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.

Balance of Nature

There is a current trend in ecology to downplay the "balance of nature". This has created a certain dissonance within me. I like to think of myself as part of the vanguard of ecology to which the main body of science (with a growing interest in "ecological service") is beginning to catch up with. But "balance" is so fundamental to my way of thinking that I wonder if I am not actually a member of the discredited old school mumbling against heliocentrism, evolution, and plate tectonics. Last week I realized that the dissonance lies in two distinct images of "balance" which I had not teased apart.

My favorite image for "the balance of nature" (in the classic sense) is balancing a yard stick (or meter stick) on the tip of my finger. The tip of the stick never stands still. There is always a slight circulating dance. And the tip of my finger never stands still, either. Always it, too, is doing a compensating dance to bring the stick back to plumb.

The relationship between stick tip and fingertip is a classic example of a stabilizing feedback loop (also called a negative feedback loop but I am beginning to drop this confusing albeit formally correct terminology). There is always movement, yes, but there is also a dynamic stability, a compensation to every perturbation, a preservation of a certain arrangement. There is a point of balance which the system as a whole tries maintaining.

If I understand the current trend in ecology correctly, ecologists are saying that yes, there are these stabilizing patterns in nature, and they express a delightful and important dynamic in the workings of nature but there is nothing inherently "sacred" in any particular arrangement currently maintained through stabilizing feedback loops. There is nothing fundamental that the system as a whole is trying to maintain in any of these feedback loops. If certain occasional forces become strong enough, they can knock the entire system into a completely new configuration with new balancing points.

This certainly is the case when one contemplates the geological history of long-term changes such as vast Ice Age lakes in the west drying to flat playas. And though I delight in every discovered example of a stabilizing feedback, the heart of my awe lies in another kind of "relative balance", the kind underlying the phrase "turning the prow of our entropyship back upstream".

Perhaps the best image I have to contrast this kind of balance with the kind expressed by the balanced meter stick is a turkey vulture spiraling within a thermal. The turkey vulture is always gliding "downhill" through the air. But if the air rises faster than the vulture descends through it, then the vulture rises relative to the ground. Unlike the meter stick, there is no point of balance trying to be maintained. Instead, there is a relative balance between gliding down and rising up. If the vulture glides down faster than the air rises, the vulture will lose altitude. If the air rises faster than the vulture descends, the vulture will rise--and from that higher altitude have more possibilities, more options, more freedom of where to then go.

Life evolves within a universe shaped by the Second Law of Thermodynamics (the downward gliding of the vulture) and upon a planet orbiting within a solar flow of energy that makes possible the thermal and ten billion other similar "upward" expressions. The tension between these two realities can lead the surface of the earth to evolve along a variety of paths. What I find so sacred is the way life collectively has evolved structures that shift this relative balance so that more of the sun's energy is diverted into life, so that flows of nutrients are slowed and recycled, so that forces that previously blasted life are moderated.

In other words, the two balances are created by two different kinds of feedback. "Balance of nature" uses stabilizing feedback loops to keep things oscillating within a narrow range. The "relative balance" does not remain within a small range. Instead, snowballing feedback loops keep things moving into new ranges of possibilities. Another way to put it is that changes in the "balance of nature" lead to a change in position. Changes in the "relative balance" leads to a change in direction.
 
 

If I look at Sand Canyon, the eroding canyon I describe in Shifting, in terms of stabilizing feedback loops, I can see several that help stabilize eroding streams. As the erosion cuts deeper, the streambed draws closer to the water table, allowing the plants that can reverse the spiral to grow more luxuriantly. The nascent jungle of willows and cottonwoods that springs upward each spring traps stream-transported soil and helps build up the streambed until it becomes again almost level with the terraces.

But it didn't happen in Sand Canyon because there were too many cattle and sheep in that streambed for too long each growing season. Every seedling got eaten. Again there could have been a balancing feedback loop to this cause of erosion. Such a concentration of walking meat should have attracted and nourished enough predators that the herbivores never reached such numbers. But the people have hunted out all the wolves and cougars.

In terms of "balance of nature", some might say Sand Canyon is out of balance and others could say, "No, the forces acting upon the system have changed and so the canyon system as a whole has evolved to a new position of stability." And that is true. But looking at it this way misses what the people are doing to the canyon in terms of snowballing feedback loops. Each year the canyon loses more of its life-supporting potential.

We are the inheritors of a multi-billion year upward spiral. The evolution of our intelligence is like the expanded view a vulture has near the top of the thermal. One could, perhaps, argue that there is nothing sacred about whether the ecosystem as a whole builds towards lesser entropy or slides towards greater entropy. But the discussion would be irrelevant to our present situation in which this shift in relative balance is due to one species that has yet to comprehend the cause and effect relationships between its efforts to decrease entropy for the human subsystem and the consequent increase in entropy this causes in the encompassing system of the biosphere, that has yet to comprehend the long-term implications that running down the greater system will have on the human sub-system.

