At its most elemental, we see the principle of interdependence at work in what biologists call symbiotic relationships, the mutually beneficial interaction of two organisms that live in close association. Every child is familiar with the example of the flower and the honeybee. The flower provides the honeybee with sweet, life-giving nectar, and the honeybee pollinates the flower to facilitate its reproduction. In this simple example, the relationship is directly reciprocal.
The real wonder of life is found, however, in complex patterns of mutual service that go far beyond such tit-for-tat market-style reciprocity. Much of this complexity eludes our normal awareness because it occurs at a microscopic level; we can perceive and understand it only by using powerful tools of scientific observation to track the multilevel dynamics of whole ecosystems over long periods of time.
As you read the following stories of life’s extraordinary capacity to self-organize, note that there is no counterpart to the hierarchical command systems we humans have come to believe are essential to maintain coherence and order in human societies. Do the lowliest bacteria 275possess some innate sense of responsibility for the well-being of the whole that eludes us humans? As you read these stories, consider these questions: How long would the forest ecosystem survive and prosper if its individual organisms lived by the neoliberal economic principle of unfettered competition for short-term individual advantage? What might we learn about the possibilities of human societies from how living organisms organize themselves into healthy forest ecosystems?
LESSONS FROM A FOREST ECOSYSTEM
Some of our most advanced insights into the dynamics of natural ecosystems come from studies conducted in the Andrews Forest in Oregon. Science writer Jon R. Luoma relates some of this fascinating research in The Hidden Forest: Biography of an Ecosystem.
The Nitrogen Cycle
Think of the forest as a self-reliant living economic system engaged in converting available resources into products and services essential to sustaining the life of the forest and each of its individual participants. Start with a simple maple leaf. Each leaf is actually a system of individual living, self-directing cells that capture pulses of energy radiating from the sun and bundle them into a neat biochemical package, a molecule of sugar. Using little more than a combination of water, sunlight, and carbon dioxide, a healthy mature maple tree will silently produce during the course of one growing season about two tons of sugar and a substantial quantity of oxygen. The energy of the sun is thus stored for hours or even years in molecular form to support the growth and maintenance of the tree. The tree also supports a host of other organisms, including “the mite chewing on tiny bits of the stem, the predatory spider that eats the mite, the flycatcher that eats the spider… the fungi pulling sugar out of the tree’s roots on the forest floor… [and] the squirrel or vole or deer that eats a bit of fungus.”9
Each of the organisms served by the tree in turn contributes services to other organisms, including many on which the tree itself depends. To produce sugar, the tree needs nitrogen, an element abundant in the atmosphere. However, trees, like most other organisms, cannot use the free nitrogen of the air directly. They rely on specialized bacteria to “fix” the nitrogen by turning it into nitrite and nitrate compounds. Typically, 276these nitrogen-fixing bacteria live in nodules formed by particular species of plants—such as lichens, and the root systems of legumes and red alder trees—that protect and nourish the bacteria. The plants that host the bacteria, however, have their own problem: They require abundant sunlight. When the forest canopy shades out these plants, it kills the host that sustains the bacteria that supply the nitrite and nitrate compounds on which the whole system depends.
Life’s solution to this problem reveals an extraordinary capacity for mutuality and adaptation—not only in the moment, but with a sense of foresight that may span a century or more. When fire, volcanic eruption, or a violent windstorm creates an open space in the forest, plants that harbor nitrogen-fixing bacteria colonize the area initially to produce nitrogen in sufficient quantities to support the growth of the trees for as long as two hundred years.
After the forest canopy shades out the nitrogen fixers and the stored nitrogen is exhausted, the trees would be doomed to death except for a dynamic found only in old-growth forests. As the trees reach their hundredth year or so, nitrogen-fixing lichens begin to establish themselves in their upper reaches, where sunlight is abundant. Over the second hundred years of the tree’s life, these lichens grow in increasing abundance, creating a forest canopy that functions as a powerful nitrogen-fixing factory. By the time the mature forest is in danger of suffering a nitrogen deficiency, the living canopy is producing and shedding nitrogen-rich waste matter to the ground at a sufficient rate to renew the soil and supply most of the nitrogen required by the entire system.10
Beneficial Infection
Another example of complex mutuality is found in the relationship between the evergreen trees of the Andrews Forest and a specialized fungus named Rhabdocline parkeri that lives inside their needles. When the Andrews Forest researchers first discovered this fungus, they were surprised to find no indication the tree suffered any ill effect from what they would normally consider a fungal infection. Eventually they discovered that the tree provides the fungi with the energy-rich sugars and starches on which they feed in exchange for the fungi’s service of protecting the tree from defoliating insects by producing poisonous alkaloid compounds whenever the tree becomes threatened. 277
The fungus, it turns out, is remarkably frugal and respectful of the host tree’s resources. Its spores initially lance their way into a fresh green needle and wait. They grow virtually not at all, and thus place no burden on the tree, until the time comes for the needle itself to die as part of the tree’s natural cycle, at which time the fungus draws energy from the dying needle, matures, and releases its own spore to find and “infect” a fresh green needle. In the meantime, if the needle happens to be attacked by insects, the fungus poisons the insect and then prospers by tapping the dead insect rather than the needle for nutrients.11
One might reasonably ask why the tree does not develop its own chemical defense against insect pests. The simple answer speaks further to life’s complex intelligence. Insects are short lived, with an ability to rapidly evolve defenses against toxic threats. The similarly short-lived fungi are equally agile in their ability to reformulate their toxins to overcome those defenses in a way the long-lived tree species could not. Here we see another striking example of how life flourishes through the power of partnership.12
The Living Soil
Insects, which are abundant not only in their numbers but also in their variety, have essential roles in rebuilding forest soils. Each insect species makes its distinctive contribution to chewing up and processing the waste matter of a dead tree or plant, with many insects of different species ingesting, processing, and evacuating the material in turn in a highly complex recycling process. In simple language, the poop of one becomes the food of another. Indeed, the soil of the forest floor is composed almost entirely of the bodies and feces of microbes and insects.
