Reading Nature’s Signals

All Things Considered today gave the usual calm treatment the remarkably incongruous claim by news anchor Glen Beck to the mantle of Dr. Martin Luther King this weekend. An minister who had attended the “ecumenical” political gathering pointed to how the number of children born without married parents had gone up dramatically since the 1960’s, as indicating the nation taking a “wrong turn” then, and what a new religious revolution was needed to heal.

—My comment

I don’t take Mr. Beck any more seriously than I take a drunk with a loaded gun… but the point he makes that something is wrong if most children are born without married parents, and implicitly not being taught successful ways of living, seems quite valid.

If we are looking at the great turning points that coincided with the 60’s, as showing a nation taking a wrong turn, shouldn’t we be “ecumenical” about it. How about considering the way the nation quite ignored the main messages OF the 60’s. For one we let our economic religion take over, completely ignoring that the rigid physical limits of the earth had already started getting in our way, despite quite loud protest.

Why not acknowledge the great harm being done by economic institutions that treat everything on earth that is either out of sight or not tied down as being as exploitable and disposable. That is now quite visibly and actively causing the physical world we rely on to be slipping from our grasp.

The earth is a sacred trust. Our spiritual failure to acknowledge the need to stop consuming it ever faster, which “growth” unavoidably directly means, devalues every human institution that tolerates it.

To end the growing impacts of our consuming the earth we’d have to end our growing investments in doing that, whether it is seen as the mainstay of our crazy economic scheme for the crazy, or not. Yes, discussing it is also a taboo, though, so maybe we shouldn’t talk about it.

Maybe it’s better we just leave it unsaid… ignore it knowing it’ll just go away anyway sometime and so there’s no real reason to bother.

How in trying to “save the environment” most people choose symbolic energy savings, instead of responding to what “the experts” point to as having real effects, is the theme of the NY times blog “Dot Earth” post Misperceived Paths to Energy Savings. It’s sadly also “the experts” themselves who are the very worst offenders, in truth, constantly recommending energy savings for their business value, but by making energy use more profitable also stimulate the economy to use more. I occasionally try to get Andy Revkin, the author of the blog, to question his own assumptions…

+++Comment 11:
Andy,
As I think you know, this is one area I’ve studied quite a bit. The problem isn’t that the bad responses don’t do much. The problem is that the good ones are actually worse.

Basically, all l the energy saving strategies listed as “good” are profitable, and so are part of the growth stimulus side of our world commitment to accelerate the use of efficiency for both accelerating growth and slowing resource depletion. The multiplier is 2.5. On average throughout the world for every unit of energy saved by efficiencies 2.5 new uses are developed. The reason is that efficiencies make resource use more profitable.

The really alarming problem is that this is one of many ways we are consistently compartmentalizing “cause and effect” in our minds for real causes and effects that are not in the least bit compartmentalized in nature. I’m struggling to find anything that might get people to simply go through the clear evidence.

So… the problem is that it’s the leading experts as well as the public who have entirely misperceived the nature of our problem. http://synapse9.com…

+++Comment 61
Andy,
The confusing real truth, that saving energy does not save energy, but stimulates more energy uses, is getting largely missed in the discussion here.

Three other readers did mention the “paradox” that saving energy increases what you can do with money,… increases spending and stimulates growing energy use as Jevons first pointed out 150 years ago. But the absolute reality that what we do with the money saved messes up our theory of having saved energy is still not getting across. You, your other readers, and the vast majority of other scientists and activists actually treat it as just “words words words”… We’re all not recognizing the real usefulness of looking beyond our assumptions.

Our real problem is *not paying attention* (to quite obvious, easily confirmed, but socially disapproved hard facts that conflict with our cultural myths).