Money as Symbolic

I had an insight into money this autumn that strikes me as profound. When I try expressing it to others, the reaction is a polite, "Of course, so what..." so maybe it is profound just for me in the same way discovering that 1+1=2 is profound for a child but is no longer profound for adults. After all it is simply a consequence of money being a symbolic means of economic exchange.

Being symbolic, money has meaning only to people. Another way to say it is the only things that ever get paid in economic transactions are people. In other words, all money flow is to salaries and income.

Standard budgeting categories had clouded my awareness. For example, if I was building a bridge, a certain amount of my expenses would be salaries for the workers. Another part would be for equipment and materials to build the bridge. If I stop there, I am left with the idea that only part of the money flow goes to people. Much of it goes to "natural resources".

But if I follow the purchase of, say, the concrete, I find that the money I earmark "for concrete" is not "for concrete". It is for the salaries of people working in concrete plants, for the profits of people who own the concrete plants, for gasoline and equipment and electricity, for the purchase of other materials needed for concrete. Similarly, I can then follow back the part that goes "for gasoline" and find much of it going to salaries and profits for those who own the oil companies and for those who own title to the land under which the oil is found and the rest going for equipment and such. And if I follow that part which is for equipment, I find it going to the salaries and profits of those who mine iron and process it into steel and transform steel into machinery.

Whenever I follow the flow of money, never will I find money reaching the land or the other species (timber trees, corn, fish) that make the economic process possible. Never will I find money being used to negotiate with the Earth itself what it wishes to contribute to the economic flow.

It is like studying energy flow in an ecosystem and realizing that all the work happening on Earth (the winds and waves and forests and flying birds and diving whales and moving continents and water cycles and nutrient cycles) derives from electromagnetic energy flowing from the sun and nuclear energy and gravitational forces emanating from the planet. A simple truth underlies a complex diversity.

So it is with money. Money flows only to people. Money can never talk to the Earth. It only talks to people because only people listen to money's symbolic speech. People can converse, through their actions, with the Earth. Farmers talk to the land when they plant a cover crop or do contour plowing. One can pay farmers to change the way they talk with the land. But the money goes to the farmer, not to the land. Money never repays the Earth for what it gives to the economic system. Only human actions (which includes the action of self-restraint) can do that.

A political implication of realizing that all money flows only to people is that, just like energy flows within an ecosystem, there is no waste. (Well, technically there is if one drops a penny down the gutter or have some paper money burn in a fire.) The money always flows to someone who is willing to receive it and, eventually, pass it on to someone else in exchange for something. So all the political talk of "eliminating (economic) waste" is very relative. What actually is being talked about is shifting who will get paid for doing what. One can look at a $600 toilet seat as waste. But none of that $600 went to the toilet seat or to the machine that made it or to the Earth that provided the materials for it. It all went to people who then exchanged it with other people. A stock broker is more likely to receive some of that money if the toilet seat money flows to a rich person; a grocer is more like to receive some of that money if it flows to a poor person. But none of the money is wasted.

What can get wasted in money-driven flows is parts of the biosphere and parts of the human spirit. So, rather than talking about monetary waste, the deeper issue is "In which direction do we want our culture to move?" The next question becomes "Which economic actions actually move us in that direction and which actions move us away from there?" The answers to these questions then lead us to the challenge of shifting the flows of money so that less of it nourishes the undesirable actions and more of it flows towards nourishing the desirable actions.

Which, if I want to, can lead me back to charter schools. One of my hopes for Chrysalis (and charter schools in general) is that they help reallocate the flow of money so that a higher percentage of the public expenditure on education makes it (with hardly any strings attached) to the classroom teacher.

So many of the thoughts that run through my soul are based on visual patterns that I find hard to express with only words. The following images are a simple example to help express the concept of "self-similar" that is so characteristic of watersheds. "Self-similar" means that the same fundamental pattern expresses itself at many levels of scale. Whether one is a few inches above a sandy beach or in outer space gazing down on Yemen, one sees the same pattern of water converging and creating a flow of water with greater energy to shape its channel.

The images most important to me are of the way water moves. Within the next year or two I will probably be driven to make my own movie in the same way I had to make my own book. I knew little about writing and publishing a book when I started and I know little about making a movie. Computer technology helped me create Shifting and I'm sure it will be the new computer technology that will help me create videos. One thing I have learned since working on Shifting, however, is the power and grace of seeking help from others. Anybody out there know anything about creating your own video productions? Advice on what equipment and software to buy and filming and scripting and editing techniques is welcome.
 

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© 1997, Paul Krafel, P.O. Box 609, Cottonwood, CA 96022-0609
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