As a student of natural systems I mean 'birth' in an almost literal sense. The structural transformation from explosive growth to the next phase of development is the natural change of life that begins the mature lives of everything, and is the best identifiable moment of their 'birth' in lots of ways. It's a physical change of life in that a system changes it's entire complex way of changing. The end of explosive growth actually corresponds to the time we call 'birth' for biological organisms, when a fetus leaves the womb or a seedling extends it's first two leaves. It's when new living things switch from exploding to stabilizing their own internal relationships, and establish their long term independent relationships with the world around them. Humankind is now at the end of 600 years, as I count it, of remarkable explosive cultural and economic revolution and expansion. We're colliding with several kinds of increasingly severe environmental limits, though; climate change, compromised energy sources, soils loss, unmanageable complexity, crowding and congestion, loss of natural habitat & diversity, extreme human inequality, cultural conflict. We're not reading and yielding to the signs.
The concerted global professional consensus, being pursued uniformly by finance, government and business interests, is that human welfare requires business to expand exponentially forever. How that ends is more the question rather than if or when. The end of explosive growth, in whatever form, will be the start of the new Mankind's real freedom and independence on earth. Seeing it coming should be a time of great celebration, but we don't see anything coming. We're even being tragically mislead by the leading environmental organizations, like Al Gore's ClimateProject or the US Green Building Council and its LEED model of sustainable design. ALL the popular environmental organizations actually promote 'good' endless exploding business growth. With all due consideration, I don't think any of the above see the choice clearly, or think of their own work as haplessly interfering with a natural change of life. The environmentalists just see it as a way to get business support in exchange for concessions to environmental interests that happen to coincide with the business interest in continually multiplying business.
As with any pregnancy... however, events will bring it to our attention. If we learn to understand the amazing thing our lives are part of, we'll have more fun and be more able to do some good. There'll be lots to learn and do. Not the least reason being that asking the world's institutions and the wealthy to save their wealth by giving up their mechanical means of pumping it up, is a very very big thing to ask of them... It will happen, as sure as birth pains, though, and can be made somewhat less painful by people learning how the same transformation trick is performed so very easily by most complex natural systems.
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I seem to have spent 25 years or so slowly building a new way of speaking about the events of nature as if they were individual organisms, beginning with a radical reinterpretation of physics that actually fits the evidence a whole lot better. The work is going quite well now, importantly for recently finding very useful new pieces to connect from the works of others. It's still in conflict with traditional science, which describes natural behavior as controlled from the outside and having no insides. Denying that anything has an inside is a big mistake. If I get to write some set pieces, a 'book' perhaps, I'd love it. That's not been the form of my writing though. It's been research, letters and short notes like this, since the biggest hurdle is the language people use. What's published can be found at:
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