystems.  The book, Code Complete by Steve McConnell, proclaims on its cover that it's "A practical handbook of software construction".  While a lot of the book is about programming techniques (with a bunch of examples in 'code' or programming language), there's also a whole bunch of thinking that might be useful to anyone planning any type of project.  (Some of it reminds me of the way that Ben Falk approaches permaculture design--see my post called Resilient Farm, 8/25/14, for a bit more on that.)

Here's an odd place to start reviewing Code Complete but one of the books that the author references as a resource is The Sciences of the Artificial by Herbert Simon.  I hadn't heard of it before but McConnell says it "draws a distinction between sciences dealing with the natural world (biology, geology, and so on) and sciences that deal with the artificial world created by humans (business, architecture, and computer science).  It then discusses the characteristics of the sciences of the artificial, emphasizing the science of design."  (This book looks like something I will probably want to read.) Again, comparing this to Ben Falk, Falk points out the difference between natural systems and human created structures (like buildings) and the different care needed to give to each.  We can help natural systems evolve (and can design things to do this), but we need to actively design artificial systems like buildings, etc.  (And I think that communities have aspects of both.)  McConnell's book focuses on the design and construction of artificial systems--and it's important to understand that artificial systems are necessary, we just need to get them to support natural systems and not vice versa.

McConnell has a whole chapter entitled 'Measure Twice, Cut Once'.  That's advice I've often seen in books about construction and design.  Nevertheless, when I built a shelving unit at my cousins' house, I put it up fast, and then had to redo it, not once but twice.  We built a second shelving unit and this time we measured multiple times before we put it up--and it went up without a problem.  Yes, this stuff is important.

The book claims that growing is a good way to describe natural processes, but for design of artificial systems terms like accretion, building, and construction are more useful.  ("...building construction suggests careful preparation is needed and illuminates the difference between large and small projects.") McConnell point out the importance of problem definition and the problem with moving too quickly toward solutions before adequately defining the problem.  He covers design challenges such as 'wicked problems' and dealing with the fact that 'Design is a Sloppy Process (Even If it Produces a Tidy Result)'.

Here's another good quote from the book: "A study of great designers found that one attribute they had in common was their ability to anticipate change... Accommodating changes is one of the most challenging aspects of good program design."    McConnell even talks about the personality characteristics of good programmers (or, I would say, any good designers), which he claims are humility, curiosity, intellectual honesty, creativity and discipline, and what he calls 'enlightened laziness'.  He believes that the two ways to make laziness work for you are  1) "Doing an unpleasant task quickly to get it out of the way" and 2) "Writing a tool to do the unpleasant task so that you never have to do the task again".  (Or creating a process that does the task.)

There's lots more in here but this gives you an idea.  This is a book worth browsing if you want to get ideas on the basics of systems design and construction.


Quote of the Day:  "You need to experiment throughout the development process...  To experiment effectively you must be willing to change your beliefs based on the results of the experiment.  If you're not willing, experimentation is a gratuitous waste of time." - Steve McConnell

The Body's Wisdom

I'm still in Virginia with my cousins.  The house has an extensive library with books very different from what I usually read (religious books, libertarian books, books on English history and things about Virginia and the southern US, books on computer security systems, etc).  Even so, I've found a bunch of books on different topics that I've been reading through.  I've also been reading through some books that I brought with me, including Thinking in Systems (which I mentioned in my last post).  And I have been thinking about systems.

Some of the books from this house have given me views on systems from angles that I don't usually think about them from.  So my next three post (hopefully) will be on unusual takes on systems.

And why should I write about systems on a blog devoted to social change and focusing lately on intentional community?  Community, as I alluded to in my last post, is a system.  And social change is systemic change.  I remember in the sixties people fighting against 'The System'.  I'm not sure if people were talking about the political system, the economic system, or the cultural system, but they're all systems.  And, in doing social change, we want to create new systems.

A lot of things that we don't usually think of as a system, are systems--and sometimes, systems of systems.  Take the human body.  One of the things about my cousins' library was that, while there were science books, they were about mathematics, and logic, and computers, and electronics.  I complained to one of my cousins that I was more interested in the biological sciences.  And then I found a book called, The Wisdom of the Body.

