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Pathways to our whole system change

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and for the use of one’s podium

Jessie Lydia Henshaw
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Below are three short pieces
I.   WHAT WE TOTALLY MISSED
II.  THE SYSTEMS THINKING WE ALREADY KNOW
III.  THE MEANING OF OUR OLDEST DREAM
They’re to help our enormous audience with the great puzzle of what to do now, now that we’re at the very ends of the earth. We have no more excuses for continuing to use up all our options to make our home a good place to live. The wrong turns we’ve made go back a very long way; with most of our history and brilliantly thinking animals, we did not live in civilizations growing to their famous collapses. So we have some original good senses to build on that we can still recover, much of it recorded in plain sight by the richly meaningful words we made that connect our minds to nature. That language has been harmed and distorted by our falling into traps, requiring us to endlessly multiply our power over nature, each other, and ourselves, a question of steering.

I.  WHAT WE TOTALLY MISSED – The current decade of growing breakdown and dysfunction in critical natural and societal systems needed for good lives, even in language itself, and the environmental, climate, inter-cultural, international, government, and economic systems didn’t develop overnight. The interventions of scientists of many kinds, and perhaps most notably the economist J. M. Keynes, have long pointed to the whole system instabilities that would develop as a result of continual doubling of our impacts on the earth and each other, driven by profiting from compound investment, have been oddly very clear and ignored for a long time.

Despite great efforts to avert the whole system crisis now upon us, its disasters have also continued to spread and escalate, the harsh realities finally becoming quite undeniable. Why don’t we do what we do best, though, see what’s amiss as things to do and get about doing them? Is it that we’ve given up trying to manage the unmanageable, or just not noticed we’re using outmoded management for a very natural kind of whole system crisis for an endlessly multiplying system? What if we changed the story? What if we saw what’s wrong as the perverse consequence of the economy’s “growth imperative” cheating us out of every innovative solution we’ve tried?

Shouldn’t we have foreseen that the growth economy would use innovations to heal the huge damage growth has caused, now seen so clearly in hindsight? What seems to have happened is that those caregiving efforts were exploited as efficiencies to invest in, speeding the profit growth as the disruptive innovations disrupted the environments, economy, and lives of others. Honestly, of course, such a dramatic change in reality was probably not expected by the investors blindly investing in making money as the cost/benefit curve turned upside down.

That’s what the data seems to show so clearly if just looked at with an open mind. Because of that, we do need a “general law of care” for the people who didn’t see what was coming to help us all learn what happens when long-trusted rules turn upside down. Nature’s growth rules always reverse as systems approach their limits to growth. See if you can think of one that doesn’t. In personal relations, what’s on the other side of affection as it’s pushed too far? What’s the better growth policy for a business? Invest in what was profitable before till you go bankrupt, or treat growth as fragile and care about serving the whole world you live in?

So, the environmental and sustainability movements need to be forgiven and forgive themselves for not realizing that cause and effect would reverse as we began to see growth becoming the most destructive rather than most creative force on earth. Who would have ever guessed that the growth economy would misuse 50 years of dedicated effort and creative collaboration for the opposite purpose? Nobody at all would have, well, except a few like Keynes, who studied the ironies and looked around the corners of the systems we energize.

Sustainability became a growth stimulus and is one of the oddities, making things popular, efficient, and easy to multiply, with great social support. So, those efforts both failed on the one hand despite the dedicated efforts and also backfired, profiting the dumb system that didn’t know when to quit for threatening its existence, too. You can see that plain as day in the CO2 curve below, not a ripple of hesitation in the CO2 growth curve, just as if *everyone* was strongly in favor of it.

So, it seems to be time to look at the whole problem from a fresh point of view and start sorting our choices.

  • The current world measure of atmospheric CO2 (the main source of the exponential climate heating crossing the thresholds of lasting harm we’re now experiencing). – The trend is closely proportional to world GDP growth from 1971 to the present (7), with CO2 growing at ~2% a year since WWII and GDP at ~3.5% a year.  
    – CO2 Data – Scripps: https://scrippsco2.ucsd.edu/data/atmospheric_co2/icecore_merged_products.html

II.  THE SYSTEMS THINKING WE ALREADY KNOW – I’m a senior natural systems research scientist who’s been trying to shed light on some of these fundamental errors of perception that seem to be at the core of our modern world’s struggle for survival. This approach originally came from noticing gaps in physics, you know, the kind that shouldn’t be there. But it took many years before I had the beginnings of a clear idea of what to do with them. One of them was the reliance of physics on math, which meant the field had no way to study how things began and ended.

Let me explain. Scientists, not nature, define scientific equations. So, equations of change over time would trail off to infinity unless someone defined them to begin and end at a particular time or change abruptly by a scientist’s arbitrary choice. The same goes for economics, the math for our life support system!  This is part of why it’s not working when, indeed, extrapolated to infinity.

Both of those illusions of math seem to come from the many centuries of our public lives relying on increasingly rigid thinking, like abstract rules, when nature presents us instead with highly varied kinds of resilient, lively, flowing systems of working relationships that themselves evolve into and out of existence. Empirical systems science is then a study of reliable but not rigid understanding. So it is also a little more focused, but not so different from what people do every day. We all spend our time looking for one after another sign of change or opportunity, or of what may be approaching, reading and getting a feel for the contexts for changing relations.

Doing that scientifically means asking key questions and looking for specific signals and patterns, more record-keeping, exploration of more related contexts, the added boundary testing and careful feeling for surprises, hoping not to be blinded by assumptions, reading situations, playing with hints of irony, and following up to confirm possible connections, all the fun mental journeys that help us get along. So it mostly works in context but also alternates with simplifying patterns to abstraction, not to follow, but like symbols, as handy guides to the questions that come up at different times. So, in that way, it’s the oldest science of all, what we as a species spent time learning from for the last million or so years as humans began to rely more on reaching for the limits of information, art, insight, connections, and feeling. The pace of that learning greatly accelerated around 60 to 100 thousand years ago, as we discovered how to form reliable language, with sounds that pointed to things and patterns in nature to our feelings and experiences with them. That “genome of language” seems to be what made it possible for all languages to collect and share useful meanings for the same things and translate them from one language to another.

