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.
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.
posted by Ridgewriters at 11:11 AM
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