Category Archives: Natural systems

scientific methods & principles for natural systems research

Mail & Comment, Natural Economy, Natural systems, Policy discussion, What to do

UN OWG-5 statements – SDG’s missing some signals

December 5, 2013 mothernature Leave a comment

Last week was unusually successful for me at the UN, or felt that way. The increasing openness of the process, and my good luck in finding socially acceptable ways to stay it, both helped me. So I was able to bring small flashes of light to the deeper kinds of issues about “What to Do with the Earth” that the UN is continuing to expand it’s discussion of,..

toward defining the world’s “Sustainable Development Goals”

It’s really an amazingly broad discussion of every aspect of how the “world we want” should work, a truly impressive effort, well, of course still leaving out the things that we are culturally blind to and at the same time feverishly looking for to save our necks in a terrible situation Here are three of my statements for OWG-5, and capsule assessment of the UN’s Technical Support Team briefs for OWG-6 for framing everyones terms of discussion for the issues.

Yes, but can we REALLY now have energy and equity for all?

Macroeconomics – of ever increasing inequity
More Energy – for ever growing demand
Mismatched measure – impacts missing from responsibilities
Using the economy’s own steering not mentioned

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1. OWG5 Scheduled 11/25 intervention Macroeconomic Policy (circulated)

Promoting growth at the limits creates severe increasing, not decreasing, inequities

The great variety of urgent SDG’s being discussed are truly desirable, but can only be somehow addresses together.

Monday morning Bernbadette Fischler offered a model that seems consistent with cost estimates for doing all this, that the SDG’s might for a period cost 2% of the income of the over developed economies to kick start the growth of the underdeveloped economies.

Say that worked. We’d then have 100% of world population using modern technology, adding their earnings to their investments to drive more growth, and so ever increasing competition over the earth’s shrinking resources too, adding even more strain on both people and planetary boundaries. Continue reading UN OWG-5 statements – SDG’s missing some signals →

Mail & Comment, Natural systems, Scientific theory

Natural Systems.. meet many worlds of Cultural Reality

December 3, 2013 mothernature Leave a comment

I got a strong “like” from Mark Stahlman to my comment on Real-World Economic Review – issue no. 65. that led to A great longer discussion on the Cultural Anthropology of Knowledge on Open Anthropology . We start a series of excerpts, mostly my writings, with my comment to the economics review journal. J.L. Henshaw (@shoudaknown) commented in response to Edward Fullbrook’s “New Paradigm Economics” :

Culture was always what defined our realities, till we had to deal with multiple cultures, and found our selves confused.

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1. JLH Comment to Ed Fullerbrook 10/6/13: –

A Solution that leaves out much of the problem

Edward, Regarding your new paradigm. I’m a natural systems scientist who has spent a lot of time on the puzzle of how economics became so detached…

I certainly applaud your effort to describe a new paradigm for economics, and see your approach as having the right intent and to be quite elegant in how you construct it. It still overlooks why natural systems will invariably depart from even the most faithful effort to describe them mathematically.

It’s that 1) natural systems change how they’re organized, and so how they behave, ALL the time, 2) all natural systems originate from a growth process in which they change how they work ever faster, to then change form, and 3) by ignoring #2 the present paradigm is to manage a world of systems that all expand and become ever more unmanageable over time. It’s “impractical”.

What I think this exposes is a very basic flaw in our conception of nature. It seem to be coming directly from our attempts to define nature conceptually (treating nature as rules that we control), rather than using the rules we find to help us learn about it. What we have is an ever changing world, full of complex living natural and cultural systems we need to interact with, that are inventing new behavior all the time and fundamentally out of our control. From there I’m not sure what would help you understand my approach, as my terminology is likely to ‘sound funny’.

Continue reading Natural Systems.. meet many worlds of Cultural Reality →

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Nature’s Capitalism: “Homemaking” now, not competition over shrinking pies!

November 20, 2013 mothernature Leave a comment

This post is for the UN’s OWG 5 proceedings next week, on Post2015 Macro Economic development positions. It led to the OWG 8 proposal “A World SDG“, introducing an integrated true scientific measure of sustainability... It’s now followed with “The Decoupling Puzzle – a partial answer” , on measuring our “decoupling rate”, and the development space reserved within planetary boundaries, such as for achieving world cultural wellbeing!