Had language just been an accumulation of popular hearsay and heresy, as much of language seems to be becoming today, it would never have become such a very useful way of storing, comparing, and improving on useful insights, feelings, designs, values, and ways of working. The surprising thing today is that in so far as nature is still here, the forms of language that so effectively connected our minds to nature are, too, just sometimes hiding in the root meanings of the words we use all the time, still there, just never cut from the branches and trunks of natural meaning they grew on. While their natural meanings do “have definition” and are related to others. ”Their meanings” are “not defined,” though, in the sense of being fixed by some rigid specification. Instead, they are recreated again each time we learn from their rich histories of usage, like new flags waving what we all find in the commonly recognized aspect(s) of nature they point to.

Do you have a podium?
What do you think humanity should do now?
We’re mostly very nice people, but we do not know what we’re doing. We always want to find out, though. 
Other people need to hear what you really think if you can find a way.

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III.  THE MEANING OF OUR OLDEST DREAM – What seems to be one of humanity’s oldest hopes and dreams is for there to be some great force of good to call upon as if we still had our parents to rely on or a God that might step in if problems got bad enough. We do experience the natural form of that in all the systems that we are part of and that we interact with. The word “system” came originally from observing things that held together and have experienced real “unity” and “cohesion” when part of something powerfully good for us.

Many kinds of natural systems that hold together are also organized to care for all their parts. Our healthy minds do that, and healthy families do that, too, as do friendships, organizations, and communities. It’s how things that work well work. We always like it and are happy to take part in it, but the world we also made seems driven to be at war with itself and nature, against nearly everyone’s wishes, but we just don’t see why. We might have thought we were living peaceful lives, but something seems to consistently blow things out of proportion, inflaming conflicts inside and out.

There are exceptions, but that’s been happening for at least five thousand years, and mostly for the world’s most productive cultures, starting with what seemed like wonderful traditions, leading to their terrible entire societal collapse. That kind of collapse also erases what it was that collapsed, as the tower of Babel was recorded only as disunifying the multiplication of languages and fragmenting culture.  Both the Greek/Crete “Atlantis” and the Roman collapses came from the great success of intelligent, egalitarian, caring, and creative cultures, only to vanish mysteriously, of course. That’s what’s currently straight ahead for us, too, as our global system of stimulating human creativity led us to fight with and exploit each other as we destroy the only habitable planet we know.

Part of the secret is that Growth systems self-organize to work as a whole AND double in size and complexity again and again till something changes them. If they fail to find how to cooperate, nature erases them. From the smoothness of the economy’s global curves, it is clearly working as a whole, coordinating its parts. It’s regularly doubling its scale and complexity, as well as the suffering and conflicts between its parts while degrading its environments. If it is working as a whole, then why isn’t it taking care of all of its parts?  It seems to be taking care only of the forces pushing itself and its environments over their last thresholds of growing instability, conflict, and exhaustion. It’s a failure as far as nature is concerned and approaching the time to erase itself.

All systems are self-organized around how the parts smoothly fit and cooperate. The long-term economic curves show how effectively increasingly educated people all over the world are working together, totally unaware of what they are now working on. To grow, systems naturally design themselves to work as wholes, smoothly coordinating AND responding to changing conditions to stay out of trouble, all that is 99% hidden from view. That natural self-coordination comes along with the system as it changes purposes, too.

Any growth system has to change purposes, though, something no one has discussed yet, it seems, either to keep multiplying and stop responding to the suffering and dysfunction it creates or the healthy way to respond to limits to multiplying, turning the same resources to new purposes, to make sure it doesn’t stop caring, to perfecting its designs and making a good home in a stable environment, … i.e. what we all did when “growing up.”  Civilization just made the wrong turn.

Look around. All sorts of new lives successfully transition from emerging to maturing; some quite smoothly, and others struggle, sometimes getting the help they could use or not. “Transformations” rely on chains of reactions between the parts as they interact to their “reading the signals,” sometimes like automatic reflexes, other times as explorations of new territory, as they find and change directions – the whole system steering we see everywhere things work.

We’ll need to collectively master that to survive on earth. It can go in alternating phases of experimenting and maturing, as the course of an education or career does. It’s in growing up that any system finds itself and its freedoms.

Making life work for all our world’s parts is the trick; creating a kind of hologram of every part represented in its best way to serve the whole, as the natural goal for systems able to steer is what we’d need to focus on for some time. The role of the parts is always to share and learn, notice good, bad, fresh, stale, and other kinds of useful and enjoyable ideas, to “get the signals”  to “step up” or “take off” to reorganize our way of life, follow the paths of all successful new living systems, moving from multiplying our designs to fulfilling them. It’s not erasing the primacy of creativity but finding its right place, taking part in the new focus on caring for and perfecting the many designs of existence that every beautiful work achieves.

For either kind of growth, it is how the system steers that takes it where it’s going, responding to internal and external signals as navigation, so the system’s profits to enable it is changing lasting purposes if we want our two hundred thousand years or so of accumulating wisdom to survive.

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Author References:

Research site:    Reading Nature’s Signals 
https://synapse9.com/signals
 Original Draft of Pathways article                 
Pathways to System Change

Papers:

(2024). A People’s Systems Science [GST/n]: Weaving Abstract & Contextual Systems:
Telling Them Apart & Aligning Their Parts. ISSS 2024 Mtg.
Draft Paper  https://synapse9.com/_ISSS-24/HNS3-PSS%20MS-v.docx   
Talk Slides  https://synapse9.com/_ISSS-24/HNS3-PPS-1.pptx

(2023). Emergent Growth of System Self-Organization & Self-Control: Contextual system design, steering, and transformation. Systems Research and Behavioral Science
Author copy https://synapse9.com/pub/2023_sys-SelfOrg&SelfControl.pdf

(2022). Holistic Natural Systems – Design & Steering: Guiding New Science for Transformation.  Journal of the International Society for the Systems Sciences. Presentation Jul 9
https://synapse9.com/_ISSS-22/HNS1-MS-Design&Steering.pdf

(2021). Understanding Nature’s Purpose in Starting All New Lives with Compound Growth: New Science for Individual Systems. Journal of the International Society for the Systems Sciences July 2021.
MS https://synapse9.com/pub/2022_NewSysSci-IndividSys.pdf,  
Supplemental https://synapse9.com/_ISSS-21/ISSSJul11NewSci-IndividSys-supl.pdf  
Oct 2 Talk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0plSWMjnTHQ

(2019). Growth Constant Fingerprints of Economically Driven Climate Change: From 1780 origin to post-WWII great acceleration. draft https://synapse9.com/drafts/2019_12-GrowthConstFingerprintsOfCC-preprint.pdf, in Cornell arXive physics preprints https://arxiv.org/abs/1911.04340 Submissions to: Submissions to Nature Climate Change, IOP, Ecological Economics, Anthropocene, Springer Climatic Change, PLOS.

