Claire

We live in a time of rapid change and uncertainty. The 50 year failure of the environmental movement has left us with a tangle of interconnected problems. Ecosystem destruction;  freakishly high levels of pollution of the land the water and the atmosphere; and resource depletion combine to create a looming crisis of epic proportions. We are faced with increasing political and economic instability and it’s clear that there will be no large scale co-ordinated efforts to address any of it.

This blog is about what we can do, as ordinary people in families and small groups, to create lives worth living; to build a future worth having; and to be a force for renewal and regeneration in our much depleted world. 

Natural systems are not static. They maintain an active balance as energy, materials, and information all flow through in their different patterns. Energy dissipates. Information can evaporate. Materials can be transformed, concentrated, or dispersed, but they cannot be eliminated.

None of these can be used without the others. You need materials, information, and energy to produce energy. You need energy, information, and matter (tools) to do anything with matter. You need energy and matter and information store and retrieve  information*. (Even if it’s just the food and memory triggers that support the grey matter in your head.)

A shortage of any of the key resources in a system is a Limiting Factor that will reduce the  productivity of the entire system. Waste, unused resources that accumulate within the system, will also limit productivity. Biological systems take advantage of the circular movement of matter. Waste  produced by one element is a resource for another.

Natural systems are complex not just complicated. This is an important distinction.**

A complicated system, like a car, may be intricate and confusing but it is understandable. There are a limited number of factors that contribute to making it work and direct chains of cause and effect if is it isn’t working. Someone with enough expertise can probably fix it.

In complex systems, there are too many variables, too many unknowns, too many links and connections. Even people with years of training and experience don’t fully understand them. Cause and effect are difficult to see and interventions can have surprising unintended impacts that reverberate throughout the system.

Natural systems are complex dynamic webs of interconnected relationships. Each element relies on the operations of the whole system to meet its needs. Each contributes to the function of the system in many ways. The system is resilient because every important function is supported by many elements.***

Industrial production is a complicated system embedded in the complex system of our political economy. It can be described in simple linear terms “Take - Make - Waste” but it’s a  tangled web. Energy and materials are extracted and shipped around the world many times as they are processed, made into components, and eventual arrive at factories for final assembly into consumer goods. 

Global systems of production and distribution have the complexity but lack the redundancy of natural systems. Complexity without redundancy makes a system fragile. 

Weak understanding of whole systems, over reliance on linear thinking, and ignoring the crucial difference between “complicated” and “complex” has created many vulnerabilities in the system. It is also responsible for the extreme dysfunctions like the massive accumulations of waste and contamination. 

We tend to use mechanical analogies to describe ecological, biological, and social systems. Mechanical metaphors are helpful for conveying information about complex systems but it’s mistake to think they are accurate picture of what’s really going on. Mechanical systems are simple and relatively easily understood but they are also inert, linear, and predictable. Natural systems  are not. 

Fully understanding everything going in a complex system is impossible. Our brains evolved to solve the simple problems of making yourself attractive to the opposite sex and getting lunch without becoming lunch not to understand the workings of the whole ecosystem. But recognizing patterns is one of our superpowers.

Practicing systems thinking and developing our natural abilities to recognize patterns is a necessity if we are going to have a positive impact on the larger world or even manage our own lives as unsustainable systems of production unravel around us.

Train yourself. Hone your observation skills. Look for patterns. Identify the flows energy matter, and information in your life. Look for blockages and stagnation. 

The slow the flows as much as you can. Catch and store energy. Value information. Use everything as many times as possible before it leaves your system. See if you can turn wastes into resources.

If we take becoming a keystone species  seriously training ourselves should be our highest priority. Our brains may be limited but for most of us in the west they are also completely untrained. Like flabby muscles they need exercise.

Lynne Kelly’s work on memory came about because she realized that not only did the elders of the community where she was studying birds have a wealth of detailed information about the birds in their heads, they had similarly encyclopedic knowledge about all the other animals and plants in their territory and about every other thing that touched their lives!!**** 

Clearly our brains are capable of much more.

Next: Get Outside

*Once again, those of you familiar with John Michael Greer will recognize the huge influence of his work on my understanding of these things.

**Thanks to Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying for driving this point home. The Darkhorse podcasts are a master class in systems thinking from two highly skilled evolutionary biologists who are also experienced teachers.

***These concepts as well as the definitions of “waste” and “limiting factors” come from permaculture and were first introduced to me in the the works of Bill Mollison: “Introduction to Permaculture” and “Permaculture: a designers manual.”

**** Australian kinship systems are infamous among anthropologists for being fiendishly complex. Yet everyone in the community knows who’s related to whom and to exactly what degree.

We live in a time of rapid change and uncertainty. The 50 year failure of the environmental movement has left us with a tangle of interconnected problems. Ecosystem destruction;  freakishly high levels of pollution of the land the water and the atmosphere; and resource depletion combine to create a looming crisis of epic proportions. We are faced with increasing political and economic instability and it’s clear that there will be no large scale co-ordinated efforts to address any of it.

This blog is about what we can do, as ordinary people in families and small groups, to create lives worth living; to build a future worth having; and to be a force for renewal and regeneration in our much depleted world. 

Each of the three types of resources Energy, Matter, Information has a distinctive pattern of movement within the system. Understanding the movement of matter is essential for understanding the twin predicaments that shape our lives and the lives of our children and grandchildren: pollution and resource depletion.

