Reading Nature's Signals

Nature makes complex things simple, to signals her emerging behaviors, worlds for Exploration, Physics for observing the animation of life.

Adopt natural system principles to keep economies profitable at their limits

by mothernature Published on: May 10, 2012
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Categories:Mail & Comment, Natural Economy, Natural systems, Transformation, What to do

The collection of “Hacks” for the Long Term Capitalism Challenge offered byHarvard Business Review, McKinsey and MIX, for the M-Prize for Management Innovation now has this proposal from me… Please leave comments on my on the MIX site (here too is fine of course).

It’s a nice new version of the long series of proposals for using natural economies as models for better ways to organize ours, a kind of systems biomimicry.

notes

1. I got some very good questions on the practical details it from Bill Rees, and posted them and my responses as Questions from Bill Rees & response, that may be a big help for people wanting to understand it clearly. 5/12/12
2. A simplified intro to Synapse9 and Natural Systems Thinking, 5/14/12

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The Summary

A good goal for growth would be to end at a stable peak of vitality providing a sound capital endowment for life on earth. That would be better than ending at a peak of exhaustion, like other “tower of Babel” societies of the past such as Rome and the Mayans.

It can also be thought of as a change of “ism’s”.

It would also represent a change in form for our economic system, while still being the very same economy with the same people and rights, and reliance on creative innovation funded by investors. By giving profits an end purpose, of caring for things rather than just for multiplying profits, it woud give the whole economy a very different purpose. So, it can also be thought of as a change of “ism’s”.

It’s to change the use of our ability to control things, to care for them. So we’d need to change our systematic habit of using the profits from controlling things to multiply our control, to instead care for them. Choosing to not make the change would turn us into one of those societies of good people that work together for truly evil purposes, that no individual would want to have anything to do with.

or similarly, it seems… it’s time to grow up! ;-)

(more…)

What’s good for Conservation?

by mothernature Published on: April 14, 2012
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There have been three posts on Dot Earth on a strategic change taken by some leading conservation advocates, led by Peter Kareiva, chief scientist of the Nature Conservancy. His view presented in Peter Kareiva, an Inconvenient Environmentalist is that environmental conservation is meeting less success due to “doom and gloom” advocacy, that turns business and the public off, and it would be more productive to work cooperatively with business.

That view is criticized by others in Critic of Conservation Efforts Gets Critiqued April 10, 2012 and then defended by Kareiva in ”Another Round…Conservation on a Human-Shaped Planet” (April 11, 2012). My short comment (below) seems to clarify the real issue, and got six “thumbs up” to date.

_________

Just ignoring the deep conflict between conservation and business purposes, because it’s good for the business of conservation, doesn’t make the problem go away.

It’s very curious. This is Kareiva’s second round of explaining his approach to being more cooperative with business. I understand a lot of why that is good for conservation, as a business itself. He still leaves out the big contradiction of that for the environment, though.

Businesses around the world are indeed now trying to learn how to avoid environmental liabilities of all kinds. They’re now hiring teams of in-house consultants to guide their sustainability policies and practices to do that. Their purpose has not changed yet, however. Their purpose is to sustain their growing rates of profit, not the earth. Their impact reductions inherently involve only slowing the rate of accelerating increase in using resources and the environment.

Maximum rates of growing profits simply never come from reducing or even stabilizing business impacts. I do actually applaud his engagement with business but it needs to be a far more open and honest effort to educate, still. Nothing has really changed. Just ignoring the deep conflict between conservation and business purposes, because it’s good for the business of conservation, doesn’t make the problem go away.

Jessie Henshaw
way uptown

Cancers or Endowments

by mothernature Published on: April 12, 2012
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Categories:Mail & Comment, Natural Economy, Natural systems

In Continuing the Conversation on Resilience John Fullerton offered a provocative summary and invited more comments on the subject that started with examples found from Bill Reese and Donnella Meadows of resilience as “a Double Edged Sword”, like either social or biological diseases that change to become resistant to treatment. My comment on it got to be 1000 words…, so I just posted the introduction there, and continue it here, where I also can edit it if needed.

_________

Hmmm…. I think I both agree and disagree with all three, Geoff, Dave and Ted. I’m sure they’d point out problems with how I fit the various issues together, the way I draw the bigger picture too, of course.

The reality we’re looking for will need crucial parts contributed from many different perspectives, as no one sees what a complex society needs to work by themselves. Given our particular dilemma, critical success-or-failure issues still seem to dominate though. I myself have witnessed several decades of everyone’s seeming helplessness, in devising an escape from the converging crises many people have seen coming, and are now occurring.