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Sad changes at Etymonline.com

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I’ve enjoyed the previously marvelous etymonlin.com etymology dictionary and the also marvelous word patterns site, Onelook.com, for years. They worked great together to explore the meaning of the repeated structures of words and how words with one, two, three, four, five, or five-syllables are assembled as very lean geometries for adding the many particular nuances that modify the base term for a particular kind of use.

I seem to be at war with the site’s new managers, though. They are showing the greatest of all possible vanities in eliminating both the word “syllable” and the idea that syllables have any meaning other than the repetition of letters.

Richard Nordquist, a language scholar diagrammed the classical interpretation as follows:

SuffixMeaningExample
-acystate or qualityprivacy, fallacy, delicacy
-alact or process ofrefusal, recital, rebuttal
-e/a ncestate or quality ofmaintenance, eminence,
-domplace home beingfreedom, kingdom, boredom
-er, -orone whotrainer, protector, narrator
-ismdoctrine, beliefcommunism, narcissism,

And I’ve similarly included for variety a few others. There seem to be hundreds of each kind.

SuffixMeaningExample
-tificin the manner ofscientific – well-defined
-finemake finitedefine – To fix, bound, limit
-ivitypotential, biascaptivity, longevity, activity
-owin a manner ofnarrow, widow.shadow
-encea contextual forcescience influence presence
-lapseslip, expire, ceasecollapse, relapse,  

My complaints to Scott, one of the Etymonline.com editors, it seems, went like this:

June 6, 2024

Scott 2D

You’re taking a different approach to understanding words than this dictionary. The ‘pos’ part of the words composition and pose come from different sources. Either from *apo- or *tkei- in the reconstructed Indo-European language family for composition, or from pauein in Greek for pose.

The pose entry does mention how the similarity in form between pause and position has influenced their meaning:

hence the Old French verb (in common with cognates in Spanish, Italian, Portuguese) acquired the sense of Latin ponere “to put, place” (past participle positus; see position(n.)), by confusion of the similar stems.

Jessilydia

Scott,
Yes it does seem I wish I knew how to strenuously fight what I see happening on Etymonline. The site seems to be just erasing the contribution of root meanings of syllables used in the geometries of compound worlds. I’m really astounded and frightened by such a blatant error.

The root meanings of the parts combine to create elegant and rich compositions of meaning, clearly serving as the building blocks of our natural languages. These structures of language happen to derive from the most useful and lasting ways of referring to the forms of nature and our experiences of them, derived from many thousands of years of beautiful discovery, and now someone has some notion to erase them.

I think it’s wrong to erase them, particularly for some arbitrary lexicological reason. That is just awful harm to history and humanity to drop the meaning of the ancient building blocks of every language’s most durable words. They carry the history of our direct references to the designs, processes, and ends of natural systems, their material meanings, and our relationships with them.

JUST SAYING… YOU KNOW, I THINK IT’S DEAD WRONG.

Scott

I respect your level of concern for this stuff. Maybe you can help me understand you a little better. Here is what I think you are saying:

There is an inherent meaning connected with syllables or geometries in written words. Which implies a shared meaning between composition and pose simply due to the presence of pos in both words.

So tell me if I represented you correctly there. Also let me know what you think about these two objections.

1.) swine and pig share meaning but do not share syllables.
2.) noon and soon share a syllable but do not share meaning.

I’m having trouble imaging how your approach would make sense.

Jessilydia

Thanks for the question.  The answer is not exactly.  The geometries of meaning that one finds [from combining] syllables in compound words are interactions of the ancient meanings attached to them, as units of ideas [and] meaning that had originally been expressed vocally. It’s hard to say, but as Latin and Greek record their conversion from vocal to written dialect, it appears most of which seem predate written language.

So they appear to come from sounds and gestures *referring to* natural phenomena and experiences, repeated over and over for their usefulness and added attached meaning, that formal language developed from. So as long as they live, those informal, accumulated, culturally sustained, and diversified packages of experiences, feelings, and insights remain attached to the direct reference to the subjects of the word.

Chris

Ok ok. Could you give examples of words that preserve that ancient context as well as words that are too abstracted and have less connection to the vocal roots of meaning?

Also, are there any definitive books which outline this way of understanding language?

Jessie

I have wall-to-wall meetings till next Friday.  Sorry for the brief reply. It’s all the long-lasting useful words that stem from the meanings of indo-european syllables.  Say “conflagration” four syllables, {con fla gra tion}, or cooperation {co oper a tion}, each geometry of subjects with syllables is a reference to an old idea of the combined meaning as a whole.

One of the other pieces of evidence is that history shows that written Greek and Latin appeared as if all of a sudden, with NO precedent, while displaying a vast and deep appreciation of nature and the human experience, with no one at all to tell the writers what all that meant, — other than — the ancient common cultures from which they emerged. 

Get it?   It all had to come from somewhere, and the start was the long, long accumulation of short sounds associated with deep meanings that had to have spread and built up as people spread from Africa to the Mideast,  then both Eastward and Westward, then to the North, as the ice retreated, maintaining enough contact for innovations in knowledge to be passed along. There is no other way for the deeply related family of languages to have developed.

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

I’m out of my league here, a natural systems research scientist against a block of pure semantic theorists (it would seem). If you have any ideas about how to respond or what this means to the truth of language, please respond.

Jessie

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Why did science become myopic and now unable to guide our future?

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It’s both sad and marvelous to now be reading the clear signs that science has become so misguided that only a scientific revolution will keep it from destroying all of what science built. Science has indeed shown us the great beauty of nature and our lives, given us marvelous tools for self-expression, and then also highly unbalanced ways of life now an existential threat to the only living planet we’ll ever know, not to mention threatening to the glorious diversity of human cultures made possible by the blind multiplication of our power to interfere with nature that science enabled and made science so profitable. 