You should take up Steve Salmony’s comment #42 and give the floor to people who have little at stake but trying to tell the truth, like Gary Peters, myself in #11, Asteroid Miner #20, Larry G. #26, Gene G #33, Steve in #36, James #52. You could have a little exercise in “point counter point” among a group, even, just so the ‘Old Grey Lady’ can have the necessary disclaimer for any association with daring ideas… phil

Excerpt from my home page Bio

What happened to wreck my life, it now appears,

…is that after completing a really wonderful education combining physics and environmental design I did some independent research when in Denver, and discovered a rather effective new method of physical science research. It let me investigate how individual complex environmental systems developed their unique forms, things like individual air currents, swarms of group behavior, cultures or economies, all those things of that kind that invent and take care of themselves somehow and have so mystified people for ages. It destroyed my chance for a normal career in science, though, because just asking that question violates the basic precept of modern science that nature behaves according to our theories. You can’t be looking for how they follow “our rules” if you’re looking for how they develop their own as they go!

I was watching and discovering how to follow natures independently original behaviors, uncontrolled systems that develop from the inside. What you find pursuing both those basic preconceptions of nature, i.e. that everything can be seen as following rules we can make for them, and that individual processes develop by themselves, is highly productive if you look for both. Both are excellent questions. Either preconception of nature is highly misleading if you rule out the other, however, and it now seems humans have tended to think they were mutually exclusive, for thousands of years, but they never were.

So from the mid 1970’s I’ve worked myself to complete exhaustion trying cultivate relationships and explain some of the most critical findings and my technique, in each of the four decades. I’ve made slow but considerable progress with the theory and method, but only seem to go backward with communicating it to other people. As we approach successively greater crises in our conflict with the earth and the life support systems we designed for ourselves to fail, the urgency ratchets up. Curiously, so does the tenacity of people clinging to the faulty preconceptions causing the problem… or so it seems. I still hope my becoming increasingly detached from it all will give me the chance to see things clearly enough as they transpire to find how to fit in somewhere. It’s not working, though, and seems suspiciously like my failing assumption all along.

I seem to have now lost virtually all contact with my many professional peers, in the numerous communities I’d worked so hard to connect with, as well as my own family and my home, as well as all my long relationships with friends and relatives, as well as with the whole spectrum of social networks seeking political and environmental change that I’ve been an active participant in all along. I live in virtually constant desperation really, struggling to make emotional sense of each hour, and mostly failing. I also spend a lot of time escaping into a fantasy life for the comfort it offers, and the further separation and perspective on this supremely ugly stream of events I and so many others are having to be witness of for our planet.

It’s not just that all the people I’ve ever trusted, or wanted to, are clinging to deeply mistaken solutions for our civilization’s tragic and destructive course of colliding with the earth. It’s that they’re not interested in why that apparent circumstance might possibly arise, involving themselves and their actions. Why, indeed, would they expect to assure our future with ever more complex solutions clearly designed to naturally stir up conflicting responses from their environment. They seem to think putting in 110% effort and having faith will make clearly false solutions trustworthy. Getting good at checking out how things really work does take effort, but that’s what’s actually needed.

In the end, people seem just too attached to jumping to conclusions as our way of reasoning, though. That seems to be the bottom line, the central cause, the mortal flaw, why my own work is so quickly dismissed by the sciences. Humans really like thinking of everything in our world as a construct of our minds… a reality simple enough to put into concepts, but then distracting our minds from an awareness of the reality outside.

So, where does the rest of my life go and our evidently tragic failure in taking care of ourselves and the earth?? You tell me!

“No Daddy, the pile gets too big!”… How deranged the conversation gets, is having year after year the same fundamental problem poking it’s nose through the tent flaps and trying to get in, and people keep shoeing it away. We forever try to solve the wrong half of our problems, like trying to stabilize ever growing instability, in several ways, but particularly trying to stabilize limitless multiplying money. “No daddy… that won’t work (the little children in the circle all chime in) … the pile gets too big”…

pfh

My friend George posted a good article on modeling the approaching decline of energy returns on energy invested in the earth (EROI), and I mentioned “the Catch”.