The Wisdom of the Body is the name of a book, well known in some systems circles, written in 1932 by Walter Cannon, which focused on the body's control over things like digestion, circulation, and temperature.  This book introduced the term homeostasis, which is about mechanisms that keep things constant.  While Cannon mostly focused on body processes, the term is also used to discuss things like the thermostat in most houses, which maintains the house at the temperature you set. This was one of the early writings on what led to systems thinkers talking about feedback loops (something Donella Meadows discusses at length).  However, the book in my cousins' house wasn't Walter Cannon's book.  It was a book by the same name by Sherwin Nuland, (who was a surgeon at Yale-New Haven Hospital), who says that he took the name to honor, not only Walter Cannon, but Ernest Starling (who gave a talk by that name in 1923 and apparently influenced Walter Cannon) and Charles Sherrington (who also gave a lecture by that title around 1938).

Nuland's book is an idiosyncratic blend of discussions of the anatomy and physiology of many of the body's systems, with stories from his time as a surgeon and philosophical musings, which occasionally were about systems thinking.  One very pertinent section (right after he talked about Cannon's book) is a paragraph that doesn't directly mention the body at all, but is about how systems function, particularly around change:

"A stable system is not a system that never changes.  It is a system that constantly and instantly adjusts and readjusts in order to maintain such a state of being that all necessary functions are permitted to operate at maximum efficiency.  Stability demands change to compensate for changing circumstances.  Ultimately, then, stability depends on instability."

This could have been a quote from Dana Meadows or from one of the complexity theorists.

Beyond this, there's lots of good information about how the body operates, and it's been a good review for me.  I've studied anatomy and physiology and this has been a good refresher.  And his surgeon stories have been mostly entertaining and many of his musings thought provoking.  All and all I'd recommend this book as either an introduction for someone who wants to learn a bit about how the body operates (and isn't too squeamish) or someone with a health or biology background that can always benefit from another take on the human body.

In fact, I only had one major disagreement with the book.  That (hopefully) will be the subject of my next post.

(Sadly, Wikipedia informs me that Sherwin Nuland died in March of this year.)


Quote of the Day: "... the stability of this self-regulating organization that is us achieves its stability through the unique nature of its very instability.  Its instantaneous readiness to react and return to constancy's baseline makes possible every restorative response toward maintaining the delicate balance of homeostasis that is the foundation of life.
"Always on the alert for the omnipresent dangers without or within, ceaselessly sending mutually recognizable signals throughout its immensity of tissues, fluids, and cells ... inappropriate alterations are balanced and changes are either accommodated or set right--all in the interest of that equilibrating steadiness that is the necessary condition of the order and harmony of complex living organisms.
"... Our lives march to the molecular beat of our tissues.  Our spirits sing to the music of our biology." - Sherwin Nuland

Where's Weirdo?

I just sent out an email to friends and family with the title "Where's Waldo?"  One of my cousins misheard me briefly and thought I said "Where's Weirdo?"  I liked that enough to use it for the title of the post.  It's fitting enough.

I'm currently in Hanover County, Virginia, in an extended stay with cousins.  I had a good time at the Communities Conference on Labor Day weekend and then came over here where I am helping my cousins set up a small business.  It's been fun and I'm planning on staying here until the middle of October.

My current plan is to return (very briefly) to Boston and then turn around and leave for New York City.  I'll be in NYC until the next week.  After that I'm hoping to be in Boston for a little while.

What's going on?  At the moment I'm in a situation that some of you will recognize from job hunting.  I'm pursuing several community leads and right now I'm focusing on two of them.  Like someone pursuing job leads, I'm going after both of them, in the hopes that one of them will end up as community for me.

The first is with some of the folks from the group that I was involved with this past year, trying to build community in upstate New York.  There are some people that I liked that are still trying get something together up there and I'm in dialogue with them.  We'll see what happens.

Meanwhile, at the Communities Conference I met a woman who is trying to start an urban community in NYC and that's where I'll be going mid-October.  Again, I want to see how realistic this is.

So my two prospects at the moment are in NY state--one in urban NYC and the other in the more rural upstate.  Of course, neither of these may work out--and I may well end up pursuing something completely different.  I'll just have to wait and see.

All this leads to my current thinking on community. I now believe strongly that it needs both a clear mission and vision and strong, positive connections among the members.