One of many bits of clear evidence is the scientific consensus that global warming is caused by our overuse of fossil fuels. Technically, that is a symptom, not at all close to the cause, but aside from that, the consensus scientific response to the symptom is to try overusing something else to replace fossil fuels to see if that works out any better. 

Or, you could ask, “How’s this for progress?” This December 2023 data record of the entire history of human-caused CO2 blanketing the earth shows the accelerating acceleration of the climate-forcing trend. Its real value, though, is as remarkably clear evidence that **all our solutions are only accelerating the problem.** You could hardly find a greater or clearer cry in the darkness for a new scientific revolution. Clearly our guidance is way off track.

We’ve faced profound contradictions produced by science generation after generation, most not timely nor effectively responded to, some wonderfully enlightening too, and of both the larger and smaller varieties of important confrontations between our minds and nature.

Perhaps going back to the origin of the human species about 850,000 years ago when our peculiar constellation of amazingly perfected designs, our ultimate problem seems to be whatever caused us to be emotionally attached to making up our own realities, given minds and bodies that proved very clearly our sudden emergence back then marked a major departure from evolution. 

Image from “Genomic inference of a severe human bottleneck during the Early to Middle Pleistocene transition” in Science August 2023

In this story, the rub is that in order for humans to make mental images powerful for influencing our far more complex and varied environments, we clearly had to keep perfecting our ideas and tools and selecting the most powerful for controlling outcomes as we evolved. Given the vast “mismatch in variety” between mind and nature, we’d have to keep leaving out more and more and more of the contextual variation of reality to fashion ideas, giving us more and more power, not noticing that it also divorced us from the contexts from which all other kinds of meaning come.

Thus, we came to represent nature with numbers and formulas, ENTIRELY stripping our images of nature from their contexts. That separation of our powers from the wide and rich variety of the contexts of natural working relationships was the cost. Our mental versions of nature then harmonized our blind power over nature with the warm connections of home and family, the one place in our world, the foundation of our cultural worlds. Coupling our mental worlds, centered around in-context relationships but increasingly dominated by finding abstract rules, taken out of context, selected for power over things over the centuries, is the storyline of our whole history, enriching and impoverishing our chosen way of living, then becoming trapped in using science to multiply our interference with nature for profit, that the math all projects to be potentially infinite. … well, something wrong with the math – no context.

History is replete with all manner of stories about the disastrous course of affairs that lead to, like the story of Adam and Eve or how the most successful civilizations tended to collapse, the rub being that the problem-solving gets too complicated, as documented by Joe Tainter. The familiar fables and famous plays centered on the naturally corrupting influence of power over people and nature are evidence, too. The cause? The cause, apparently, is the oversimplification of the rules of power and the blinding of the people using them to the contexts in which they are being used.

So …. that’s something of a big deal. Humans are also capable of big ideas as well, though, and it’s clear today we may have only one chance left to get the idea out of our heads that the laws of nature are what we think. Could our way of thinking change to being part of the world we live in and came from instead of being in charge of it? Sure, it is very possible. If you learn to read the markers of the difference, you find the diversity and learnability of ways for people to reconnect with the natural world and possibly continue our, in some ways, most remarkable of nature’s great experiments, are growing all over.

What’s in the way is the power of our few hundred years of perfecting our powers, unaware of how ultimately dangerous to ourselves and to life it made our dominant world culture. My most recent contribution to that is in the form of a LinkedIn post yesterday (to celebrate my birthday! :-) on how my views evolved. I come from a multi-generation science and education family and had a marvelous connection with gamey high-school friends and relations who got together in Brooklyn in 1968 to collectively ponder what in the world was happening to us and have fun doing it. 

If the LinkedIn post is not accessible, the photo journal with notes linked from there, on the ten years “Where it all happened,” is posted in my library.

Jessie 

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Return to Nature’s Long Path for New Lives

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I’m a natural systems transformation scientist, who was mostly learning from the UN SDG process in the early years and looking for words to describe what I saw happening. There are some flaws in the design the UN produced, all preapproved by finance, that prevented the SDG process from being more effective. There are also ways in which it was intentionally or blindly designed to fail; driving BAU and our world’s existential crisis. but deep look under the hood finds something quite positive.

This is a message first sent the UN’s Major Groups on strategy for the upcoming SDG Summit, on the ten year anniversary of the SDGs, as it struggles with the world spinning ever further out of control despite the enormous effort to reverse the pattern.

Intro to the MGs: It’s been a very pleasant honor to engage in NGO MGoS meetings again this week, feeling the energy building to do something significant this fall (just around the corner). In the workshop at the Church Center yesterday I got some very reassuring responses to suggesting we finally look at the main causes (where the leverage lies) regarding the threats we’re responding to, and, to having “nature on the board” of the MGoS and maybe the UN too.

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The main thing I found, though, is that we’re not learning from the diversity of examples of how nature elegantly solves growth overshoot problems like ours. There are good models of all sorts to help us see the turns to take. It’s a matter of responding in time to care for what we create. The fortunes of a starting plan, of “multiplying new forms,” switch in the middle to “making them work” in context. At first, growth is centered on what got it started, then naturally collides with the world it grows into. That involves steering. We do it quite successfully all the time when we see what’s happening, as when making dinner, making friends, or starting a business, noting when multiplying initial successes turns to a need to make them work in context.

To me, the greatest achievement of the SDGs is the great wave of caring about what happens to us it helped trigger. We’ve been talking about why that seems not the main interest of the many institutions that are supposed to serve us. That may be natural at the end of growth. An emerging wave of caring for the whole of a new system, as a unity of parts, seems to be the first sign of it developing a survival instinct. It seems to come with the shock of starting to collide with its environment when new lives most often also need the most care as they struggle with their new reality.

So, other than nature, what’s the real root cause of our troubles, and why hasn’t humanity readily responded in its own self-interest? It seems to be what has bothered the now dominant culture forever, that it learned to communicate powerful ideas with words and numbers, that kept going out of control and separated us from nature. Using words and numbers for steering our choices is dangerous. Both easily misinterpret and misrepresent the realities they are abstracted from. So fears and misunderstandings of what we’re doing can amplify and allow us to create and need to rely on entirely unreliable life support systems, as ours is, based on multiplying power.
One could spin it saying that people blinded by power found it simpler to creatively overpower parts of society and nature to solve their problems, making bigger and bigger problems. Another way to see it is as one of those “experiments” that nature wanted to try out on us… just to see what we’d do, and if we’d ever grow up. Nature IS very experimental, after all!

