by Ted Bernard
OVER THE CLIFF
Katja Nickleby
Chapter Two
A People and Nature Mosaic
EARTH IS 4.5 BILLION years old. If we were to equate our planet’s history to one 24-hour day, humanity’s journey began just a heartbeat ago at two minutes before midnight. In a trice, we humans with brains that enable speech, abstract thinking, tool making, and hypermobility have become not just a force to refashion the planet but the force above all others. Beyond this, our extraordinary communication skills and limitless imaginations dream up stories we ordain as truth. Among these, we have given birth to the most tragic of myths — the hubris of supremacy, the delusion we can live apart from the Earth of our being. Twenty-first century technological humans have inherited this hubris with little enough wisdom to understand its risks. As Rachel Carson wrote, we have not been able to contain “the train of disaster in its wake”2
From neighborhoods to the global atmosphere and oceans, the litany of Earth pillage is now so familiar that all but the heartless or those wearing political and religious blinders understand, even in rudimentary ways, the madness of these recent seconds. We have lived this painful litany. On Ojibwa native lands in Ontario, for example, the air and water carry mercury from a paper mill to their villages.3 In its deadly passage mercury is taken up by aquatic life, biomagnified, and ultimately ingested by the fish of their diets. As this invisible poison contaminates their waters, their food supply, and ultimately their children, it poisons society at large, scrambles all experience and rules for living, and ravages their future. Ojibwa lands are but a speck of Ontario, a pinprick on the map of North America. Yet, from pole to pole, there are millions of examples like this. No place on Earth has escaped the train of disaster. Where will it stop?
We cannot begin to answer this question until we see the world through new eyes. First, we must envision ourselves and the environment in which we live and breathe as a complex system — a social-ecological system. My academic colleagues may rightfully scold me for suggesting this as novel. Of course, it is not. Human geographers, anthropologists, and agroecologists have long studied traditional peoples’ richly diverse food systems in this manner and have come to realize that their knowledge of the natural world and their ways of responding to it amount to thousands of ingenious self-organizing complex adaptive systems.
To say it plainly, we now live in societies that are inextricably embedded in the environment. We are born into, live in, and die as part of vast social-ecological systems made up of our communities, their landscapes, biota, and climate and all their institutions and diverse societal arrangements from families to huge corporations, nation states, and transnational unions. These systems are self-organizing with components that are independent and interacting. When any system operates within its limits, variation and novelty are perpetual. When elements change, the system itself will reorganize around this change. Sometimes the system can deal with change and keep its identity while doing so. Sometimes it cannot.
It is impossible to understand this world of complex systems by assessing our societies and analyzing our ecological systems in isolation of each other — people and their institutions in one box, the natural environment in another. Though this is the way the worlds of marketing and communication, of internet commerce and connectivity, of energy production and consumption still construct reality, there is no such thing as people and nature separate. To our peril, the longer we embrace this delusion of separation, the shorter will be our trip across dangerous thresholds right to the edge of the cliff.
Secondly, we must understand that these super systems adapt to change in unpredictable ways. We are engulfed in what Canadian futurist Thomas Homer-Dixon calls “a world of complex systems” and, whether we like it or not, we must perpetually “cope with their vicissitudes”.4 Think again of how we feed ourselves, of how many interlocked steps there are from farm to platter and how much can go wrong in this complex globalized food system running on cheap fossil fuels. A flood or drought, a blight, or a spike or a rapid decline in oil prices can rocket through the system, discombobulating its many parts with grave consequences thousands of kilometers from the site of the disruption. Not only will the food supply be affected but so also will be almost everyone else you can imagine: farmers, ranchers, tractor dealers, banks and financial institutions, transporters, food processors, restaurateurs, households, and on and on. The calamity cascades through the system with far-reaching outcomes.
Complex systems have many components with webs of interconnectivity. They are also open with unclear permeable boundaries; they “bleed out” far afield into the surrounding world. Flows of high quality energy, mainly in the form of fossil fuels, enable modern complex systems to survive but these flows are vulnerable and do not lead to equilibrium. As we’ve just seen, the global food system is hardly in balance; it can crumble in a heartbeat. Another complication is that complex systems are non-linear. That is, there is disproportionality between cause and effect. In the example of the global food system, small changes can disgorge huge unbidden surprises. But sometimes it works the other way. What may seem like a big change can have little impact. For example, in pre-industrial times, periodic lightning-set wildfires raged across the landscapes of the American southwest without flipping the system into a degraded state. Over eons, the plants and animals, insects and birds, and native peoples had become tolerant of the occasional fire. This enabled the overall system to persist in more than one kind of ‘stable’ state — in this case, desert grasslands and fire-scorched desert grasslands.
Finally, complex systems have properties we can neither foresee nor understand simply by reducing our analysis to their individual components. We call this emergence and it is a serious headache for conventional science, acclimated as it is to reductionism. I was trained in conventional science and use it every day in my research and teaching. But blind reliance on specialized scientists, who often do not communicate across disciplines, cannot alone grapple with the world of complex systems, a world of uncertainty and infinite numbers of ‘unknown unknowns’.