Biologists believe our planet may be host to as many as thirty million insect species, each of which occupies its own ecological niche. Each maintains itself by performing a distinctive service on behalf of the whole. Scientists are only beginning to sort out the essential roles they play in the health of the forest ecosystem—and by extension in the maintenance of the health and fertility of all the soils so essential to planetary life.13
These stories demonstrate the complexity of the relationships underlying the coherent function of a major ecosystem. Each organism contributes to the whole through patterns of relationships that involve 278loops of reciprocity that may cycle through thousands of species and take a century or more to close.
At every turn, we see evidence of life’s astonishing ability to organize for mutual self-empowerment without evident central control or direction. The rain forest ecosys
tem is one example. Our own bodies are another.
LESSONS FROM THE HUMAN BODY
The creation of an individual human person begins with the joining of two microscopic cells—a sperm and an egg. This merging of genetic materials to create a single composite cell begins a profoundly complex self-directing process of cell division and differentiation. Communicating with the other cells, each individual cell makes the appropriate decision at the appropriate moment to divide or to take on the specialized functions of a brain, liver, or blood cell as the body’s specialized organs and structures take on form and function.
A generalized map is embedded in the genetic structure shared by all the cells of a given body. Although there is no dominator cell instructing each of the other cells what action to take at any given moment, each cell, through processes still only dimly understood, makes the right decision at the right time in support of the emergence of the whole body. Countless such individual decisions result ultimately in the growth and division of the two initial cells into a complex organism composed of more than thirty trillion self-directing, self-renewing cells—an organism with the capacity for intelligent, self-reflective choice able to contemplate eternity and to join with similar organisms to reshape the planet and reach out to the stars.
Renewal, Sharing, and Adaptation
The processes of self-renewal that continue throughout the human life span compound the wonder of the human organism. Each minute three billion of the body’s cells die—each reliably replaced by a living cell of like kind. The stomach lining replaces itself every five days, the liver every two months, and the skin every six weeks. Ninety-eight percent of the atoms in the body are replaced each year.14 Except for the occasional error, each of the body’s cells has the same genetic coding. Yet they differentiate into many specialized functions, sensing and 279responding to intercommunication among the cells to take whatever action is appropriate to the needs of the emerging organism. The identity and dynamic coherence of each organ, the body as a whole, and the conscious self with all its memories and intellectual abilities are sustained throughout.
Equally extraordinary is the ability of the body’s trillions of cells to move energy instantly from wherever it is stored to wherever it is needed in the event of injury, illness, or a physical threat from the environment. As Elisabet Sahtouris points out, the muscle doesn’t tell the heart, “Nothing more until you settle your past due account.” It sends what is needed. If necessary, it starts breaking down its own tissues to release additional energy. Nor does the heart say to the muscle that needs an extra measure of oxygen to mobilize the body’s flight from an attacker, “Hey, business is business. What’s it worth to you?”
Decision Makers Every One
It all makes for an organizational challenge of breath-taking complexity and raises the question of who or what is making the decisions. Genetic programming, the brain, and the central nervous system play their roles, but the essential answer is that the decision-making capacity and responsibility are distributed throughout the body’s every cell, microbe, and organ—each sensing and responding to complex flows of information from its environment—suggesting that many levels of self-regulating intelligence may be involved.
