Late-K Lunacy

by Ted Bernard

  Stefan walked to the back of the room and sat in an empty chair next to the soccer star, Michelle. Loud enough for everyone to hear, he asked her, “So, Michelle, what’s with this word, panarchy? Where'd it come from?”

  “Let me see, the first part was from Greek mythology. Pan was some kind of god. I can’t remember exactly what he did but he was apparently hard to pin down. Just like this Panarchy model.”

  Her quip got a hearty laugh.

  “Interesting analogy,” Stefan deadpanned. “Yes, Pan was a fickle being, a sort of nature god. He hung out with the nymphs. The nymphs were nubile female spirits who claimed certain bits of terrain — a grove of trees, a lakeside — places like that. Pan had a reputation for being somewhat randy with these young spirits. No need to get into those details.”

  “Aww, just when this got interesting, you choose to censor information.” chided a guy on the other side of Michelle.

  “Not now,” Stefan replied. “We’ve got lots to do this morning. Besides, isn’t it a bit early for tales of ardor and passion?”

  “Not for me,” he responded.

  Stefan smiled and moved back to the front of the room. “Maybe not for you.” He changed the subject. “While I’m at it, what about the ‘archy’ part of the word panarchy? Hannah?”

  “Well, that’s from hierarchy,” I replied haughtily, like the geeky know-it-all I seemed to be that year. “I guess the scientists wanted to show that the theory is meant to cover scales at lots of different levels.”

  “Yes. In terms of change, how do these scales operate? Somebody else here?”

  Astrid replied, “Well, there are many possible connection points between the large, slow-moving cycles and the small fast-moving ones. They can impact one another going either up the hierarchy or down it.”

  “Right. What do you recall about the concepts of ‘revolt’ and ‘remember’?”

  Astrid in her usual uninflected manner said, “Yeah, revolt happens when fast moving, small events overwhelm large, slow ones, like when a forest fire that was once very local at the ground spreads into the crown and races from one part of the forest to the next until the whole forest is blazing.”

  “Good. Who else here? What about the concept of remember?”

  Michelle responded. “Remember is about the wealth stored at the top of the hierarchy where change takes place more slowly. Wealth can play a big role in the r phase. So, using the example of the forest fire, after it burns out, over the long-term, processes at the higher levels slow the leakage of stuff, for example from the seed bank in the soil and from surrounding places with the help of, like, birds, insects, and mice. These become the blocks to rebuild with.”

  “Perfect. Everybody with Michelle here?”

  “Absolutely!” Zach, as usual, presumed to speak for everybody.

  A boy named Greg raised his hand. “By the way, Stefan, since I’m a third-generation Greek American, I pay attention to things Greek. Did you know that there’s a statue of Pan on campus?”

  “Really? I did not know that.”

  “Yeah, in the little park with benches between Brownlow Library and Stiggins Hall, he’s right there, larger than life. I don’t know why.”

  “There you go gang. Take a little detour to see Pan next time you’re at the library. The Library! You might remember that the library is where you can find books. Ever hear of books?”

  Nobody took the bait. But almost under her breath, Astrid, mumbled, “Are you, like, lampooning us, Stefan?”

  Stefan tilted his head and smirked at Astrid. He said nothing. The class stirred with a few snickers and whispers. I can tell you that in our sorority that night I heard Samantha mimicking him: “I’m headed out to study in the library now,” she said. “You know, that big building where you can find some books. You know what books are, right?” Proving, of course, that our beloved mentor had found yet another way to imprint our half-developed brains and enlarge our unsure hearts.

  Greg had one more thing to tell the class. “Expect to be surprised, perhaps a little grossed out. Pan isn’t exactly handsome. He’s half-goat — or is it sheep? — half-man. The lower half is the animal. Let’s say, the sculptor let it all hang out.”

  Stefan cut in, “Okay, Greg, that may be more than we needed to know, but thanks for the tip. Now every time you guys pass through that little park, I hope you’ll think about what the Panarchy model is trying to teach us.”