“The cure” seems to be to unblind ourselves, rediscovering how our world works by reattaching our abstractions to their real meanings. We’d more carefully explore, experience, and validate our thinking, “regenerating” the tried-and-true ways of steering our lives that all of life has depended on from the start. Without much notice, the systems scientist Elinor Ostrom received the Nobel Prize in economics in 2009 for the essence of that plan.
Rather than using powerful and blind abstractions for remote controlling nature, we’d explore our contexts to enrich and inform our senses, notice and respond to changing opportunities, and draw on honest feelings, fears, and other intuitions to help us understand what’s going on in the non-verbal world, and develop indicators for where our externalities are and include them in making our decisions.

So, is this our best chance to put nature back on the board? The main threats from not consulting her seem to be:
1. Global societal degeneration and threatened authoritarian takeovers.
2. Financial institutions taking the job of defining the rules of “sustainability” to
a. blame producers for what they’re told and paid to maximize for finance.
b. holding themselves blameless for the multiplying externalities to be ignored.

JM Keynes seems to have been the first to say it. We should find some better uses for our money. Will it be to care for our world, to destroy it, or go endlessly back and forth?

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What do you think?

We’re clearly in the biggest jam our species has ever faced, with our cure for climate change accelerating it, the latest curve, below, clearly showing that we have had ever faster accelerating climiate change since WWII, and the curve is very smoothly optimized, apparently by the financial system believing that maximizing the the steady explosion of profits would outweigh the exploding costs of the damage, apparently not having looked at that either..?:

Our solution for inequality rapidly accelerated it too, apparently for some reason not studied as well.

I guess everyone was convinced that growing the pie (without counting the disruption of nature) would be best for them even though it would become worst for everyone, as the separation accelerated and the brutal consequences of disrupting the working contexts of life around the globe mounted:

It was the grand display of data driven growth maximization after WWII that did it

and … famous for failing to get out of its biggest jams, plagued by self-corruption, self-deception and extraordinary tragidy, with mumerous whole civilization collapses ‘under belts,’ only to do it again. That’s a remarkably odd behavior for a natural species, isn’t it?

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Note to RegenPollination

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ALERT – ambitious regeneration … faces rapid global decline!

Lauren,

I’ve been active in the movements for decades but have been unsuccessful in pointing out how we should address the symptoms AND the causes of rapid global sustainability decline.

That has not been happening at all, though. While trying to heal the world, the UN, environmentalists, and all the other regenerative movements have done nothing about what is causing the rapid acceleration of damage. Hidden in very plain sight it’s the regular financial doubling of the economy and its side effects for maximum profit. 

However important the symptoms are, we have also been displaying about as much blindness to the real cause as the people actively managing or doing it. That is, the well-educated professionals with homes and families whose rules for profit tell them to extract multiplying wealth from the earth, blind to the costs! That’s the real cause in a nutshell.

I write lots of short pieces on it. The main possible saving grace is that the people managing the planet’s destruction are mostly well-educated, successful professionals with lives and families as threatened by global environmental collapse as anyone’s. That they are blind to how they are causing the threats to themselves is the weak point in the system.

It happens by their following the old rule for profit, to use profits to invest in multiplying profits, thus endlessly multiplying the economy’s power over nature. They don’t see it because “the rules do not connect with their contexts.” The people are then only guided by their social relations, which are mostly very positive due to all the profits, unaware of the existential threat!

The real key is for the movements to expand our caring to include those causing the harm but don’t see it, rather than despising them, as Marx and so many others have, assuming they saw what they’re doing. Their blindness is systemic and, largely, NOT THEIR FAULT.

The solution is for our care for them to let us serve their interest in caring for their homes and families at risk. That MIGHT trigger a realization that they need to fund all our cares for the future rather than deny our care and fund its ever-faster destruction. We’d be in good company then, as ALL natural and human systems that survive their growth exit growth that way, by shifting from extraction to care.

I wish I could attend some of tomorrow’s key Pollination & Ecocivilization meetings (ref below). I’m generally available to talk or consult. Would you pass the word that I’d love to help writers to write up some of this? I’m a scientist who writes and needs to connect with writers who do some science.

Here are links that go in-depth, from a humanistic natural systems view, Three talks with links in the prefaces.
– Language as a knowledge tree for systems *in context* (last week)
– How Natural Growth Makes New Lives – Opportunistic Paths to Smooth Sailing (2022)
– The Surprising Design & Steering of Whole Systems (2021),

All the very best,

Jessie

Jessie Henshaw  –   HDS natural systems design science     ¸¸¸¸.•´ ¯ `•.¸¸¸¸
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Research Journal — Reading Nature’s Signals — Publication

Regeneration Pollination will be hosting its regular session (on our regular zoom link) this Friday in parallel with the Ecocivilisation 24-hr Connectathon that starts on Sept 22nd at 14:00 UTC. In addition, Regeneration Pollination will be hosting a 1 hr session pre-event (9/22 @ 13:00 UTC) and post-event (9/22 @ 14:00 UTC), which will be on the zoom link used for the Connectathon.  Register for the Connectathon here and join us for the pre-and post-event session here: https://us02web.zoom.us/j/8206

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We have more than one problem

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Thinking about the global crisis, the people who feel it think so differently than those who don’t, and the solutions of the latter seem to be at the very root of the problem (problem A).

We need solutions that would work in practice. That would take a real understanding of the problem and its origins. Easy-sounding solutions only mention the endpoint and skip how the process of getting there starts and develops. Decentralizing the economy, for example, sounds good but would also destroy the economy, as every product today physically comes from everywhere! Social values can make excellent design principles, but they are not system designs. We have many good designers and managers, too, but they are not doing the job needed today. So “problem A” seems to be that our system designers and managers are following century-old rules that today have become globally destructive. That implies that changing their jobs is more important than changing the people. We still need the same talents but doing the right things.

That presents a huge but possibly practical challenge. The people we’d need to communicate with are largely very communicative and, from their view, caring. It’s our world culture of wonderfully educated, risk-averse, and successful professionals from good families – who steer the world’s institutions and economy while also being blind to the side effects of their steering. They even call the existential threats they cause “externalities” and don’t know what to do about them. In truth, those so-called externalities are internal system breakdowns caused by our long history of applying Many Too Many Solutions while Blind To The Side Effects.