Matter is messy and hard to control. It moves in circular patterns. The thing you tossed over your shoulder yesterday is likely to turn up on your path (or your dinner plate) tomorrow.  

Matter is solid, visible and touchable, in a way that energy and information are not. You can pick it up and examine it. You can see the wear and tear or dirt and grime. You can wash and repair and reuse but at a certain point you have to decide whether it’s useful life is over. 

Good care and moderate use can keep material possessions functional for a long time but most things have an end point when they are no longer useful in their current form.

The circular movement of matter continues long after it’s thrown away.

In the last 50 years massive amounts of biological and geological resources have been extracted and turned into consumer goods. Waste is produced at every phase of the process: extraction, transportation to production facilities, processing, packaging, transporting to market or consumers. The packaging is thrown in the garbage immediately and the product it contained may follow in as little as 6 months.

Waste plastic collects in giant gyres in the ocean where it is slowly beaten into tiny fragments by the waves. Or it degrades on land into microscopic particles. In either case these micro-plastics are taken up by plants and animals. They contaminate the food web and bio-accumulate in the larger creatures, including our food crops and animals, and inevitably in our bodies.

The secondary economy, the economy of human production, has always relied on the capacity of the primary economy, the larger ecosystem, to accept and neutralize the waste products of human manufacturing. As long as human production remained small scale; widely distributed; and relied on natural materials; waste management was rarely a problem.

Natural materials from biological sources degrade relatively quickly and easily into the soil or the water and the biosphere has evolved over millions of years into a complex interactive system where any form of waste is a resource for another part of the system.

As large scale industrial processes began to take over the secondary economy in the early 20th C, using chemicals previously unknown, or uncommon, to process petrochemicals into synthetics materials, the costs of dumping waste products in to the environment began to rise. By the mid-century they started to come to public attention in the form of ecological disasters with devastating human health consequences.

Between 1962 and 1970 Dryden Chemicals Limited dumped more than 9 tonnes of mercury waste from their paper mill into the English-Wabigoon River in Northwestern Ontario. In 1974 Japanese researchers confirmed the devastating effects of mercury poisoning on the communities of Grassy Narrows* and Whitedog. “Minimata Disease” was named after the Japanese village where the neurological damage caused by mercury poisoning was first discovered in 1956!

The Love Cannel, a neighbourhood in upstate New York infamously built on land saturated with 19,800 metric tonnes of chemical waste from the dyes, perfumes, and solvents used in the production rubber and plastics by the Hooker Chemical Company between 1940 and the mid 1950’s clearly demonstrated the devastating and deadly effects of “Better Living Through Chemistry”**

Despite this and other tragedies, the clear connection between industrial toxins, cancer, genetic abnormalities, and autism, which should have led to dramatic changes, has been largely ignored. Fundraising for “cancer research” continues while cancer rates rise and the highly paid researchers blithely ignore the obvious. 

Plastic production has increased dramatically since Dupont coined it’s slogan and the main effect of the limited environmental regulation enacted in North America was that manufacturing and manufacturing jobs were exported to poor countries without environmental and safety regulations. (The social cost of throwing the working class here into abject poverty in an attempt to move the toxic mess over there is another story.***)

The environmental movement has also ignored the obvious. Over the last 50 years it has consistently let industry off the hook. The main focus of action has been on personal responsibility and consumer focused recycling programs. Essentially, trying to mop up the flood while steadfastly ignoring the running tap in the bathtub.

The problem of plastics has continued unabated and pollution levels have risen to the point of very nearly overwhelming the capacity of the environment to contain it.

Unfortunately, the feed stock for plastic production, ethylene, is a waste product; a by-product in the production of valuable fuels: diesel for industrial use; gasoline for cars and trucks; and jet fuel for air travel. 

Ethylene cannot be used as fuel and getting rid of it is a problem. In many areas there are regulations restricting the amount that can be flared off, that is, burning it and dumping it into the atmosphere.

New plastic is cheaper than recycled plastic because the raw material is virtually free. The recycled product simply can’t compete. Collecting, transporting, cleaning, sorting, and reprocessing existing plastic of many different types and colours costs more than producing perfectly clean new plastic pure enough to be considered “food grade” in any colour you want.

Meanwhile the circular movement of matter continues, as it does. 

The reckless extraction of raw materials has ravaged enormous areas of land. Mine tailings leaking into river ecosystems have contaminated drinking water and annihilated fish stocks. Our “recyclable” plastic waste is dumped offshore onto poor countries. Industrial waste from manufacturing goods for the North American market in China, India, and elsewhere, contaminates the atmosphere we all share and poisons the water used to grow crops we all eat.

Matter moves in circles. Carefully guiding the cycles and transformations makes it useful and keeps it useful for longer. Reusing, repurposing and recycling materials is ideal but there is a limit to how many times most things can be reused or recycled. 

Everything eventually degrades into the land, the water, or the air and the cycle continues.

*More than 50 years later the fish in the river are still unsafe to eat; the people of Grassy Narrows are still suffering the effects of the persistent toxicity; corporate liability laws are unchanged; and the government has still not stepped up to do what is needed to clean it up.

**The slogan used by Dupont Chemicals from 1935 to 1982

*** Arguably a very important one since our current political instability can be traced directly back to the widespread immiseration that resulted.