Sadly, as careful as I am with the language, there is some scientific thinking… so the social organizations generally found no way to engage in discussing it. The basic principle is that “when you build something you then need to take care of it”… something everyone knows in their personal lives. That runs into the problem that, culturally, we don’t see economic growth as “building something”. We see it culturally as a “constant” of prosperity… the ultimate tragedy of our times. that ever faster change is seen as “constant” it seems. 4/21/14 jlh

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As a young systems scientist many years ago

I noticed a need for a better type of economic model,

that would connect money to its “externalities” in part. More importantly it would let people see economies as the complex living organisms they really are. What I found was the universal stages of natural development, that are repeated in the way any natural event or system develops from small beginnings to multiply at first, and then by multiplying in it’s environment changes it, an Organizational Stages Model (OSM)

Economies are chock full of independently organized and behaving social and cultural communities behaving like organisms, that each develops from a seed of organization in an environment of resources. You can talk about “why” things occur, causes at a distance or coincidences but that’s an intellectual issue, a prediction, a theory.

This is about using the most general of pattern of “how” individual events occur the processes of developmental causation taking place in nature in every location where events occur.

Economies, for example, are all populated by actively creative and learning people, discovering things and following each other’s leads…. So what this “Organizational Stages Model” (OSM) approach focuses on for economies is how people learn and how what they learn to do spreads as transformational stages of growth and the emergence of new systems, and their natural limits. The simple rule, for the transformative stages of any process of new emerging organization, then, is that it’s organizational process will follow an “S” curve. The first half is of multiplying innovation and expansion of connections, a “burst of development”, and the second a process of rebalancing and integrating.

That’s the dynamic we need to capture in our minds to understand the world we live in. An economy is really a whole “civilization” in fact, organized like an ecosystem, accumulating and passing on its knowledge of “how to live” in the form of family and social cultures, as the living “genetic code” of the societies they create. THAT is what the word “growth” refers to, the compound rates of expansion of that whole organic living culture.

As systems of nature, all those living parts and the whole, first grow and then mature to live and later decline
by very much the same succession of life’s great transformative experiences.

The ultimate most useful model for it I found is really cool! It’s organized as “a Narrative of Life” as a great chain of instrumental transformations. I’ve been looking for a name for my life’s work on it.. perhaps “Life Narrative Studies” (LNS) would do. I won’t further introduce it here, as it’s what my whole site is about, but just present this new graphic to help readers get a feel for the general pattern.

Organizational Stages Model (OSM)

______________ Continue reading Nature’s Capitalism: “Homemaking” now, not competition over shrinking pies! →

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In two words… what defines “science”?

September 21, 2013 mothernature Leave a comment

It’s “asking questions”, of course ( silly! ;-).

Science is also about asking particular kinds of questions, so you’d be missing a lot if you didn’t also ask “What kinds of questions is that?”… and end up getting to the “big picture” by asking “But then,… doesn’t any question both open your mind to one thing and close it to another?”

So that more precisely defines science is a kind of “open territory” of all the kinds of questions one might ask, hoping to find ones that are particularly “informative” and give us unexpected “insight”, while keeping us clear of “jumping to conclusions” and other pitfalls. It’s a long process of bending our minds to fit the world we seem to be part of, finding ways to both “get along” and to bend the world to suite us, guided by the landscapes, pathways, open skies and hidden traps of “understanding” and “misunderstanding”,talking to “busybodies” and “not so busy bodies”, that one finds traveling beyond “The Phantom Tollbooth” (ref the Juster & Pfeiffer masterpiece).

the question is...?

What have you been wondering about…?

One of the very most informative and useful questions I ever asked is “What is nature hiding from us?”. That question came to me about 25 years after my first highly productive question of the kind. which was “what makes life so lively?” I’ve had SO much fun with both those questions I really cannot tell you! I don’t feel compelled to “look under every leaf and stone”, but having asked those two questions, using them as a kind of “lens” for studying what’s happening around us, it has made it quite likely that in any natural hiding place I look I’ll find traces of things “making life lively” as a way to study what they’re doing and how, along with leading questions about where they’re headed. Continue reading In two words… what defines “science”? →

Natural Economy, Natural systems, Policy discussion, Popular, Stories & Experiences, Transformation, What to do