Viewing the world as a mosaic of complex social-ecological systems enables us to think about their resilience through time and across space. Resilience is a crucially important concept to the understanding of how complex adaptive systems persist and perhaps how we humans can imagine for ourselves a humbler role. In everyday parlance, resilience means the ability to bounce back to some kind of norm after a shock or disturbance — as in, “Isn’t it amazing how well New York City has recovered from the ravages of Hurricane Sandy? Talk about resilience!”
The technical meaning of resilience is quite different. To those studying complex human and natural systems, resilience means the capacity to withstand shock without catastrophic failure. It means that the system can adjust to unforeseen events. It means the system can absorb change. It means the system can learn from the experience. Resilience is the quality that enabled those landscapes in the Southwest to withstand the occasional fire without shifting to a degraded state. Healthy systems can reassemble after a disturbance, in this case wildfire, and return to the grass dominant landscape. Whether New York City is resilient in these terms awaits the next super storm. By most assessments I’ve seen, it is not.
Impacted systems — those in which humans are part of the disruption — often find themselves crossing border lines, or technically, thresholds, that flip them into new and often degraded regimes. Thresholds are defined by certain variables that keep the system within bounds. Thresholds can be discerned and measured, and they are hugely significant because they can sharply change the behavior of the system in ways that could limit future options. And here’s the ultimate concern: once the system flips to a different regime, it may be impossible to bring it back across the threshold. The system then stagnates in a perpetually degraded state, lacking both the potential and the resilience to recover. Putting all this together, Homer Dixon concludes:
… by a lot of metrics
our world is unquestionably becoming more complex. It is becoming more connected, we see larger flows of energy into our socio-ecological systems, it’s exhibiting greater non-linearity, and it’s exhibiting lots of emergent surprises — more and more, it seems, all the time.5
Herein lies one of the biggest challenges of our time: lots and lots of emergent surprises. It is not my contention that understanding the complexity of social-ecological systems is a magic bullet. I do contend that framing questions around these system properties could lead to new ways of solving problems and perhaps new thinking about how to back away from the brink. In crises, humans, after all, are capable of imaginative responses. Unfortunately, quick-fix crisis management won’t do. Imagining solutions at the scale of the coming array of disasters will require patience and time, not panicky last minute responses. Time is the essential ingredient. Yet, as many climate scientists suggest, time is not on our side. In 1962, Rachel Carson ruefully noted, “in the modern world there is no time”.6 Can you fathom how much urgency has accumulated in the decades since she wrote these words? How tragic, this bleeding planet with its frayed ecosystems, its disappearing species, its roiling atmosphere and rising seas, its starving masses, wars, and acts of heart-rending inhumanity. If you cannot feel this urgency, your heart may well have taken leave. Bring it home, please.
2
Em, the Senegalese grad student, studied Stefan rushing about the classroom, scooping paper and cups into the recycling bins and cleaning the boards. She said that her professors at the Sorbonne in Paris would never have groveled to do the work of subordinate staff, all of whom were Africans like herself. She wondered how fate had determined such disparate paths. Here in this classroom, she saw something different: the absence of overt classism. Sadly, she would soon discover the underbelly of America’s apparent classless society: oppression of people of color (not counting internationals, only six percent of Gilligan students were African American or Hispanic) and of Native Americans (apart from my friend Abby, almost no others); women paid twenty percent less than men for equal work (maybe not here); sex trafficking of African American and Latina teens (even in Ohio); staggering inequities between ordinary people and rich people nationwide, if not at this university (though the football coach’s salary was upwards of $600k). Mon Dieu! Tas de problèmes.
Stefan opened class by telling us that Jellaludin Rumi was one of his teachers. Up to then, I had never heard of the man. He explained that Rumi was a mystic born in 1207 in what is now Afghanistan. He lived most of his life in Koni, Turkey, a crossroads where travelers from the Christian, Muslim, Hindu, and Buddhist worlds would meet along the Silk Road. “In those days,” Stefan continued, “traders, scholars, and clerics were not at war. And isn’t ironic that this ancient Sufi Muslim is now one of the most read poets in the west?”
From a projected slide Stefan read us Rumi’s lines and then he asked two students to re-read the lines, also aloud.
I have lived on the lip of insanity,
wanting to know reasons,
knocking on a door.
It opens.
I’ve been knocking from the inside!
The mind,
this globe of awareness,
is a starry universe that when you push off with your foot,
a thousand new roads become clear.
As you yourself do at dawn,
Sailing through the light.
The class seemed unable or unwilling to grasp Rumi’s opaqueness, almost everyone projecting a dopy brains-on-cruise vibe. I wrote in my notebook: Rumi sputters to crash landing. Even worse than John Muir.
Stefan ignored our stupor. He asked rhetorically, “Can you imagine that a mystic who walked the Earth 800 years ago might have something to teach us?” Nobody said a word. “Panarchy, the model we’re about to learn, was named less than two decades ago. Because it transcends time and space, I feel certain Rumi would have been intrigued by it.” Stefan then cruised the front row, knocking his knuckles on the writing arms of several chairs presently occupied by zombies. He ambled to the desk of Zachary, normally a repugnant yapper. “Zachary, what do you make of these lines?”