The group I was part of in upstate NY had a very compelling vision and a direction I really believed in, but the organizer wasn't good with interpersonal skills and ended up discouraging and alienating folks.  My cousins, who I'm currently staying with, are wonderful people and the energy here is very positive and encouraging.  This house is a lovely, loving environment.  I really hope I can bring the kind of positive energy they have here to whatever community I end up with. However, this is suburban America (far from simple and sustainable) and while I'm enjoying being here for now, this isn't anywhere I'd want to live long term.

What I wish is that I could take the kind of strong vision of the NY group and merge it with the loving positive energy my cousins have here.  I think a bold clear vision and a very supportive atmosphere are what a community needs in order to have a good chance of success.

Of course, having that loving positive atmosphere depends on having a core of people with those attitudes and a strong determination to remain positive no matter what is happening.  The vision is incredibly important but it can be developed and even borrowed from other sources in a way that basic attitudes can't.  How to find people who have those attitudes and can sustain a clear vision, that's the question.

I can see several things supporting all this from a more theoretical viewpoint.  First of all, Donella Meadows in her book Thinking in Systems (which I've written a bit about in my posts Leverage Points and Graphs of the Future, 2/15/12 and Thinking in Circles, 1/6/13) says that "...a system must consist of three kinds of things: elements, interconnections, and a function or purpose."  Also, in my post on Equality and Leadership (10/2/08), I talked about Bruce Kokopeli and George Lakey arguing that leadership functions could be broken down into two major catagories: 'Task Functions' and 'Morale Functions' and that in order to survive any group needs to pay attention to both.

Now I have some visceral examples of all this.  The elements of a community are the people, but it's not a community without the interconnections and these need to be paid attention to.  This is Kokopeli and Lakey' Morale Functions, and it's what my cousins excel at.  But it's not enough.  A group, a system, a community needs a function or purpose.  This is what the Task Functions address.  The NY group was a clear example of focusing on the task and purpose and neglecting the connections, the relationships, the morale.  My cousins have the interconnections down pat, but I'm not on board with their purpose.  Now for something where we do both and we do them well.

So.  Knowing all this and doing it are two different things.  We'll see what's next.


Quote of the Day:  "The path is uncharted.  It comes into existence moment by moment and at the same time drops away behind us.  It's like riding a train sitting backwards.  We can't see where we're headed, only where we've been.
"...Now is the only time.  How we relate to it creates the future. ... What we do accumulates; the future is the result of what we do right now." - Pema Chödrön

The O&I Board

My blog buddy, leavergirl, wrote me last month that someone that we both know who visited Twin Oaks (also known as TO) "described a large bulletin board at TO that helps people stay connected and talking, and to bring up issues. I was wondering if maybe you'd do a post on how that works?"

I replied that I was a bit preoccupied at that point, but would write a post about it in the future.  I also described the board and its uses in my reply to her and I will quote liberally in this post from what I wrote her.

Twin Oaks has a decision making system which is incredibly complex, involving planners, managers, voting, and all kinds of checks and balances, but most things start when someone is concerned about something and they post a paper on the O&I Board.   According to Kat Kinkade, in her book Is It Utopia Yet?,  O&I stands for Opinion and Idea.

The 'board' is actually large three wooden screens with a number of clipboards hanging on each one.  If you've got an idea or a concern, you can write a paper up detailing the issue.  People sign their papers and leave several sheets of paper behind what they wrote.  Other folks read the papers and leave comments on the blank sheets.  (All comments need to be signed as well--TO folks don't like anonymous stuff on their board.)  The planners read the papers on the O and I board to know what's going on in the community.  The comments are very important to giving them a sense of the reactions to these issues--is this something others really approve of or something that there's a lot of different feelings about?  Actually, many members, visitors, and guests, constantly read the O&I board just to get an idea of what's going on.

What makes this work is that this is a norm at Twin Oaks--people are always posting things on the O&I board.  Most of the time all the clipboards or all but one or two are filled, each with a different topic.  In many ways, this is the heart of how communication as well as decision making occurs at Twin Oaks.  I don't think a system like this would be necessary in a much smaller community, but it works well at Twin Oaks.

