When I first started thinking about creating this newsletter I found it difficult to capture in just a few words or sentences what I wanted it to be about. Do I simply say that it is about societal collapse and how to live through it? Do I suggest that it will offer readers a number of so-called ‘practical solutions’ about how to adapt to economic disruption and natural disasters? Or do I take a more general approach and brand such efforts as adaptive strategies for an uncertain future?
Yeah, I like to keep it simple where possible, as well. But sometimes it's not possible: like when trying to explain what it means to be in or of a "back loop" set of processes. I find approaching a wide range of situations via adaptive systems thinking truly helps.
I'm currently playing with with idea of "radical wholeness" as a way to simplify my own take on adaptiveness and how to live with nature as part of nature.
The coupling of a healthy person, or family, or even community, with healthy ecosystems and the bioregions that we all live in/with = Wholeness (as a relational adaptiveness even in the messiness and tangled differentiations of life).
Great post/intro! I’m not familiar with this strand of thinking. How do we account for our location/social position and the way that affects our perspective? From some vantage points and in some places, it seems like global industrial civilization is still very much in the exploitation and conservation phases.
The adaptive cycle heuristic has a long and supported application in the ecological sciences, but has never really taken off in the mainstream as model for understanding dynamic and cyclical processes -- which is how natural systems actually work. We are hoping to contribute to changing that in some small way.
The way I look at it is that it doesn't really matter at this point what people's opinions or vantages are re: industrial civilization because back loop processes and trajectories have already been set in motion so eventually these 'pockets of privilege' (places and peoples not yet seriously effected) will have to reckon with such biophysical realities regardless. Whether those regions double down on unsustainable and collapsing systems or make intelligent transitions to more regenerative practices remains to be seen.
To be more concrete, collapses on core social and ecological systems are unevenly distributed, like you suggest. So there are many complex systems in different regions at various stages in their adaptive cycles -- some at peak conservation stage and some fully in collapse. The nuance is found in how any particular ecosocial system exists in relation to others (in symbiosis, mutualism, parasitism, etc.) and how well that systems maintains itself in watershed/biome and planetary contexts.
Take Indigenous north americans for example. Many of their ecosocial systems have been in collapse since 1492. The current settler-colonial consumer society that overtook them is a parasitic system that was in the conservation stage for a long time because of the resources and land and water that it extracted as the Indigenous systems declines. So many back loops gave rise to a larger front loop. But because that larger system is not an adaptive regenerative system it too has now entered a long hard back loop...
We will see if it can be composted to eventually create enough fertile 'soil' that people can cultivate healthier alternatives (new systems in states of front loop)?
Culture is always downstream from ecology and material life conditions, so basically it comes down to adapt or perish.
Thanks for your detailed response! The uneven distribution of collapse/collapses is what I was thinking of, though less clearly and concisely. It’s hard to break out of the thinking that separates front loops from back loops.
i like this but tend to simplify the ideas for myself like we need to start learning from nature (we are nature too)
Yeah, I like to keep it simple where possible, as well. But sometimes it's not possible: like when trying to explain what it means to be in or of a "back loop" set of processes. I find approaching a wide range of situations via adaptive systems thinking truly helps.
I'm currently playing with with idea of "radical wholeness" as a way to simplify my own take on adaptiveness and how to live with nature as part of nature.
The coupling of a healthy person, or family, or even community, with healthy ecosystems and the bioregions that we all live in/with = Wholeness (as a relational adaptiveness even in the messiness and tangled differentiations of life).
Great post/intro! I’m not familiar with this strand of thinking. How do we account for our location/social position and the way that affects our perspective? From some vantage points and in some places, it seems like global industrial civilization is still very much in the exploitation and conservation phases.
Hi Ryan! Thanks for the kind words.
The adaptive cycle heuristic has a long and supported application in the ecological sciences, but has never really taken off in the mainstream as model for understanding dynamic and cyclical processes -- which is how natural systems actually work. We are hoping to contribute to changing that in some small way.
The way I look at it is that it doesn't really matter at this point what people's opinions or vantages are re: industrial civilization because back loop processes and trajectories have already been set in motion so eventually these 'pockets of privilege' (places and peoples not yet seriously effected) will have to reckon with such biophysical realities regardless. Whether those regions double down on unsustainable and collapsing systems or make intelligent transitions to more regenerative practices remains to be seen.
To be more concrete, collapses on core social and ecological systems are unevenly distributed, like you suggest. So there are many complex systems in different regions at various stages in their adaptive cycles -- some at peak conservation stage and some fully in collapse. The nuance is found in how any particular ecosocial system exists in relation to others (in symbiosis, mutualism, parasitism, etc.) and how well that systems maintains itself in watershed/biome and planetary contexts.
Take Indigenous north americans for example. Many of their ecosocial systems have been in collapse since 1492. The current settler-colonial consumer society that overtook them is a parasitic system that was in the conservation stage for a long time because of the resources and land and water that it extracted as the Indigenous systems declines. So many back loops gave rise to a larger front loop. But because that larger system is not an adaptive regenerative system it too has now entered a long hard back loop...
We will see if it can be composted to eventually create enough fertile 'soil' that people can cultivate healthier alternatives (new systems in states of front loop)?
Culture is always downstream from ecology and material life conditions, so basically it comes down to adapt or perish.
Thanks for your detailed response! The uneven distribution of collapse/collapses is what I was thinking of, though less clearly and concisely. It’s hard to break out of the thinking that separates front loops from back loops.