  In my diary that night, I wrote, Tomorrow, check out Pan’s junk.

  OVER THE CLIFF

  Katja Nickleby

  Chapter Four

  Late-K Lunacy

  IF JOSEPH SCHUMPETER were alive today I would quickly arrange for him to meet C.S. “Buzz” Holling, who, with others around the world, rolled out panarchy in 2002 as a frame for understanding how complex adaptive systems evolve and function. Schumpeter, an economist, you will remember, believed that breakdown and rejuvenation were inevitable and necessary for the health and creativity of capitalism. But there was no way in the 1930s, when he came up with the idea of creative destruction, that Schumpeter could have predicted the complexity and connectedness of the globalized twenty-first century. Thomas Homer-Dixon puts it this way, “We now have to think of humankind’s global society and economy as intimately linked with an ecological system that provides the food, energy, and resources it needs to sustain itself.”13 It is, in other words, an intricate nesting of super-systems. In the pre-computer era, it was impossible to imagine this, but today, even people who know nothing of panarchy, possess this awareness. “It’s a small world,” we reassure one another.

  Panarchy theorists take it further. They argue that this small world is barreling toward Late-K as a hyper-coherent, too-tightly-coupled system, dangerously high on the connectedness axis. Though the global system possesses unprecedented stores of information and wealth, these are increasingly inaccessible, sequestered in silos and specializations, indebtedness and speculation, and ’sunk costs’ in ageing infrastructure, pensions, and the like. As a consequence, system resilience is in steep decline. The educated global citizen may be aware of today’s ’small world’ but almost certainly has little idea of its vulnerability. Oblivious in fact because the social and political institutions — even environmental and resource management institutions — dedicate vast resources to stave-off breakdown, to invent work-arounds, and to cover up or misconstrue warning signs. In essence, the political class and the corporate world believe they are successfully stalling the system’s progression toward Late-K. Most of the rest of us are in chronic denial. Little do we know.

  In my fancied meeting between Holling and Schumpeter, I can hear Holling saying, “As you wrote some seventy-five years ago, breakdown is vital to system adaptation. Thus, to avoid it, engineering practices simply increase the likelihood of a catastrophic event in the future.” Schumpeter might gravely nod his assent. “But then,” he might say more brightly, “after collapse, there will be such novelty, such fresh competition and reorganization that the world’s economy will be given new birth, yes?” Holling tentatively nods. “Perhaps, but if our present phase of manic growth goes forth, I believe deep collapse could occur when all systems synchronously fail. In this case, collapse cascades across so many physical and social boundaries that the system’s ability to regenerate itself is lost, at least in human time. It will take a long, long time. The planet is already bereft of healthy ecosystems, of critical ecosystem services on which to rebuild. Wildlife populations, for example, have decreased by more than fifty percent just since 1970; bird populations even more; pollinators like honey bees are down in some countries by fifty percent, the oceans have been seriously overfished and are warming and acidifying at alarming rates.”14 Somberly, Schumpeter replies, “I am heartbroken.”

  Before discussing this Late-K state of affairs, let’s briefly review how change proceeds in the adaptive cycle. First, remember that the progression from stage to stage is neither continuous and gradual, nor consistently
chaotic. It is instead episodic with slow accumulation of capital punctuated by sudden release and reorganization. The climax forest takes centuries to evolve but then a tornado, an episodic event, rips through and sets things back to omega. In the marketplace, the quick and unexpected collapse of General Motors in 2008, after almost four generations of accumulating power and market share, was a shocking event. Without a government bailout, GM would surely still be groveling in the depths of omega. I reiterate these examples because they illustrate clearly how Late-K circumstances can, almost instantaneously, drive a system over the cliff.