This cream of the world crop of educated professionals is NOT intentionally blind to their impacts, now destroying the earth at the economy’s maximum rate of acceleration. They also do have access to the data on the global system breakdowns. However, their thinking is in terms of the CONCEPTS of their work (simple models of profit), not noticing how their choices became disconnected from their CONTEXTS (the rich meanings of all the living worlds they touch). So, the problem is they don’t-feel-a-thing.

Feelings and their meanings come from contextual awareness, not abstract concepts. So blind to the effects of their work, they blindly follow the outdated rules to multiply everything that was once highly creative but now is quickly destroying the earth. Yet, if you get to know them personally, it is quite ironic how they do largely seem to be caring, responsible people. They’re from good families and try their level best to secure their homes and care for their communities. Those ironies present are where the openings for real communication are!

So, how do we get them to look at different rules to follow, like for the rest of us, please “pay attention to the planet.” There are two necessary parts to freeing professionals from their “true beliefs” and opening their eyes. (((#1 One is experiential.))) Someone needs to personally lead them out to explore the world and have direct experiences of the natural beauty of life spoiled by rising global demands and dysfunction that urgently need relief from growing pressures and good care. (((#2 Another is mining deeper cultural knowledge.))) Caring for your home is as deep a tradition as any in human cultures, but our elite professionals have totally lost track of it in wildly shaping (and reshaping) our world.
The first link shows some history of what happened to cause the blindness of experts to develop. It implies the task is to help the world’s leadership recover their ability to care for the earth as our genuine home, and NOT a concept (a). It helps to see the breadth of our crises (b). a) https://synapse9.com/signals/bronze-age-roles-of-hestia-and-hermes/
b) https://synapse9.com/_r3ref/100CrisesTable.pdf

They’d never do most of the wrecking crew work they do if they followed the customary practices of “homemaking” or if you prefer “home science.” They are fairly simple and reliable practices for 1) having wide awareness and 2) respecting common interests that we all follow in our homes. We all follow them when doing tasks, too, at home, at the office, or in the community. They are the same as the universal system-making model nature follows for Making Things To Fit The Context. When making changes, it starts with building on some idea, “confluence,” or inspiration of nature. When activated, it becomes the ‘germ’ of a new working system that grows as fast as it can at first. Then it sometimes passes the test of when and how to stop.

The universal test is simple, taking resources from growth for Responding To The Growing Needs Of The New System as those needs start competing with the values of more expansion. An endless expansion gives a system more to take care of (and more complexity that prevents it) than is manageable; a fatal problem. When making dinner, for example, the natural turning point is when you have collected and started preparing what is needed and then turn to finishing and gracefully serving. That must be before you startup too much to finish. That turn from starting to completing a design process also happens when new organisms become fully formed and ready to start learning about their new world. That occurs at birth for mammals when the new life starts to explore with family support for a while as they “fledge” and then be freed. People call it “youth” and “graduate,” the preparation and point of leaving the nest.

So, communicating to professionals about their ignorance threatening the planet is a dicey proposition. That is helped by really knowing what you’re talking, protesting, or singing about. Since negativity usually reinforces opposition, it helps to take a caring rather than aggressive approach.

A good example of that came up with the US supreme court starting to take away universal rights. The idea of forcing the country to adopt radical Christian Right (CR) values by packing the court came from their decades-long quest. Now it looks like there may be more to come than denying every woman’s right to privacy in their reproductive choices. Every living thing on earth needs individual and home privacy, though, so it seems to violate nature to deny it to others unless you are seriously injured.

So to turn that all around, ask: “What in the world happened to the CR to make them feel so directly harmed” And why was the only solution to deny the world around them universal rights??”
Were they feeling an egregious loss of their home and privacy? The world around them has indeed been changing ever faster (due to problem A). The threat of ever faster change around their very fixed beliefs could have made them feel alienated, without a secure home anymore, and only able to think of lashing back? That makes it plausible that sympathy could sometimes be a better tool than antagonization, and of course, it would go both ways.

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JLH

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System change? It’s also birthing new lives

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from One community Global: Living In a New World
https://www.onecommunityglobal.org/living-in-a-new-world/

A comment on a post by Joss C.  for an Offering of tools for systems change on the Systems Innovation Network, a quite beautifully done Systems Innovation Starter Kit for which courses are offered.

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Yes, quite nice work. I think learning how natural systems develop and change as wholes seems needed too, though.  We are often easily confused by how easy it can sometimes be to change the parts of systems we want to change as a whole. Systems generally develop as wholes and change as wholes, though, of course, unless broken up. Learning how to foster whole system change often comes from attempting to engineer some living system, to then see it fail over and over, learning how from experience by deep emersion in the context to understand its needs.  That’s often how businesses evolve, by the deep emersion of its people in creating order from the chaos their first attempts cause. That’s still likely to happen, but might be made easier if people studied how actual systems emerge and change. 

Real system change is more like the birth of a child, something developing as a whole and emerging as a whole, to then find it has to actively explore and adapt to find its place in the world.  That applies to the birth of new ideas for new kinds of organization within a business, for or in a community, or in the world.  It always first starts with the germination of its growth, then development and maturation on the way to having a life. Each stage is a unique challenge and experiential learning and growth process. The first creates its insides and then develops its relationships outside, to fit with the environment it emerges into. 

What we’re struggling with globally is, of course, moving the world system in a profound and dramatic way. Though it is very different from learning to personally host and guide the birth of innovations in our work to fit their contexts there is a lot about global change we can learn from it. For a global change, we need to recognize first that we are not in control of much at all. Secondly, we need to recognize that systems are systems primarily because they are self-controlled, work as wholes, and though they have flexible parts and do often change by themselves, they really ONLY change as wholes and not by pushes and shoves, but by themselves something like we do. 

That’s where it’s useful to study our experience with systems that change by themselves, our groups, friends, communities, selves, and children are things we know a lot about. There are only a few ways an outside approach can help, or hinder. For systems that one is part of one can spread the feeling of the pressures and any useful knowledge of opportunities for a whole to change on its own. There are often places where a developing whole system awareness is not getting through, and different forms of whole system awareness are needed. That is what seems to prepare a system for some sort of inspiration of its own, sometimes called “animal spirits,” that trigger whole system change, in a direction that motivates the whole. 