—-
One of the difficulties with feedback models is that they all need to assume the parts are following rules.

How economies work, of course, is with” animate learning-bots” (us), all exploring the world and discovering new relationships all the time. That’s why I tend to take the limiting conditions nature displays as a guide, based on her own synthesis of the whole process (like the switch from multiplying to diminishing returns on the success of the search for stuff). When you learn to identify them they display what the system as a whole actually IS finding and learning from its environment, using the system itself as a better guide to what ALL the parts are learning at once.

Have you considered what evidence in the environment you’d look for to see if the system as a whole was approaching a danger point of vanishing net energy? One clear sign seems to be where the market mechanisms “hit a snag” and start displaying emergent systemic behavior where there should be smooth market adjustments.

A field called “econophysics” as mentioned in an article in the NY Times. I posted a comment, now reposted here, mentioning a couple of the other examples I know.

The whole story of growth and money, a simple resource using natural trade economy.

As in a four person market economy, shown with two resource providing and two resource consuming trades, people create wealth by exchanging complementary goods in exchange for money. Growth comes as each learns how to do things better and the resources hold out. For price stability the banker prints money to keep up with growth.

The banker also provides safe keeping for the money saved by people with more than they presently need, and gives it out in exchange for a promise of money growth in return.

At the limits of the earth that tells people to make money taking big risks to avoid limits, when that’s more of what’s left with high returns, so to avoid being responsible for growing risks, people with savings should just spend their returns instead of expecting them to multiply. It’s the natural thing to do to make peace with limits.

Regarding an article in the NY Times, A Richter Scale for Markets and to Dirk Helbing’s letter to Soros on the new physics exploring the great disruptive events our economies so frequently produce.

To Xavier Gabaix, w/ H. Eugene Stanley - authors of the study referred to: A theory of power-law distributions in Financial market
—-

The term you use is “econophysics” but the graph in “A Richter Scale for Markets” in the NY Times seems to display the emerging continuity of systems developing where they are not supposed to. I’ve got great physics based data mining tools for emerging continuities of that kind that might be useful to you. As I approach it, these physical processes of “happening” appears to be very usefully observable, and expose the mechanisms taking place in the “unhidden patterns” of their emerging continuities, i.e. the sequence of how they systematize and desystematize by grow and decay.

In my many years of work on it I learned quite a bit others should find useful I think, except I keep running into theorists limiting themselves to constructing equations before clearly identifying the physical processes they are studying… or something, and so not getting what they can from mapping the developmental sequence of events. Here’s a couple more, things well mannered economic systems are NEVER supposed to do [as if the market players run out of room to maneuver and are cornered by something into slow motion panics].

It’s the continuities that expose them, and expose how they operate to the patient eye, and are what my approach is fairly effective in using to expose the sources of their power and the information we need to protect our environments from the conditions that set them off. Of course most generally, once they begin you’ve completely lost control.

The catch,.. and there is a catch,.. is that we’d need to both learn some things, because my knowledge is built using a general model of eventful non-deterministic processes in nature, physical processes having *energy continuity in developing organization* which one may clearly identify developmental processes of but must assume they operate by means beyond the range of our information to describe.
—- fyi
The general law of continuity in change, (and general form of complex physical systems) & recently published in Cosmos & History, Models Learning Change (and map of how to read nature for signals of change)

A related post on The Oil Drum concerns some of the “points of vanishing returns” for otherwise smoothly running net energy systems (i.e. nature’s forms of bankruptcy) that seem to trigger these other kinds of systemic disturbances. Profiting from Scarcity

phil

A friend in an environmental discussion group proposed his favorite list of hopeful, but quite unproven technology solutions for the energy crisis, making the usual false assumption that the problem is a lack of energy resources. That causes the further error of not considering what consequences the solution would have… if it worked.