  What does this look like in time and space? Change is patchy and discontinuous. Knowing this and realizing the world’s climate is likely to add its own temporal and spatial chicanery, despite what Paul Hawken and others believe, I contend it is naïve to assume that a raft of ’sustainable communities’ (like Brights Grove) will stave off collapse.15 And despite our unique awareness of the past and our foresight and intentionality, history is replete with examples of catastrophic reverses of societies that came down like avalanches upon well intentioned, committed people who perhaps could see the handwriting on the wall. Humans as ‘free agents’ with so much brilliance and goodness (as well as evil) have frequently been taken down by deep collapse. Think here of the Mayans, the Tigris and Euphrates civilizations, Great Zimbabwe, and many others.

  Socio-ecological systems do not operate around a single equilibrium but rather evolve with multiple equilibriums. If we assume there’s only one equilibrium, our plans will be side-swiped in unexpected ways. There are countless examples born of such specious assumptions. To go back to Rachel Carson’s time, we discovered that dousing pests with massive doses of DDT and other chemicals in the 1950s and 1960s within a few short years created a worse nightmare: pesticide-resistant superbugs. Carson, in a chapter titled “The Rumblings of an Avalanche”, pointed out that not only were these pests “made stronger by our efforts”, but even worse, she wrote, “we may have destroyed our very means of fighting them.”16 Her metaphor of an avalanche could not be more timely and appropriate.

  Policies and management systems with fixed rules independent of scale and system dynamics add to the risk of collapse. This is often the way we have managed natural resources. Fire suppression in western North America, for example, has made landscapes — now covered with ranchettes, suburbs, second homes, golf courses, and ski resorts — more, not less, susceptible to catastrophic fire. Think here too of ocean fisheries that have been managed according to one-template-fits-all ‘sustained yield’ targets. Now they are almost universally overfished, some perhaps beyond recovery. Environmental managers, suffused in the delusion that we rule supreme and that we could accurately predict natural cycles in the vastness of the oceans, grievously erred. And now we find ourselves at the edge of a cliff Schumpeter could never have imagined. Our panarchy alarms are flashing red, yet we pay little heed. We are ill-prepared and we foolishly abide politicians and financial barons who tell us all is well. This is pure lunacy.

  What exactly are these alarms? What led Holling to write of the “brittleness” of Late-K as the most precarious of states? From an array of studies of the collapse of complex systems, here are the main elements that combine to hasten Late-K.17 First is declining novelty: the loss of a system’s capacity to exploit its potential for new expression. America’s ‘too-big-to-fail’ banks in their conventions, bureaucracy, compromised regulation, weak capitalization and thus inaccessible real capital, and suppressed internal criticism and reflection, discourage new ideas and devote too little energy to the pursuit of new ideas or new capital toward solid investments and opportunities. These banks closely resemble the climax forest, which, as we noted above, is the expression of past, slowly accumulated mutations, but which, at the Late-K ‘locked-up’ stage, offers almost no opportunity for novel genetic mutations to find expression.

  The second reason we find ourselves at Late-K is the decreasing redundancy of important components. As a forest evolves toward its climax, critical components are eradicated. Whereas there were once dozens of nitrogen-fixing organisms in r, as the forest progresses toward Late-K, the number is reduced to a handful. Consequently, the loss of just one or two of the remaining nitrogen-fixers could cause the forest to cross a threshold and head toward collapse. Loss of redundancy, in other words, means greater susceptibility to collapse. The globalized economy is similar. Instead of the vastness and diversity of many small companies, production has been concentrated in fewer and fewer firms. Homer Dixon notes, “Worldwide, two companies make all large jet liners, three companies make all jet engines, four companies make ninety-five percent of the world’s microprocessors, and one company in Germany produces the machines that make eighty percent of the world’s spark plugs.”18