We see it in our own behavior, as with what makes us overcome habits and do something new. It takes deep and ultimately inspiring feelings. If you think about change moments for other things, other words for it might come up, but it’s one or another kind of holistic response to awakening and opportunity. It needn’t be awakening due to growing life-threatening pressures, but we do hope indeed they will help motivate and inspire our world. When the system awakens to the opportunity it triggers the animal spirits to be felt by and move the whole.  

Of course, that is IF successful. Let us hope that’s what humanity will have in mind to do as push comes to shove and the terrifying game of “chicken” we keep playing with ourselves, of using power to multiply power as a way of life, finally breaks.  

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jlh

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Betrayed by the power of our minds

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The radical separation of humans from nature, our being so self-absorbed and seeing nature as defined in our heads rather than the other way around, has been a deep mystery for a long time.

My interest in it came from noticing how mathematics became our standard for representing nature but cannot describe or help us study what makes life so lively, the abounding creative processes of nature.

I’m not against math, a fabulous art, that does help us identify certainties, however, our desperate search for certainty is what seems to have betrayed us, splitting our minds between attentiveness and total blindness to our environments, having defined in our minds nature as our rules for how to control nature…

A general systems theory and demonstration of the problem and solutions are to be presented on Jul 9 at 3:30 at the 2022 ISSS world systems science conference. See the preprint Holistic Natural Systems – Design & Steering – Guiding New Science for Transformation.

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First Openings

The search for answers in mathematics, the language of determinate relationships that science uses, has proved extraordinarily profitable, leading to growing human comforts that have also taken us to the point of our increasingly destroying the natural world. Our mysterious detachment from nature seems very directly at fault. The animation of life, its rich relationships, and creativity are all left out of the formula when people are guided by determinate rules. It’s something I’ve long studied as a physicist, having first noticed that every event begins and ends with some little dynamic transient of change.

I think part of the problem is that language was actually reflected our first highly useful systems thinking, with all its words and grammar arranged to communicate important experiences, designs, and relationships IN THE NATURAL CONTEXT. Math makes rules abstracted from a natural context, that are most profitable when offering easy ways to control nature without concern for the context. So they work great but pass on no information on when they are being overused. That is as clear in the simple cases and most extreme cases, such as the world consensus plan to maximize our economic growth rate, for regularly doubling the wealth we extract from nature while ignoring its rapidly degrading impacts on nature, called “externalities.”

But who is it that is blind to what, and how in the world do we face an existential dilemma evidently buried so deep in human consciousness?

Finding the right path forward

We see humanity’s deeply split personality, generous and playful as well as obsessed with expanding our control of the world but need to find its source. Then we will finally begin to make progress, to slowly dig our way out of the terror our powerful minds seem to have created for us. Somehow we allowed our truly wondrous designs to create a new world of enormous cruelty, following their promise of relieving nature’s cruelty. That’s definitely happening, and definitely not good.

One of the paths to a cure could come from studying the differences between how people behave in one or the other way. We might then cure the blind way of abusing our powers by restoring the principles of staying in touch with environmental contexts. The direct approach, helping others immerse themselves in the natural environments they are in trouble with, works great using an experienced teacher. The living systems scientist like Ostrom or Midgley do it by lead communities through a process of exposure to how their worlds work, leading to their making much better choices.

As parents we also talk to our kids that way too, helping them to understand problems of insensitivity to others. Every good family does that, but the children still grow up to follow the rules of maximizing growing profits and ignoring the economy’s ever-growing impacts. That very clearly defines the split between how people behave in familiar contexts, where they can feel the strains on relationships, and in the public sphere where they don’t. In the public sphere rules for profit give people only feelings of self-interest and blind them entirely to the enormous building strains in the wider world’s relationships.

I’m not saying that is the only strong force causing humanity’s spiritual separation from life, but one we can see plainly enough to realize we very much need to act on it, despite the difficulty of communication that recognizing errors in our plans naturally creates.

Modern society presents other special problems of communication too, confronting us with thousands of self-serving silos of narrow beliefs, personal, social, religious, national, and professional. I look at them all as “cultures,” the “cells of knowledge” we build to guide us on how to think, work, live, and talk to give us some local sense of security in a confusing world. Cultures are also a saving grace as well as a way to divide us, given how most are deeply rooted in what worked in the past, with authentic copies passed on from generation to generation.

Of course, individual people have individual saving graces too, to use in helping us climb out of the trap we find ourselves in. Some have vision, steady hands, charisma, moral clarity, persistence, or wonderful person-to-person good hearts. Those don’t come from theories of control, that betray our powerful minds. They come from the opposite, from our loves and cares largely cut out of the public sphere by the rules we blindly follow. Saving graces in our institutions seem harder to find. We mostly built them around ideas of expanding control or being funded by it, not on learning how to make free associations work well.

What it seems we need to rely on is family culture and their central one for all and all for one life agreement. I’d include in that both the home and work families we center our lives on, which generally make us acutely aware of the non-verbal as well as verbal cues indicating openings and strains on our relationships. That is the very kind of environmental awareness that enables our personal and family survival instincts.

That is what seems most missing from the public sphere institutions, seemingly blinded by following abstract rules rather than navigating relationships with the world. It’s not even that the world doesn’t act as a whole. It certainly can and does, as you see in the effect of managing a global economy to work as a whole. To feel where the world is going, and change our collective steering, we’d need to count all the global strains we have not been counting.

An Experimental Partial List of the mostly uncounted growing strains on our relationship with life.
The Top 100+ World Crises Growing With Growth
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(note on the home science of Hestian proto-Greek culture now the new post: Bronze Age Roles of Hestia and Hermes

JLH

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Good people cooperating for evil*

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*A recovered Sept 2013 draft somehow never published
Cooperation makes us feel good socially, whatever else we don’t control may be done with it.

Dwight Eisenhower approached the question from the usual perspective in his 1960 address to the Commonwealth Club of California, quoting the club’s statement of purpose saying:

“California suffers greatly because the best elements of the population fail to cooperate for the common good as effectively as the bad elements cooperate for evil purposes.”

He then goes on to eloquently advocate and express confidence in the higher purposes of American society to heal our troubled world, to bring peace and justice to the world.   But life is not a simple contest of good and evil.  That’s a simple problem to solve, just let people join the side doing good.