—-
All,
There’s a rather interesting “Catch 22” in trusting hopeful but unproven technological fixes. They raise a promise you can’t check out the consequences of. The usual hidden consequence is the problem. Even if they work wonderfully to solve the problem they are targeted to solve, then they expand the economy and multiply all our other problems…

Have you ever thought about that ‘feedback’ issue before? The solutions for economic growth constraints invariably extend or accelerate the growth of the economy and ALL its other multiplying impacts and complications for the environment and society at the same time. You fix one problem and it triggers a torrent of others.

“My theory” for why that’s easy to miss is that people are just not taught how to think about complex systems that behave as wholes, though we rely on them extensively and they’re all around us. It’s not a subject in school. We’re not taught that nature is “alive” (full of things that take care of themselves) and how to watch the way they work. Instead we’re taught that everything is determined by being controlled by something else, and to ignore subjects that can’t be explained that way. Natural systems work by the development of networks of independent but complementary parts, i.e. not a deterministic process at all. As a result our whole culture is missing the basic terminology for it.

The question was asked by Sue Charman on the UK Finance Lab, How do we start predicting ecosystem decline and if business is capable of changing?
________

Well, one way is to begin to use more scientific ways to measure the net effect of things. There are some rather major problems with “sustainability arithmetic” you might call it.
People tend to mix statements of social values and the numbers they use in a way that is very forgiving for whatever purpose intended. I don’t exaggerate. For one familiar example, people count their own personal waste items as their environmental impacts, the number of plastic bags they use or their efficiency in cooking and cleaning, running the AC, etc. When the scale of their environmental impacts is hardly related to their personal wastes.
What personal impacts are directly related to is the scale of their personal income, and everyone is making every effort to increase it. Big income big demand on the resources of the earth. Whether they cut back on one thing or another they’re still going to spend or invest all their income. In a market economy every dollar tends to have equal effect, each representing average resource use for the service provided. The simplest starting point for estimating the total is ~6000btu/$, the global use of fuels to produce total GDP.
Using that principle correctly as we do in our paper on EROI for Wind Farms to measure the total impact of whole business systems, what you find is even the world professional standard for adding up the totals of things, Life Cycle Cost Analysis (LCA) is off by 500% due to a similar social value error. LCA measures only the impacts of the technology used… and not of the business operations, services, commerce, people, etc.
Having accurate measures for resource use for different things will then let you make legitimate comparisons and value judgments relative to the resources the earth has left. Then of course, to get to the question asked, you can assess the risk on individual businesses for whether pushing up the price of diminishing resources will prevent some industries that once used them from continuing to operate. That’s one half of the limit question we really need to get a handle on.
The second half is asking, once we use up the affordable supplies of important resources, how are we going to operate an economy without them while looking for some affordable substitute? That’s the one that the Peak Oil people have been projecting and seeing a very bumpy downward staircase of oil supply contractions over the next 20 years. We have no substitute for oil really, and its affordable supplies do appear to be running out as we speak whether you consider the probably underestimated costs of responding to climate change or not.
The real problem to me, though, is that time lag between running out of affordable stuff and finding an affordable substitute. The sole guiding principle of finance is to use the genius of the markets to use up all affordable resources at ever faster rates, assuming that bigger supplies of cheaper resources are around the corner. For 60+ years we’ve been looking around the corner,… and still don’t see them coming. What the rule of finance does not consider is the “precautionary principle” of asking what’s next. I think financial balance sheets need to be required to begin showing a reasonable estimate of “what’s next ?”.

I was pointed to Michael Herman’s Open Space World, and his introduction to his Open Space group learning methods. We exchanged a couple emails and it occurred to me there’s a simple way to combine his and my learning process models, his using the four organizational dimensions of purposes, actions, stories & structures and mine as the dimension of natural progress in time.

Michael,

Thanks, that was a good intro. Might this be a cool way to link our models??

Treating time as a fifth dimension of organization (how your four dimensions of purposes, actions, stories & structures add up), and mapped as the sequence of observable changes in the form of energy flows that correspond to essential stages of successful eventful learning.