  The same is true of the way we store digital data. Not long ago, anyone with a computer and virtually all businesses, universities, and government agencies stored information on site in the computer itself or in networked storage drives. In the past several years the concept of ‘the cloud’ has surged through the economy. Data, whether personal, medical, or commercial, are now sent off-site to the cloud, essentially servers controlled by a few giant firms, miles or world’s away from one’s own machine. Again, the rate at which the redundancy of many storage sites for crucially important data has shrunk is shocking. It would not take much malware or many cyber attacks on server farms or massive power meltdowns to sink the ship holding the data that now keep our economy and society afloat. Fred Guterl writes that we have absolutely no effective defense against malware. “Viruses of the computer kind, as well as the biological kind, hold the key(s) to our destruction,” he concludes.19

  Businesses, resource management and conservation organizations, universities, school systems, and many other institutions are increasingly directed by command and control systems that are helpful, on the one hand, in maintaining a kind of tenuous order, but on the other, in crisis, become hamstrung and unable to effectively respond. The bungling responses to Hurricanes Katrina and Sandy serve as tragic reminders of the inadequacy of the command and control mentality, as are almost all flood control and storm surge systems in the United States. As centralized, top-down institutions age and are forced to deal with greater and greater complexity in the world around them, their preoccupation with process (more and more rules, more and more time spent on how well workers or students adhere to procedures or stack up according to arbitrary performance metrics) takes the place of innovation and reflexivity. This, together with rising transaction costs of managing information, bargaining for least cost solutions, and policing and enforcement, rob enterprises and society of capital or, to put it another way, of the potential to take advantage of opportunities or even to respond to crisis effectively.

  No system can remain in Late-K forever. Complex systems simply do not work this way. The costs are too great. When these costs exceed the benefits of all the deviations, all the fix-ups and work-arounds, collapse comes swiftly. Late-K devolves into omega. In facing this prospect, the worst thing we can do is to resort to linear cause and effect reasoning that indicts only one or a few culprits (“It’s those big government liberals. It’s all their fault!”). Complex socio-ecological systems are, by definition, non-linear and are driven by multiple interactions and equally complex sets of exogenous elements, not the least of which is a rapidly changing global climate. Just as Rachel Carson warned of pesticide abuse, as we get closer and closer to the cliff’s edge, “it is clear that we are traveling a dangerous road”.20

  4

  As usual, Samantha and I arrived early. Stefan had his back to us at the audio-visual console. Our classmates flocked in jabbering about plans for the weekend starting tonight, Thursday, a longstanding Gilligan tradition. Stefan darkened the room and cued-in amazing, mellifluous classical music, a symphony of some kind. ‘Mellifluous’, to this day, is still part of my vocabulary, though I doubt I have ever uttered the word aloud, especially since we have
no way of playing back recorded music now, mellifluous or disharmonious. Stefan stood wordlessly at the side of the room, nodding as late-comers found their way in the dark. After about ten minutes, he dampened the music and brought up the lights.

  He asked us why we thought he would play a symphony at the start of a class and whether his critics would approve of launching a class this way.

  Katherine, the grad student from Virginia, spoke. “I’m not sure what’s in your inscrutable brain, Stefan. Who knows?” She paused, whimsically it would seem. A palpable titter or two rose like soap bubbles and drifted across the room. She smiled and zeroed into her professor’s smoky blue eyes, looking to me that morning more like Great Smokey Mountain blue than Mediterranean sky blue. Still plenty sexy. “I, for one,” she continued, “believe that without music, without the arts, there’s little hope for long-term sustainability or our survival as a civilization. If your critics don’t approve, why don’t you invite them to our class? Some of us can speak to the issue.”

  “Yeah!” affirmed Sean, another grad student.

  Melissa, a 45-year-old Appalachian Ohio mother of three trying to finish a degree she had started 17 years earlier, chipped in. “Make them lock horns with yours truly, a renowned ill-humored battle-axe.”

  Stefan ignored Melissa’s description of herself. “Inviting my critics here is a great suggestion. Warring with them is another matter. For now, I’m hoping everything will blow over so we can concentrate on the precarious future rather than becoming distracted by their tirades.”