Zach jerked upward. Staring bleary-eyed at the projected words, he shook his head silently, a hapless hangover victim.
“Hmm, Zachary’s lost his tongue.” Stefan moved a few steps to stand in front of me. Urp! “Well, how about you Hannah?”
I squeaked mouse-like. “Well, I think …”
“Speak up, so all can hear”.
“… if you knock, the door may show you a universe you could never have imagined. You were going nuts because you believed the door opened inward. Now you are even more flustered because you find out you’re knocking from the inside and it opens outward. From there your awareness expands to a thousand new roads. It’s like Alice in Wonderland.”
“Yeah, quite mystical,” Stefan agreed.
From then on, I began to believe that Stefan had been heavenly-sent to fix my self-loathing and replace it with an expanding ‘globe of awareness’. What a sophomoric notion. And yet, I still hold to it.
“Good. Let’s see if we can find at least a few of the thousand new roads this world offers. In your text, Nickleby writes of the vast array of complex systems of which we humans are a part. I asked that you take her ideas and illustrate them with a briefly researched example that might be memorable for others.”
Who would be called upon? We held our collective breaths and tried to make ourselves invisible.
“Let’s start with Nick,” Stefan suggested.
Whew.
Nick looked up at Stefan, waving his phone. “Do you mind if I record this?”
“Of course not. Going to send it home to mom?”
At that, like buttercups in a summer breeze or crocuses blooming in January, smiles spread from face to face around the room. With just a few words and with his chin tilted slightly as if gazing at a passing cloud, Stefan could be cute. We took notice.
“Er, no, sir. My girlfriend wants to hear it,” Nick said meekly.
I laughed along with almost everybody else. The zombies had come to life.
Holding back a grin by clenching his teeth, Stefan nodded. He stepped away and draped his lanky frame into an empty chair next to Samantha. Nick ambled to the front, his hiking boots emitting muffled clunks.
The shift stalled Nick’s mighty engine. He blinked. To choke off the silence, he cleared his throat, stroked his beard, seemed to be groping for opening words. Finally, he spoke. “Um, okay, this is a case I know personally because the spruce budworm has made a mess of the red spruce forests in Quebec where I grew up. This slide shows the range of the eastern spruce budworm. I highlighted my hometown here northeast of Montreal. It’s called Saint-Damien. Everybody with me?”
An audible round of affirmative grunts.
“Here is a picture of the caterpillar and the damage it can do.”
The caterpillar was a tiny creature, the forest a vast expanse of dead trees.
“So,” he continued, “the budworm is the larvae of a moth. In its sixth larval stage, as caterpillars, they feast on the young needles of spruce trees. Like many forms of life in the northern forests, budworms have natural cycles of boom and bust. Every 40 to 100 years their populations explode and kill up to eighty percent of the spruce trees. Can you imagine? That this little larva, only about 25 millimeters long, can do such damage?”
“If this is natural, why does it happen?” Zach asked.
“It seems to be the way nature works in these forests: cycles of population explosions and crashes.”
“Such a waste!” Samantha blurted.
“It would be tempting to think that,” Stefan cut in. “But hold your thought, Samantha. I think Nick will explain why that is not so.”
Nick again: “Right, I will. This kill-off happens after the forest has become mature and the needles are thick. Predator birds cannot locate and therefore cannot control the budworm. A budworm outbreak happens when bud
worms no longer have to worry about predators. They ravage the trees so completely that most end up dead. After the forest thins out, new seedlings pop up to take advantage of the light and soil nutrients. They fill-in the openings. Another cycle starts.”
“So, when tree and needle density are low, predators keep larvae in check, until they cannot because the forest is too thick. Then an outbreak begins to happen. Is that it, Nick?” Stefan asked.
“Aptly put, oh faithful disciple of Jelly-something Rumi,” Nick replied in good fun. But I sensed from his expression that he worried he might have crossed a line, might have been too snide, too disrespectful.
Stefan chuckled from his undistinguished place in the front semi-circle away, as it were, from the respect-authority-space. For the moment, he was just one of us. Very cool.
“So is this an example of a threshold?” asked José, the Puerto Rican guy who bounded down the stairs last class with Samantha and me.
“Yeah, right on point!” Nick aimed a two-handed call-out toward José. “My friend here is way ahead of you guys. The significant threshold is needle density. But don’t forget the larger system, the whole spruce forest. In the natural scheme of things, sections of the forest are at different stages of growth. You’ve got to think of scale. At the scale of the entire forest, at least before technological humans arrived, it was an intricate patchwork of different stages — some patches maturing, some collapsing, some reorganizing, some on their way to reestablishment. The system self-organizes this way.”
José: “So what happens when humans come on the scene?”
Nick: “Thanks for the segue!”
Stefan: “Cunning softball question there.”
Nick: “Absolutely not a setup, Stefan.”