If these two models refer to broad teachable patterns of the same physical reality, they must connect something like this I think.
____
The narrative: After groping in the dark to find a starting point for your education, learning can expand itself, taking off by leaps and bounds, until changes of scale present unexpected choices of kind, to overreach or adapt, presenting a natural point of changing values. The added value of using knowledge to expand knowledge changes to added value in perfecting knowledge, finding a way to integrate with a new environment full of others, all now meeting the same new challenge of finding new values on changing scale. It’s the same for personal, community or societal affairs, at limits to growth the new task is to simplify and perfect your way of fitting together with others, reducing complications rather than adding to them, being born into a new body, experiencing a change of form and coming together as a whole.

Because it takes time to develop energy systems, and they need “a little push” at changes in direction, these become the basic “evolutionary clicks of time” for organizational learning: germination, development, integration. They’re three quite different forms of productive energy use, and needed in sequence, to create wholes that approach perfection.

That’s not easy to imagine, especially for a creature accustomed to using information as its guide, that set up all its information models, resources and systems without any plan for a “change of values” toward becoming whole. That evolutionary “click” at the peak of one’s power is in part losing interest in the quest for power. So… some unfamiliar kind of intuition and method is needed, like groping in the dark again, but this time with partners.
____
For reference, this way of linking the internal organization of a system to how it changes form over time is also the subject of a web page for scientists I did a couple years ago. With PICS (Projecting Images of Complex Systems) I was suggesting ways to discover elements organization or learning strategies found in one natural system to experiment with in others.

Geo Mobus’ post on his blog “Question Everything”, on “Where is the Economy Going” left little to question but that the choices for the physical economic system we’ve called home for a couple centuries is either down or faster down. It does seem true enough, comparing the beliefs that led us to our present global impasse, and deep denial of how different the present physical world really is from those beliefs. But there are also other questions. This is a response to the ideas of “GaryA” and “Florifulgurator” yesterday, about other things to do than cling to our dead end.
—–

Good questions…. The idea of a “mass sea change of some kind”, a religion that’s not a religion…”immersion rather than separation with nature” is something that could be curiously hidden in plain sight.

It might be a matter of becoming part of nature’s intelligence as a physical act, as a way to overcome our flawed mental constructs of how nature works. Immersion seems to help, but is easily derailed by the our habit of converting the physical subjects studied into theories, and so losing sight of the originals. That only seems avoided by leaving your theories incomplete, and finding a way to retain the questions you wouldn’t have had time to explore, the openings to unexplored paths in the road map.

You see the other solutions to the growth problem demonstrated all the time that way. They’re in the deep mystery of the natural systems that grow explosively to a point at which they change form, and mature to perfection instead of ripping themselves to pieces or disrupting and depleting their environments. The catch is not that how they do it can’t be studied well enough to imitate. It’s needing to keep the open questions as you go, and getting lost if you strip them away to make things more explicable. If you can maintain your contact with and curiosity about the physical subjects themselves in that way, not reducing them to images, one can watch where the net energy goes that gives natural systems their self-steering capability.

You’d need to find a community of people curious about the possibility of looking to the physical world for the “true religion” and for not finding it in just a more ethereal images. You could say it’s in “the unending meditation” of “being here” if that softens the jolt a bit. It seems to involve separating our information and cultural realities from the independent realities of their physical subjects, in order to fully enjoy the richness of useful questions nature’s physical intelligence raises, and to give our rich mental experience a more reliable connection.

That double step of separating our mental realities from our physical ones, leading to a better way to connect them, makes most everyone I know turn and run, though… That’s a bit of a problem. It’s the subject I write about though, and find a minute growing audience for.

http://www.synapse9.com/pub/ModLearnChange.pdf
http://www.synapse9.com/drafts/StimAsConstraint.pdf
http://www.thepeoplesvoice.org/TPV3/Voices.php/2009/12/15/throwing-our-energy-at-impossible-dreams