For more on TO, see my posts Real Models 1:Twin Oaks, 9/30/10, Update 6: Life at Twin Oaks, 12/4/12, and Snow, Darkness, and Fire, 3/13/13.


Quote of the Day:  "We have several communications devices, but the most important by far is called the O&I Board. ... This bulletin board has been in use since 1970. ... Members read the O&I the way many people outside of Community read the daily newspaper, though in our case the 'newspaper' is mostly one big editorial page, with many editors.  It is our custom to attach blank pages to the backs of our papers, so that others can comment on our ideas.  ...  No one has ever declared a limit on the length of a comment, and sometimes they go on for pages.  The norm is shorter than that, and many people limit their comments to a sentence or two, or to ditto marks under someone else's comment.
"Some O&I papers are proposals which will eventually go to the Planners or relevant managers for decision. Planners customarily watch the O&I Board, and if they can see a path of useful action, they will add the current issues to their agenda." - Kat Kinkade

The Earth's Spheres

While reading books on meteorology and ecology, I've found references to the 'spheres' of the Earth.  One book mentions four spheres and another book mentions four spheres in one place and five in another.  In one place it's called 'the Earth system', in another 'the climate system', and a third just calls it 'Spaceship Earth'.

Some quotes: "As we study Earth, it becomes apparent that our planet can be viewed as a system with many separate but interacting parts or subsystems.  The hydrosphere, atmosphere, biosphere, and solid Earth and all of their components can be studied separately.  However, the parts are not isolated.  Each is related in some way to the others to produce a complex and continuously interacting whole that we call the Earth system."  - Lutgens and Tarbuck, The Atmosphere, p 4

"...there is a climate system that includes the atmosphere, hydrosphere, solid Earth, biosphere, and cryosphere. (The cryosphere is the ice and snow that exist at Earth's surface.)  The climate system involves the exchanges of energy and moisture that occur among the five spheres." - ibid, p 321

"The biosphere or ecosphere merges imperceptibly (that is, without sharp boundaries) into the lithosphere (the rocks, sediments, mantle, and core of the earth), the hydrosphere (surface and ground water), and the atmosphere, the other major subdivisions of Spaceship Earth." - Eugene Odum, Ecology: A Bridge Between Science and Society, p 31

As I've been reading books on geology, soil science, meteorology, and now, ecology (probably the subject of my next post), I've become more and more aware of how connected they all are.  I tried to get that across in my post on The Chemistry of the World, 8/2/13, where I talked about how plants use minerals from the Earth's crust (the lithosphere) and chemicals from the atmosphere (especially carbon dioxide and nitrogen) as well as water (from the hydrosphere) to grow from, and how we then get those same elements from the plants.  And, as I've talked about in my posts on composting (see for example, Thinking in Circles, 1/6/13), eventually we return those elements back to the earth.

It's interesting thinking about these spheres in terms of climate change as well.  The book on The Atmosphere listed the elements in the atmosphere by percentages and parts per million.  They listed Carbon Dioxide (CO2) as 0.036% or 360 parts per million.  The book has a copyright of 1998.  The news this year is that CO2 in the atmosphere has just reached 400 ppm.  The book also states that "...glacial ice is the Earth's largest reservoir of water outside of the ocean, accounting for 85 percent of the planet's fresh water.  ... As glaciers are composed of solid water, they are usually considered to be part of the hydrosphere.  Sometimes Earth's ice is placed in it's own 'sphere',the cryosphere (cryo is from the Greek for 'icy cold')."  It occurs to me with the rate that the glaciers are melting, that distinction may not be that relevant for long.

It's all only one planet and everything is connected with everything else--and everything changes everything else.  The boundaries between what we call living things and the systems of air, rock, water, and ice aren't as great as we might think.


Quote of the Day:  "The biosphere includes all life on Earth and penetrates those parts of the solid Earth, hydrosphere, and atmosphere in which living organisms can be found.  ...it should be emphasized that organisms do more than just respond to their physical environment.  Indeed, through countless interactions, life-forms help maintain and alter their physical environment. Without life, the makeup and nature of the solid Earth, hydrosphere, and atmosphere would be very different.  ...
"Humans are part of the Earth system, a system in which the living and nonliving components are entwined and interconnected.  Therefore our actions produce changes in all of the other parts." - Frederick Lutgens and Edward Tarbuck