Bioregeneration in the suburbs

Bees and complexity

Ecologists have long known that if you have an ecosystem with complexity, systems overlap and buffer each other from crashes of the kind the NYT reporter http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/27/business/27bees.html?pagewanted=2&_r=1&th&emc=th describes.

My friend R puts it a little differently:

"I have received similar dire reports from others.  It's all the doing of the scientists who have been trying to improve nature for so many years, that now they've all but ruined the natural cycles our Creator put in place.
  A preliminary inspection of my own bees last week, showed me that I have 2 out of 6 hives alive.  The other 4 contain dead bees.  I don't have a case of hives with no bees.  I have not had a chance to examine the hives in detail to determine the cause of death.  It could easily have been the usual:  mites, severe cold, weak hives to begin with.  I'm glad I have 2 alive because I will catch a  couple of swarms and expand my colonies in May.  I intend to start feeding my living colonies a sugar water mixture to help them stay alive until the dandelions appear."

I have control over the small environment in my small city yard, though my neighbor still insists on using weed killer and artificial fertilizer, at least he had taken to using the pelleted kind. In my yard, as a guide for what to plant to restore the landscape, I use the maps of the land before the Europeans lived here. Even in my small yard, planting natives had increased the variety of butterflies.

I still have grass and I still plant vegetables, but I have corridors that wildlife can make habitats in and where they can move from corridor to corridor, making a network of places for them, even in the city.

What is amazing to me is that even in the city, if you plant it, they will come. Monarchs have visited me since the turn of the century. Last year I spotted swallowtails and skippers. The black dragonflies that live near the water seem to like the cover of the bramble berries on the hill to live in.

Gotta go -finish trimming my trees before March.

Reconnect

It is a new world we all live in, this information age. One way I have found useful to deal with all of the difficulties, sadness over loss, order of things, is to reconnect with the chaos of ecosystems.

Local ecosystems in city and suburbs were decimated in the last century. It took concentrated efforts to keep control over large areas of monocultures, grass and impervious surfaces.

Several years ago my family stopped mowing grass in the flood plain that backs up our property, thinking it would just go back to what we liked to call nature. In many ways, it has, but it is not such a simple process, this return to nature, as we first thought.

It turns out that we are back to nature. Nature, or the ways of the wild, include us. We cannot separate ourselves from the complexity of the many forces. The best we can do is to stop struggling to try to control them and to seek to understand how they work so we can work in harmony with them.

This process is akin to understanding and working with God. I have been unable to separate the two. As I work to make my little piece of this earth whole again I am praying. As I let the milkweed grow, it is not magic that monarchs come to eat and sip the nectar from the sweet smelling milkweed. This process is known to us.

We know that there are other species that will attract other butterflies. Biologists and ecologists have studied this and other mysteries and learned many things about what to plant to make a healthy landscape and to promote the diversity that will buffer huge crashes.

The biggest crash I can think of in recent years is the flooding in New Orleans. The wetlands that acted as buffer from hurricanes had been ignored at the peril of residents. Diversity of species will suffer, along with the human population.

Another example is in monoculture. If you are growing a large crop of a single item, the danger of a large infestation of insects, fungus or other crashes is greater than if the complex web of many different buffers and systems were in place.

Likewise in our human health. Introducing probiotics in our gut can increase the complexity of the system and create health.


The complexity of our institutions.

The organizational structure of our institutions can be buffered in a similar way. When one aspect of the institution faces a crash or a change, other parts of it can buffer the resulting difficulties.

Suppressing diversity will result in a monoculture that is destined to be unable to recover from and retain the ability to bounce back from a loss. While it may seem intuitively that letting go of control is going to result in collapse, it may well be the opposite is true. It may be that in order to make our institutions healthy, we will need to promote many kinds of positive models that can work together.