What is the Back Loop?

Life in the back loop can be understood as a time of great potential for change and reconfiguration: a release of dependence on lifeways and social habits that are no longer fit for purpose.

When we first started thinking about creating this newsletter we found it difficult to capture in just a few words or sentences what we wanted it to be about. Do we try to explain to readers that it will be about ongoing ecological and societal breakdown, and how to live through it? Do we proclaim that this newsletter will offer readers ‘practical solutions’ about how to mitigate economic disruption and natural disasters? Or do we take a broader approach and simply try to brand our efforts as providing adaptive strategies for an uncertain future? 

It feels right to say that we want this newsletter, and whatever else it morphs into, to be about all of that, and a whole lot more. 

To begin with, all of the topics, strategies, stories, and resources that we will be exploring and sharing here follow from a learned assumption that things are not going very well on this planet, at least not for a large number of people. In fact, things have not gone very well for a lot of people, in different regions, for quite some time. 

I think it’s safe to assume that most people have a feeling that things are not going very well on this planet. In fact, things have not gone very well for a large number of people, in various regions, for quite some time.

Despite the benefits industrial civilization has wrought it has also created a myriad of deepening crises and challenges: massive disparities in heath and wealth, devastating losses in biodiversity, increasing freshwater water scarcity, ongoing diminishment of cultural sovereignty, environmental toxicity, an escalating climate crisis, widely acknowledged planetary overshoot, as well as an increasingly out of control global infrastructure of militarization, surveillance and control. Our news feeds provide a running testimony of just how much is going wrong in so many different places, and for far too many people.

All this seems bleak, I know. But there is an upside (kinda). I’ll explain.

Scholars, pundits, and scientists from different nations have attempted to characterize these various combined and uneven crises with a number of labels: “Globalization, “Anthropocene”, “Capitalocene”, etc. — but more and more people are now simply talking about collapse.

“Collapse is a broad term that can cover many kinds of processes. It means different things to different people…” — Joseph Tainter (1988)

What many people seem to be experiencing now is an era dominated by declining political and economic systems that continue to be driven by destructive forms of extraction, industrial production and capitalist accumulation. As a result, degeneration and nonlinear conflicts are proliferating, initiating a series of phase shifts away from dominant and expansive international industrialized systems, towards modes life that are increasingly defined by the dissolution, fragmentation, and contraction of those systems and subsystems.

For last two decades I have been researching these complex and unequally distributed processes, trying to understand their root causes and wide-ranging effects, and how such “wicked problems” interrelate as symptoms of a faltering globalized civilization.

In his work on the *adaptive cycles* of living systems, Celebrated ecologist C.S Holling has described such shifts as a process of moving from a “front loop” phase of growth and accumulation, to a “back loop” phase of disorganization and dissipation. Holling and colleagues have demonstrated how such front loop and back loop processes are themselves made up of four more specific sub-phases of a larger process that all complex adaptive systems move through. These he described as exploitation, conservation, release, and reorganization phases.

Here is Holling and colleague’s original diagram of the adaptive cycle (with indicators for front and back loop added):

In this model, the front loop is comprised of the first two phases where initial “exploitation” and early rapid growth lead to the “conservation” and the persistence or stability of a system. Such stable states, Holling argued, are never permanent. Gradual or sharp disturbances caused by internal or external forces — or a combination of these — eventually cause systems to shift into a back loop phase, marked by a “release” of energies and elements previously captured in front loop growth and conservation phases. This release and distribution of elements often involves the fragmenting and dispersal of the system’s components, and a dissipation of it’s core energies. This back loop release phase can (but not necessarily will) then lead to a systems into a “reorganization” phase, either by an adaptive adjustment and reestablishment of the core system functions, albeit in a new way, or by a radical transformation and novel recombination resulting in a relatively new system.

Through years of research on various kinds of complex adaptive systems, in multiple contexts, Holling found this pattern of adaptive cycling happening throughout nature, at multiple scales — in forests, swamps, deserts, animal populations, plant successions, and even with cities, capitalist markets, and nation-states. This adaptation process of growth, conservation, decline, and reorganization seems to be ubiquitous among the vast majority of interlocking dynamical systems.

The following diagram illustrates the intrinsic dynamism of the process of adaptive cycling:

So what are we to do with this? What, exactly, is the back loop in practical terms — and how does this pertain to people’s daily lives?

…

Without a doubt, living in a time of back loops can be frightening and often quite disorienting, to say the least. When the systems and institutions people rely on no longer function, and our ability to comfortably provide for ourselves and our families diminishes, people’s lives become precarious as vulnerabilities increase. This can be a time of much uncertainty and unease.

Yet, life in the back loop can also be understood as a time of great potential for change and reconfiguration. The release of control and dependence on lifeways and social habits that no longer work and are often maladaptive can afford opportunities for alternative adaptations, and possible exits from previously rigid and non-viable patterns. Wild experimentation can then become the modus operandi with unexpected combinations emerging. In such conditions, individuals and/or groups, as well as ideologies and technics, begin to experiment through novel interactions and cross-pollination across previously unbridgeable divides, and in doing so can create and establish experimental, hybrid, or fundamentally new patterns of inhabiting the planet. And, despite the fear and reactionary impulses, such novelties might begin generating increased agency that enable resurgences of previously suppressed or excluded ways of adaptive living.

“The back loop is the time of the ‘Long Now,’ when each of us must become aware that he or she is a participant.” — C.S Holling

In her book Anthropocene Back Loop (2020), Stephanie Wakefield details a number of ways people, from all walks of life, are already embracing and adapting to local collapses of previously dominant modes, and are now radically experimenting with different modes of being in the world. Wakefield’s research suggests that many resilient people and communities are beginning to let go of previously established norms, frameworks, habits, technologies, and modes of subsistence, to now “hubristically” experiment with alternative pathways for adaptation and thriving.

This moves us toward an awareness of the potential of adopting an experimental approach to living (what I like to playfully refer to as X-life) that intentionally attempts to adapt to the conditions and dynamics of a crisis ridden and multi-back loop social-ecological world. And given the predominant unraveling characteristic of life in the back loop, the exploration of novel ways of feeding and housing ourselves, and maintaining family and community — collectively understood as life-making — will also entail weaving new alliances and collectivities that support people’s efforts to co-cultivate allowances for unknown futures.

Indeed, as Wakefield argues, what is needed in this time of crises and degeneration are a multitude of experimental and alternative autonomous modes of living.

From her book:

“If we accept being in a back loop, the question becomes, how do we respond? Do we try desperately to maintain the old “safe operating space,” freeze a process already in motion? Or could we let go, allow a time of exploration and experimentation, see what becomes of the pieces of us and the world?”

In my own life and work seek to explore the implication and outcome of answering Wakefield’s questions in the affirmative. I believe it is imperative to start collaborating on and applying the multiple insights gleaned from a multitude of case studies that feature different people and lifeways as entangled and integral components of various interacting complex adaptive systems, and then apply such lessons of how to live and thrive among the multiple ecological, political, and cultural crises of our time.

***

With this newsletter we seek to explore what is entailed if we answer “yes” to the second of those questions. We will be sharing and applying insights and case studies from complex adaptive systems (and their cycles) to learn how to live and thrive among the various ecological, political, and cultural crises of our time. 

Our goal is to work towards better discussions and designs for multiplying adaptive strategies, prototypes, and alternatives to many of the toxic and unsustainable modes of living currently available. And we will do so from the premise that the back loop is not necessarily a problem to be solved, but also an exhilarating opportunity to be explored.

It is our hope that others appreciate our efforts, and we invite you to join us in this journey in whatever way makes sense for you.