It’s very odd, indeed, that human society is very actively destroying its own planet, in the name of its own self-interest. What we need is something more like an endowment, that builds up, to then sustain things rather than ever grander schemes for expanding our demands on the earth, like a cancer. That kind of “progress” threatens both our host as well as ourselves, making us a fragile organism on an ill-advised quest, to “consume it all”.

We need to break away from how nature starts everything new, with a plan for becoming infinite.

Seeing it’s not going to work, we could conceptually just, “give that up”. Still we’d have to see how to do it, and evidently don’t. The situation is complicated by our needing to respond in the interests of our whole society, in a society organized around seeking self-interest. The threat seems to come from what most benefits individuals at the expense of society, that we institutionalized over the centuries, and is only now becoming a mortal threat to the whole. To survive, society more than individuals needs to break away from how nature starts up everything new, with a plan for becoming infinite.

Endowment is growth that then enriches its environment

Our solutions for instability are now for the first time ever, pushing the earth itself to the limit of instability.

The problem that we have repeatedly tried to solve it, but also repeatedly haven’t, has itself been an amazingly resilient problem. We think we’re so smart, but this one has been stumping us for a long time. The “solutions” to economic instability our culture of experts offers, again and again, are intended to bring lasting prosperity, but keep becoming very unstable themselves. They’re now also for the first time ever pushing the earth itself to the limit of instability in many ways at once too.

(more…)

Resilience… for the most wrong things

by mothernature Published on: April 2, 2012
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John Fullerton in “The Double-Edged Sword of Resilience” on the Capital Institute blog, reported on separate research by Bill Rees and Donella Meadows, on immune resistant disease as examples of how resilience can be a mortal threat. My comment was:

__________

These are good examples, but they aren’t the ones that first popped into mind. The post didn’t mention some of the more obvious direct threats of that kind to modern society and the earth, the great resilience of humanity’s worst bad habits.

Some are as bad, and take as much effort to maintain, as a virulent addiction to pain killers, even masquerading behind the very best of intentions. Those may be the most dangerous cases, where people are actively protecting the resilience of completely the wrong things.

Addiction – one of many kinds of misplaced resillience (more…)

Self-organization as “niche making”

by mothernature Published on: March 25, 2012
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Categories:among best, For teachers, Mail & Comment, Natural systems, Scientific theory, Stories & Experiences

Marinella posted on NECSI: I’ve found this research really interesting, as it goes (finally!)against our deepest beliefs in human (in)ability to collaborate and be socially engaged without specific behavioral rules.

People behave socially and ‘well’ even without rules Fundamentally people behave in a social and rather compassionate and ‘good’ way rather than aggressively, even without specified rules.

Marinella,

Simple examples of self-organization like those really help. The common habit of explaining everything with deterministic rules needs to be shaken gently, it seems. I tend to not find cooperation as deterministically caused, for example, but opportunistically discovered. One easy way to pick it out is with seeing how niches for innovation form in the gaps between and to connect other things.

Diverse individual niches work to connect resilient cultural networks

After years of working with simple examples to help me separate those two paths to causation, I think the deterministic and self-organizing aspects of nature fit together just fine.

Seen as a difference between “imposed” and “discovered” causation can also then be understood as between “remotely determined” and “locally developed” causation. Examples of the latter might range from the opportunistic formation of a rust pit, on what had been a smooth shiny metal surface, or of social subcultures taking off in some whole new way. (more…)

Approaching 30 days from the 40th Anniversary

by mothernature Published on: March 24, 2012
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There seems to be no news yet. The recent 40th anniversary meeting at the Smithsonian on the publication of “The Limits to Growth” and the clearly most urgent of our many dire environmental dilemmas of our time, with little exception, has gotten almost no attention in the mainstream popular or environmental press. So you’ll have to hear it from a real scientist as to why.

The reason is that the mainstream press is limited to discussing social issues. That our means of sustaining our prosperity is rapidly exhausting the earth just isn’t one of them, as the resource scientists who study “the blue ball” actually “have no social standing”. There’s a fascinating history to that, that reveals some eye opening new science.

A nice place to visit, Was a wonderful place to live,
with tremendous open spaces and overflowing with natural wealth

(more…)

SEA – energy accounting “far more holes than cheese”

by mothernature Published on: March 9, 2012
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Emmeline, at ethicalcorp.com was looking for recent innovation is sustainability to review for recognition. In a short email exchange she persuaded me to try to find a simple explanation again, for my recent radical discovery. It’s that our information on the scale of energy demands that business place on the economy is “far more holes than cheese“.

On 3/7/12 I replied,

Thanks very much for your nice reply. If you care to consider it for recognition, last fall I published a long paper on the evidence of a true 80% hole in our information on business energy use, that is sorely needing attention.

