Whole Systems

Taking a break from gloom and doom, because honestly, they're no fun. I don't like gloom and doom any more than the next man. Well okay, I might like gloom and doom slightly more than the next man.... ;)

Anyway, I watched a very cool video made by folks at Harvard on a particular aspect of the internal workings of cells, in this case how white blood cells are alerted to sources of inflammation or disease.

Watching all these structures appearing and disappearing and being recycled in various ways, it seemed to me an apt metaphor for how the biosphere itself works. In other words, we humans are one particular part of this organism, one protein in the cell as it were, but we imagine that we are the whole show and also that we are separate from these processes going on around us. The cell proteins are assembled and disassembled just as in the world, we and everything else is born and dies: but we hardly ever think of one single cell as multiple things or a collection of individuals but as one thing. Indeed, most laymen don't think about cells individually that much either, but about the whole organisms we may encounter in our experience.

And herein lies a problem in our perspective, from the perspective of a protein in the larger cell of the Earth, which is that we have a very difficult time visualizing ourselves as part of a whole system. In fact, we seldom try to do that. We humans don't seem to be configured for such perception anymore, if we ever were. What evidence we have for such primordial perceptions are buried in myths and legends and archaic rituals of long-gone peoples who tried and failed to harmonize the microcosm of their own bodies with the macrocosm of the universe.

And yet, doing just that may wind up more essential for the survival of our species and the survival of many other species than just about anything else we could do.

Let me back up for a moment and talk to you about a very small farm. 

This is not a real farm, it's a farm in my head and it is taking up space there as a way of thinking about how a human being could live in such a way as to maximize the health of a whole biological system and to maximize the good of all the denizens therein, including himself. My thought experiment farm partially started from ethical motivations: to think about alternatives to the living nightmare which industrial agriculture brings about to all manner of beings. One need only do an internet search for images of the conditions which animals such as pigs and chickens endure in such a system, to see what I mean. I also do not exempt plants from my concern, to me they are beings too and should be regarded as such. So initially of course, being a soft-hearted sort of person, my ideal was to avoid violence in such a system as much as possible.

Thinking about chickens, I realized that such a goal could never be completely achieved. Even if I only buy hens and never eat them, well chickens don't lay only hens. Half of the chicken race is boys, so the fate of the hens siblings is to some degree on my plate even if I buy only hens. I might not kill the roosters myself, but I am implicit in the system by which the hens come to me. The hens will eat bugs and any number of other living things, and are intended to. Moreover, what do I intend to do when these hens get old and senile and start drooling in their dust baths? Move them to the old chicken's home? Or make chicken stock?

So okay, suppose I don't get the chickens at all. Is that helping the efficiency and diversity of the whole system of my little farm, or hurting it? I'd say hurting it. The chickens could make use of lots of resources that other organisms on the farm can't, and they turn those resources into eggs and chicken manure for the plants. If the vegetable crops could speak to such a chicken-free proposal they might say: "What are you thinking, not having manure on this farm? WE NEED THE EFFING MANURE." Plants are really pretty much the bosses on this imaginary farm; they need to get what they want above almost all other considerations, because everything depends on them. And of course it is hard to say I am exactly doing the chickens a favor by not providing them a way to live. Is it better to live a short but reasonably full life and ultimately wind up on a dinner plate, or better not to live period? Because that's really what we are talking about. A vegan world would be a world without chickens.

Imagine if a pseudo-compassionate alien race were to land on the Earth and say, "Gosh you humans have a lot of troubles in life, so we are going to make sure you are all taken care of and happy, and we will keep you from reproducing any more of your unhappy and unfortunate species." I am not sure we would consider our compassionate extinction a favor.

So absolute humaneness on my imaginary farm has become a secondary consideration to, "how do I increase the diversity, stability, productivity and efficiency of the whole system?" In other words, the happiness of the poor little chick-chicks individually has just taken a back seat to the happiness of the whole system, which will tend on the whole to provide them too with a fair portion of life. The plants get their days of sun and rain, and their days as organic matter in the compost pile. The chickens have their days scratching bugs in the dirt and their days on the menu. And the same with Farmer Bob, he too is secondary to the system as a whole. And it is a system that can be violent to individual forms. It can be violent individually to the chickens, to the plants, even to Farmer Bob. In this ideal farm, even Farmer Bob is compost eventually. If however the diversity, stability, health and welfare of the whole system, the whole farm, is maintained as the foremost value, then generally the chickens, the plants and Farmer Bob will have their share of good as well as bad. 

People sometimes have this idea of Nature as a happy paradise. It is a paradise, but it is a violent paradise, equal parts sunshine and butterflies and blood dripping from fang and claw. And it is this dark paradise that we must ultimately embrace when we put the good of the whole ecological system above the temporary profit of Man.

I have a new favorite image of Mother Earth. This image was so frightening when it was originally unearthed that they actually buried it back again, afraid of the power that it could still possess. It is an image of the Aztec earth goddess Coatlique, goddess of death and regeneration, to whom the dead go that she may take them back into herself. Coatlique: full of snakes, severed body parts, flaccid boobies, claws and skulls and shit. Not a user-friendly goddess, but the Aztecs didn't have much in the way of warm fuzzy gods. 

Coatlique: she's a mean mother

I generally think of the ancient Aztecs as bloodthirsty fascist assholes who we are better off without, but you can't accuse them of having a human-centric cosmology. In theory at least, their whole ritual life and the oceans of blood and all the tens of thousands of human hearts they ripped from their bodies were focused on the idea of human beings assisting the gods in their battle to keep the world alive. In actual practice the whole thing probably served more to reinforce the power of the kings and to instill fear in the populace, and it was all the sheerest superstitious nonsense. At least in part, though, they had sound motivations: that humans should function to enhance the life and vitality of the Earth. They approached this in the only way they knew how: with blood. It keeps us alive, after all.

We today however potentially have the knowledge to do what they couldn't do, which is actually enhance the diversity, stability, efficiency and overall biological mass of a given area and so ultimately of the planet as a whole. Of course we are very busy doing the opposite of all that and very busy failing to even see the pressing need to do that, but we are analytically more advanced than the Aztecs. The application of human knowledge to an environment can actually increase the fertility of that environment without taking anything significantly away from other environments. Rather than the sterile monocultures we now have, we can make our lands into incredibly diverse and rich environments which are more stable against changes in climate, disease and invasive organisms. Such approaches are typically called "permaculture," but the name seems almost to suggest a static state. I am not talking about maintaining the system at a given state, I am talking about making use of positive synergies and the increasing awareness of the functioning of a particular system to increase the system over time. We have always looked to natural systems like forests as an example of a sustainable ecological system, because that's pretty much the only sort of system that we know of that works. I see no reason why the application of human intelligence in understanding ecological systems could not improve on Nature, make more diverse and more productive systems than Nature might on its own. In fact we do see some examples of this in the permaculture field. We can be Nature's helpers.

This of course would require what the Aztecs had but we lack, which is a focus on the whole system rather than our particular short-term advantage in it.