These many intelligences are parts of an interdependent whole. The failure of any one part has the potential to destroy the whole, but no individual subsystem, not even the neocortical brain that is the seat of consciousness, is able to dominate the others in the sense of an overall hierarchy of command and control.15
Given that healthful bodily function requires the making of billions of decisions each second, it is for good reason that the self-aware consciousness we experience in our waking hours is not in direct communication with these many other centers of awareness and decision making. Because the masses of information involved would quickly overwhelm our conscious mind, most of the processing is handled by the unconscious mind or occurs at the cellular level and does not involve the brain at all. 280
Each human life in turn depends on the support of the infinitely complex and dynamic web of self-directing, self-regulating relationships that make up the life of the planetary biosphere. The performance of these external systems is as essential to our individual survival and well-being as the performance of our internal systems. Each of these systems is engaged in its own pulsating dance of adaptation and renewal, creating constant variations in air and water quality, temperature, and nutrient supply to which the individual human body and all its complex internal processes must continuously adapt.
In the face of such complexity and foresight, the idea that evolution is nothing more than the playing out of a competitive struggle for dominance seems hopelessly simplistic. More credible is the theory that life is intelligent and purposeful and that each living system embodies many levels of conscious intelligence.
Is self-interest involved? Certainly, but it is the mature and inclusive self-interest of the mutually empowering relations of partnership that come naturally to the highest orders of human consciousness and that constitute the foundation of mature democracy.
Although science remains captive to the premise that reality can be explained entirely by a combination of chance and material mechanism, the story of Creation’s unfolding to ever higher levels of complexity and consciousness points to the existence of a profound intelligence engaged in an epic journey of self-discovery. By giving matter the capacity to choose, life accelerates the pace of the journey. Engaged in a cooperative struggle to maintain its choice-making potential against the downward pull of entropy, life exists only in living communities of diverse and mutually interdependent species. For life, partnership is more than an organizing principle; it is its very essence.
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CHAPTER 17
Joys of Earth Community
Destructiveness is the outcome of unlived life. Those individual and social conditions that make for suppression of life produce the passion for destruction.1
Erich Fromm
Being human always points, and is directed, to something, or someone, other than oneself—be it a meaning to fulfill or another human being to encounter. The more one forgets himself—by giving himself to a cause to serve or another person to love—the more human he is and the more he actualizes himself.2
Viktor Frankl
Two of the great psychoanalysts of the twentieth century—Erich Fromm and Viktor Frankl—each had personal encounters with the horror of fascism in Nazi Germany. After World War II each published his reflections on what in the human psyche can drive humans to such destructiveness. Each came to much the same simple yet profound conclusion: the human drive to belong, to connect, to express our presence, is so strong that if our efforts to connect and affirm our existence through positive means are thwarted, that drive will be redirected to negative means.
Think of it as a drive to live and thereby to do what other successful living beings do: find our place of service in a cooperative partnership with the larger web of life. The development of healthy individuals capable of relationships based on mutual caring and service depends on healthy communities that nurture healthful individual development. Healthy individuals and healthy communities go hand in hand, each inseparable from the other.
We humans, because of the gift of reflective consciousness, have the capacity to live more intentionally and creatively than any other species. We also, however, have the capacity to make terribly bad choices, as the282 sorrows of five thousand years of Empire so tragically demonstrate. The cultures and institutions of Empire alienate us from life, thwart the positive expression of our drive to live, turn our life energy to expressions destructive of both self and community, condition us to choose the path of sorrow and deny the very existence of the path to the joys of Earth Community. Yet as both nonimperial human societies and the living communities of the nonhuman world attest, the way of partnership is a very real possibility.
The work of the Great Turning requires us to free ourselves from the self-i
nflicted alienation and oppression of Empire as we create societies that support every person in connecting to life in ways that enhance the creative potential of both self and community so that all may enjoy the joys of Earth Community. The work begins in our minds with an awakening to the reality that the drive to connect in a mutually affirming relationship with life is hardwired into our nature and that whether we express that drive in ways that bring sorrow or joy is up to us.
HARDWIRED TO CONNECT
An extraordinary cooperative initiative organized by the YMCA of the USA, the Dartmouth Medical School, and the Institute for American Values brought together thirty-three prominent neuroscientists, children’s doctors, and social scientists to review the mental and emotional health of America’s children and to recommend practical steps to improve their lives. Organized as the Commission on Children at Risk, their report, Hardwired to Connect: The New Scientific Case for Authoritative Communities, is a path-breaking synthesis of science, spiritual wisdom, and conservative and liberal values.3
The commission’s report, based on scientific studies of the human brain, concludes that we humans are physiologically “wired” to form “close attachments to other people, beginning with our mothers, fathers, and extended family, and then moving out to the broader community.”4
Using magnetic resonance imaging to take portraits of brain activity, scientists have found during laboratory exercises that the experience of forming a cooperative alliance with another person produces a strong positive response in the pleasure center of the brain—rather like eating chocolate or engaging in good sex.5 Other studies find that relationships 283of trust and caring are essential to our emotional health and to the healthful function of society.6
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