What seems mistaken is portraying the evil of the world as being an absence of people doing good.   As with the German holocaust of the 1930s and 40s. It is historically common for people who feel themselves to be doing good to then lose control of their societies, not realizing till much later they were doing great evil.   In authoritarian societies, the leader commonly appears misled by the results of using their power to multiply their power, unaware of how very societally destructive their own behavior will become.   That mechanism also applies to investors and governments now using wealth to multiply wealth, unaware of how destructive to the earth that will become.   For the people in the societies doing the growing harm, like ours, “life seems normal”.

The larger difficulty is a “problem of normality”.

It’s almost too offensive for people to consider that their own good intentions and their own good feelings of cooperation in working together for the common good could be susceptible to evil.   Examples of societies acting in complete contradiction to their own cultural values, and people having their good intentions twisted to evil purposes, seem like they must apply to “someone else”.

The author of the 2006 paper, Emergence and Evil, in the systems science journal E: CO, nicely documents in intimate detail how teams of good scientists, while living very normal academic & professional lives, also devoted their talents to making smallpox more contagious than it naturally is, for use as an efficient weapon. That is a hideously evil thing to do. The Soviet biological weapons program is also well studied from other views, usually addressing it from the simplistic “good v. evil” perspective. The real problem was good AND evil, a true evil that is not so simple, one taking the reader inside what true evil is. You find how very “normal” it is and how “good as evil” is the real problem behind people cooperating socially for evil purposes, like destroying the earth.

Working energetically for what we hate

That your social relations within a society “can feel good” while your labors are “doing evil” is the problem.

There’s some kind of “disconnect” between what makes us feel good about our work,  that fools us about the nature of what our societies are doing as a whole are doing with it. As soon as you realize the nature of the relation, it’s fairly obvious why it’s a problem. It’s that the cells of an organism have a completely different environment from the body, and as cells of the human body, people are rather unobservant.   That seems to be the “disconnect.” The cells of a body have their common genome that helps guide each one to act in the interest of the whole, but for quite a number of reasons, our social lives don’t have that for our societal lives.

Continue reading Good people cooperating for evil* →

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How ‘Natural Growth’ can save the world.

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Without thinking we use natural growth for many common tasks already, simply by starting things to finishing them with a minimum of waste. In each case you “save the world” from needless excess consumptive growth in getting things started, wasting your efforts and the earth’s other natural and human resources.

Every kind of life, and kind of effort too, begins with building up a system of demands for available resources,
to further expand on what built up before.

That expansion by building on what was built is the universal start-up process of nature, also sometimes called “extractive growth.” You see it very clearly in every kind of start-up, of a new friendship, a business, a career, a seedling or a life from a fertilized egg. The all start with steps that build up from what was built before. The build up that making breakfast starts with, for example, begins with the idea of food that makes you hungry, that then gets you to reach into the cupboard, and refrigerator for supplies, and the drawer or shelf for utensils, building a customized system and supplies for making your meal.

Nature’s integral; chaining start-up growth & refinement growth in preparing for a good life.

That process could go wrong, the way mankind’s way of using technology to multiply our making of things on earth exploded, and we now don’t seem to know how to stop. In making breakfast it might similarly go wrong if you got carried away taking out provisions. You might start with a small idea of what you need from the fridge, and add to that bigger ideas as you explore what there is to take out, repeating it to exhaustion perhaps, till the fridge and cupboards, pantry, and cellar, are emptied and all the family’s provisions in reach are mounded on the kitchen and dining-area floor, as you get hungrier and hungrier and your eyes expand way beyond the limit of your stomach, putting nearly all the family’s provisions to waste. The particular outcome is rare, but it is very true that once you get going with growing a process of growing, the process itself can become addictive. Today we clearly see in how we are wasting the earth in somewhat the same way, and love to be moved to tears and laughter by watching Disney’s Fantasia when Mickey Mouse learns turn his chores over to his broom with a magic spell, which gets tragically carried away carrying water.

starting things to finish them with a minimum of waste

Of course, we don’t usually behave that way at all, but at some point near the beginning of taking out provisions to use, switch to thinking about how to get to end of having a satisfying meal. We almost never have the exact end in mind either, but perhaps initially take out eggs and cheese to perhaps put them back and take out bread for toast and milk for cereal if you’re in a hurry. As you put things together you also do various smaller and smaller things you discover to do, to perfect the end result while also arranging the timing to get all the parts to come together at once, with excess provisions put away, all part of getting ready to sit down, perhaps with together with others in the family.

In doing that, rather than letting the initial provisioning of breakfast get carried away, we have “USED NATURAL GROWTH TO SAVE THE WORLD,” most often without really realizing what an enormous contribution to the community and your family was done by simply not maximizing the waste of all available provisions in the process of making breakfast. Of course, it’s also important to do and to watch for in other circumstances, a natural duty for living in a commons.

It seems like a little thing but is actually a very big thing,
that we casually do for ourselves and others
many times every day

that we casually do for ourselves and others many times every day

People are plenty smart enough to see that this “RULE OF NATURAL GROWTH” (also called “nature’s integral“), to finish up what you’ve started up doing before you make a mess for yourself and others, should also apply to civilization as a whole, and at every scale in-between. People do see that ALL development creates disaster risks, for example, and that boundless development would always creates an all-consuming disaster. Our minds still “get in the way” somehow, transfixed by fantasies it seems, and we just trundle along on the clear path to that all consuming disaster not knowing what else to do.

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How this would save the world is really something quite plausible. We already see in progress a great “change of heart” by businesses and investors around the world to join in on averting the clearly disastrous future now directly ahead of us. If that initiates a wave of common sense, with business and investors choosing to follow the wave of the “impact investing” community, averting the looming crises in the most direct way possible, and with much less government involvement. Following that wave of necessity to avert disaster would also turn our world onto the natural growth path for perfecting how we use the earth. You could ask yourself and others to join the wave! The choices of higher purposes include the Green Climate Fund, supporting various SDG goals. The real, macro-economic effect is to distribute wealth in the service of higher purposes while directing profits away from concentrating wealth and raising the economy’s ever growing demands on nature and humanity.

Various other journal entries here discuss more about “what to do”, there’s a whole category with dozens of good little articles and discussions of it. Still, the best way to learn about it is for yourself, from watching how all of life revolves around the variations in nature’s integral, seeing for yourself how ‘start-up’ processes yield to ‘end-up’ processes in taking things to the natural climax of releasing them for their useful life.