We don’t have information on what self-managing service providers are doing, because they don’t record or report it.

The study identifies a deep structural problem in what we know about complex business service networks. We don’t have information on what self-managing service providers are doing, because they don’t record or report it.

In a contrarian way that large gap in our information is exactly what gets missed by a “focus on transparency and clarity and measurement, being more accurate”. It has to do with estimating known kinds of impacts that go unmeasured for lack of information. It’s only due to the nature of outsourced business services having evident impacts that are individually untraceable, and so provide no data to count. (more…)

Kin and Kind – Some learning in progress?

by mothernature Published on: February 29, 2012
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“Kin and Kind” is an article in the Mar 5 New Yorker by Jonah Lehrer, on the remarkable career of E.O. Wilson and his quest to explain apparent “altruism” in animal behavior. The reigning explanation for evolution is pure competition, and he’s beginning to think there must be more to it, asking “…is goodness an adaptive trait?” I note that the very first ecologist to study complex ecological behavior, S.A. Forbes, had much the same way of raising the question, in 1887.

The question, possibly, is not how mutations affect behavior, but our having not looked squarely at what is common to the behaviors of life that are so successful.

__________

for The Mail,

E.O. Wilson is remarkable among scientists for being willing to question his own dogma. Where the article ends is with his next seeming breach of scientific etiquette, his now beginning to ask if “goodness is an adaptive trait”.

Very surprisingly, that is where the very first scientist to study complex organization in ecologies, S.A. Forbes actually began. In 1887, in “The Lake as a Microcosm”, Forbes observed that somehow networks of many species evolved to respect each other enough to not make food chains highly unstable, as they would be if their competition had winners. (more…)

Is “Sustainable Capitalism” a half step too few?

by mothernature Published on: February 29, 2012
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In “Beyond Firm-Level Sustainable Capitalism“ John Fullerton reviews “Sustainable Capitalism” by Generation Investment Management LLP, as still not respecting our finite world. Maximizing long term gain doesn’t make it sustainable, for example, given the difficulty people have had identifying future liabilities for currently profitable plans. I add a graphic example, of how defining the world as what we know about it is deceiving, and results in:

simply enormous omissions from the information set we usually think of as needed for making good decisions

__________

It’s great to see such a solid critique of Generation’s “Sustainable Capitalism”, that on the surface seems like remarkably responsive to environmental issues as an investment strategy, far more than than ANY sustainable investment plan of ten years ago. The whole attitude toward avoiding environmental conflict, as a business strategy, may be applied inconstantly today but seems to have really swept the corporate world too.

It’s nice to see you’re thinking is still a few steps ahead, too, and seeing their approach as somewhat of a half-way measure. (more…)

Coping with every culture having a different reality! (& what’s multiplying them)

by mothernature Published on: February 26, 2012
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With more and more information, and noticing that much of it travels in circles, there’s both “information overload” and ”separate information worlds”. They’re barriers to communication, and can easily turn into “worlds of miss-information” leading everyone in them astray.

there’s both “information overload”
and
“separate information worlds”

CLAY JOHNSON has good links and discussion on the problem , relating to his interesting “Information Diet” book and “Information Diet Pledge“. By self-selecting our information sources we can create a world of miss-information for ourselves, so he suggests some rules for a healthy information diet. I wrote him the following comment on the “next steps” his “Information diet remainders“. Below that is my comment on his radio program on WNYC on 2/9/12.

_______

Clay, There’s an easy step beyond noticing that no one is really the author of information that travels in circles. It’s seeing that the author is really the social network it develops in, using the information as part of a social story of one kind or another.

People speaking different languages have different realities.

The next step is noticing that such authoring social networks and cultures invent rather strongly held circles of storytelling, which are very different from each other’s. They become the “reality” the culture creates and form “silos” of thinking that people in them are then structurally separated from others by. (more…)

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It can also be thought of as a change of “ism’s”.

Just ignoring the deep conflict between conservation and business purposes, because it’s good for the business of conservation, doesn’t make the problem go away.

We need to break away from how nature starts everything new, with a plan for becoming infinite.

Our solutions for instability are now for the first time ever, pushing the earth itself to the limit of instability.

A nice place to visit, Was a wonderful place to live, with tremendous open spaces and overflowing with natural wealth

We don’t have information on what self-managing service providers are doing, because they don’t record or report it.

simply enormous omissions from the information set we usually think of as needed for making good decisions

there’s both “information overload” and “separate information worlds”

A nice place to visit, Was a wonderful place to live,
with tremendous open spaces and overflowing with natural wealth

there’s both “information overload”
and
“separate information worlds”