The mission of H.O.P.E. is to turn the prow of our entropyship, the Earth, back upstream so that Earth's evolving consciousness may explore the headwaters of the Universe for billions of years to come. The work of H.O.P.E. is to make visible the larger relationships we live within - relationships that inspire visions of wonder and works of hope.

August is a great time for sky watching. Evenings come earlier but still are warm. Cygnus flies down the Milky Way. The Perseid meteors shower upon us.

Wonderful allies among you all. Thank you to all who shared thoughts on what is important for schools to teach (including one comment that it is important for the student to grow beyond dependency on the teacher to determine what is important.) Also, thank you for feedback on my story, The Upward Angle. Many people did not like the transition from third person to first person.

Chrysalis, our natural science-centered charter school, is almost fully enrolled. Chrysalis starts August 26th.

Many of us view our culture's development with an ecological paradigm. Part of the ecological paradigm is that the current direction of our culture is unsustainable; that the longer we continue on its trajectory, the more impoverished the biosphere (including our species) will become. However, many of those we wish to "convert" are deep within an economic growth paradigm. One of the main points Kuhn wanted to make when he developed the modern concept of "paradigm" is that groups with different paradigms can discuss the same phenomena and talk right past one another. They use the same words but the words have different meanings so that a statement that sounds reasonable from one paradigm sounds foolish to those from the other paradigm. Part of the challenge of helping change our culture's direction is figuring out how to communicate between two paradigms.

Which leads to a fascinating question: how would ecological problems show up in the economic viewpoint?

As a metaphor, astronomers study the universe using a variety of electro-magnetic wavelengths. Some spectacular phenomena that are brilliantly obvious at one range of wavelengths (such as x-rays) can appear almost invisible at other wavelengths (such as visible light). An x-ray astronomer could say "this object is incredibly powerful" at the same time that a visible light astronomer was saying that the same object appeared weak and faint. The two would not understand one another if they didn't know they were referring to different wavelengths. So it is when looking at the "economic growth culture" with the different wavelengths of a different paradigm. Some things that might appear spectacular when using classic cultural statistics might look disturbing when using the "wavelengths" of the ecological paradigm.

In this Cairns, I am not interested in using ecological statistics such as desertification rates and population growth rates to show that the current economic rates are unsustainable. Others do a far better job at that. Instead, I am interested in exploring the interface between the two paradigms. What do ecological problems look like when seen in the conceptual wavelengths used by the currently dominant economics and politics?

As an example, there has been lots of recent discussion about job insecurity and global labor markets. Underlying this issue is an interface between the economic law of supply and demand and the ecological implications of exponential population growth. Exponential change is scary because any understanding we are able to derive from the past is inapplicable to the future. The rate of growth in the future is not the rate of growth in the past. Any assumptions we cast into the future might comfort us with a feeling we understand what is happening and therefore can control it, but the assumption is based on superseded data and could easily go awry.

Anyway, I sense that in the past year (through a combination of technology and increasing population) humanity has created a glut of labor. The law of supply and demand has made labor a cheap (and increasingly cheaper) commodity with ever decreasing power to influence working conditions. (Positive feedback loops eventually must change and I can imagine a variety of scenarios, some scary, some fascinating, about what happens to an economic way of organizing society which ends up marginalizing the vast majority of the people it is supposed to serve.) In other words, the profound ecological tidal wave of exponential population growth underlies and drives several layers of economic explanation even though the ecological cause does not show up at the wavelength used by economists.
 
 

A similar interface between ecology and politics occurs with property rights. Our culture has two political "truths" regarding private property. The first is "a person can do what they wish with their own land" and the second is "a person does not have the right to do what they wish to someone else's land". It was easy to see the second "truth" as a simple corollary of the first when population densities were low and the impact of technology was limited. Easy to think of a violation of the second as requiring an active crossing the property line of someone and meddling on their land. If every person simply stayed on their own property, then both "truths" would be respected.

But even when population levels were low, there were examples of how doing what one wishes with one's "own" land can mess with someone else's land. Hydraulic miners in the Sierras washed so much earth into the rivers that they clogged the river channels. Farmers' fields were flooded and buried beneath subsurface silt from the mines. The American River was so clogged that the city of Sacramento frequently flooded. Eventually, the California Supreme Court shut the hydraulic miners down as a public nuisance.

A more subtle story was the war of the levees along the lower Sacramento and San Joaquin Rivers. The lands bordering the river are low-lying floodplains. Farmers "developed" the floodplains and didn't want the river to flood their developments. So a farmer would build a levee around the property to protect it from flooding. However, this meant that floodwaters which would have flowed onto that land now joined other floodwaters flooding other acreage. Floods got worse so other farmers built levees around their properties. But these levees made flooding even worse elsewhere. The farmers generated a positive feedback loop in which a farmer raising a levee would cause flooding for a farmer with a lower levee, forcing that farmer to increase the height of his levee which then forced other farmers to raise their levees and around and around it went. Eventually the levees were getting so large and their maintenance required so many resources that the farmers finally abandoned their individualistic stances and joined together to designate certain areas as "sacrifice areas" which would be allowed to flood rather than leveed and "developed".

However, as population densities increase and technology gives people the ability to generate greater impacts, these examples can be invoked as easily as someone carrying a loud boom box onto a crowded bus. (People might say the rational solution is that person should wear headphones. Perhaps but that becomes a wonderful metaphor of how our boundaries shrink and draw in as densities increase.) Increasingly we encounter examples in which a person doing what they wish with their own land has an influence on some one else's land. (And I'm not even considering the beyond-human conflicts of habitat destruction caused by piecemeal alterations in the land, each seemingly benign when viewed in isolation.)

And so, deep beneath the economic perspective of "jobs vs. spotted owls"-type issues is the ecological phenomenon of increasing population density. The real issue is not "jobs vs. spotted owls". The real issue is the increasing frequency of divisive issues such as "jobs vs. spotted owls". They occur more and more. Increasingly, the second "truth" of property rights becomes the real challenge and that the first "truth" recedes as a special (and increasingly rare) case.

The world increasingly reflects at us one of the greatest truths of ecology: each living thing has an influence on the world around it. This truth will increasingly confront simplistic notions of property rights. This fact is not a horrible downer. This truth should actually be celebrated. It should inspire the discipline to transform and develop our lives into a great cultural art form-- the art of consciously shaping the influence we have on the world around us in a way to make it more beautiful and wise.
 
 

This art challenges me when I work on trying to shift the balance in the eroding stream that flows across our homestead. The streambed gives every indication of a downcut gully. Not severe. However, the current floodplain is narrow and lies several feet below what I interpret as the ancestral floodplain. Much of the land within the drainage is fenced-off cattle-grazed land and is difficult to access during heavy runoff. Therefore, I have not been able to apply the practices of Shifting to as broad an area of the watershed as I would like.

This has posed the fascinating challenge of whether there is anything I can do within the stream channel itself to help shift the balance between erosion and deposition. I can imagine the same spirals described in Shifting happening with this stream channel. If runoff can flow more slowly, then the resulting deposition would raise the stream channel making it easier for floods to overflow the banks and spread onto the older floodplains so that more water soaks in, nourishing more plants which will slow future floods even more, forcing more of the flow onto the ancient floodplains.

I can imagine this--but my experience warns me against trying to work in the stream channels itself. At least as far as opposing the flow. Instead I think of encouraging vegetation that will absorb erosive energy as the stems vibrate in the flowing waters. So I started thinking of willows--the classic image of stream rehabilitation. For four years I've played with planting willow cuttings. Two out of many survived the full heat of their first summer but all the others died. So last year I played with drip irrigation with willow cuttings and got 4 out of 5 cuttings to survive in an area of deep gravel. (They have survived their second summer so far without water though they are dropping many of their leaves.) This year I placed and irrigated 7 cuttings in an area of intense scouring with very little sand. Only two are still alive in the heat of early August. We will see if they make it to and through the floods of next winter.

Anyway, though I love the image of willows, I have this growing sense that they do not really fit in this streambed. Although an occasional willow and cottonwood tree grow along this streambed, I don't think there is enough groundwater to sustain the number of willows I assume would be necessary to shift the balance. When I sit in the streambed observing my willows, I see lots of water-consuming leaves on branches that stick high above the level of floods. And I see only a small island of sand that settled out around the willows last winter. I feel like the groundwater could go to greater use nourishing the thousands of smaller, grayer plants that grow and flower in the streambed's intense summer heat. Those are the plants I should be courting as allies.

Too many limited resources flow to just a few plants. It would be better to diffuse the limited resources over the entire streambed. Thoughts of limits reminded me that soils in our region are deficient in phosphorous. Phosphorous is the limiting factor to much plant growth in our region.

So late last spring when surface flow had ceased and all that was left was lovely pools connected by subsurface flow, I took some high-phosphorous fertilizer and put a bit into several pools. My reasoning was that the phosphorous would gradually dissolve and be carried by subsurface flow beneath all the gravelly and sandy stretches of streambed where the summer plants grow. I didn't set up a rigorous experiment but in the one stretch I watch the most, I see moth mullein growing higher than I have ever seen it. And there seems to be more plants growing in my main study area. I will have to see if such areas slow the floodwaters and raise their beds with deposited sand and gravel.
 
 

But this leaves me with strange feelings. First, phosphorous is the stuff of euthrophication. We use phosphorous-free laundry detergent for the sake of our lakes and streams. Putting phosphorous into the pools felt very different than digging diversions on a hillside to slow the water. I was possibly disrupting life adapted to the seasonal pools along this streambed.

Also it feels so invisibly powerful, altering the chemistry of groundwater flowing invisibly beneath the sand and bathing the root hairs of the million germinating seeds that are practically invisible until they surge in June. Power residing in a handful of gray powder.

It is very easy to slide into the arrogance of the developer. Am I doing habitat improvement or habitat destruction? Probably I am doing habitat destruction for some species and habitat improvement for other species? How do we navigate our way? How do we proceed when we possess incomplete awareness? Is there an external, non-human centered morality that can give us guidance? We are probably the first species to contemplate this question and try shaping our influence in advance. But we definitely are not the first species to alter our environment. All species do that. And, I believe, the type of influence they have on their environment (as discussed in earlier Cairns) partially determines whether they stay around for a long time or not. Earthworms and salmon forever!

Anyway, I'm beginning to think that "limiting factors" is a more important part of ecological curriculum than I had realized. It might be a powerful tool (literally and metaphorically) in examining a culture's flows and trying to design a more sustainable culture. And it opens us quickly to questions that nourish wisdom-nourishing reflection..

If you are reading Cairns for the first time and wish to continue receiving it by e-mail, just e-mail me at  paul@krafel.net

© 1996, Paul Krafel, 18080 Brincat Manor, Cottonwood, CA 96022-0609
Permission is granted to copy and distribute (for free) this material as long as you attach this copyright notice and my addresses so that a future reader can track down the source.

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