A Hestian Map – the sacred hearth not at home in an authoritarian world

September 19, 2013 mothernature 1 Comment

I’ve been having a very exciting time discovering and building on the many connections between my scientific method for studying the development and organization of Natural Systems, and the wonderfully radical scientific feminism of Pat Thompson’s “Hestian Home Economics” (1,2,3). They both center on what is at the heart of the liveliness of natural systems, the living culture and the home it makes for itself in its environment. The protector of that home and hearth fire for the families of pre-ancient Greece was Hestia, the first of foremost of their personal archetypes of divinity, charged with protecting the **SACRED FIRE of HEARTH AND HOME**. From a physical science of natural systems much the same can be said for the continuity any systems “seed of self-organization” around which it has developed its way of using the energy resources of its environment. Same statements, two different wonderfully interconnected languages! ;-)

To pre-Aristotelian Greek culture HESTIA was the first of the children of Cronus, charged with the first duty of civilization, protecting the sacred flame of hearth and home. In how families still work today, that’s the continuity of their living culture, their ability to exercise their family traditions and practices, inheriting and passing on it’s joys and forms of knowing, adapting to their changing world as a bridge between their generations. It’s that CONTINUITY, then, that IS the living flame of a family home and the animating heart of any living culture, the *cont-in-uity* it develops and follows as it branches out, forming new expressions, that hav always been, and clearly still are today, the center of human life, the foundation of all our cultures. They are today also *quite threatened*, by our devotion to rules for demanding ever more productivity from these living cells that make our lives lively, driving everything sacred to us toward “make bricks without straw”, as it were, for the sake of misunderstood authoritarian rules…!

1) for her books look up “Patricia Thompson, Hestia” on Amazon. 2) PDF of Pat’s simpl e scientific systems thinking, that unlike virtually all other systems theories other than mine has living things and their archetypal living roles, included not excluded 3) How she deconstructs Roman historian Fustel’s history of Greek culture, that replaced the original (Hestian) cultural language with a commercial (Hermian) dialectic.

Let’s look at the territory,

and the basic maps of home economics and political economics

The basic map of home economics is a work of caring for the home culture.

For political economics it’s the battle in the public sphere to gain advantage over others. Pat Thompson calls them “Hestian” and “Hermian” systems, after the representative Greek gods, and we need to understand the action principles defining them.

The primary duty of the home maker, considering a family as a link on a chain of living culture, is to be the guardian of its flame of life and continuity as a culture. Its living culture illuminates the home with its light and life, as the home serves as the commons within which the family culture inherits and passes on its traditions as family members live for each other, sustaining an “all for one” life of a true commons (Hestian culture). Continue reading A Hestian Map – the sacred hearth not at home in an authoritarian world →

For teachers, Natural systems, Research & Measures

A “Commons“ is…

September 10, 2013 mothernature Leave a comment

A “Commons“

….Is a place, where

An organic culture

defines and makes its home

as its defensible and public space
for its communities of participants

serving as a “hive” for its internal relationships

usually as inclusive and equitable interconnections
(everyone to everyone)

serving as a “hub” for its external relationships

with its local niche of ecological partners
with its open environment
(exploratory connections)
with and networks of remote exclusive connections
(one to one)

As its “Niche” in the world and “living space”.

… for example

A “body” is a commons for its cells

But bodies are organized differently than their cells, each needing to be part of a different culture

A “town” is a commons for its villagers

But every town develops from its unique circumstance, so the usual patterns associated with the words are really questions about the individual thing

A “nest” is a commons for its family or swarm

Living things need to sleep, and make secure places where they can “tune out” at night, to reemerge refreshed.
and so too the organizations of a commons, that come to a rest at night, to awake refreshed by the reflections of rest.

The Earth is a commons for life Continue reading A “Commons“ is… →

For teachers, Natural systems, Stories & Experiences, Transformation, Uncategorized

Hay… We finally made the move !

September 10, 2013 mothernature Leave a comment

1948_NearTimlof- This NY blog is real glad the WordPress tools are so portable!! We moved from servers in the Mid-West to ones in Virginia today! I have more to say than time to write, and another website to build, or well… that’s the plan. Plans change a lot.

I’ll probably keep just working on the “knowledge bridge”, a tremendous labor of love for me I guess, slowly, slowly, learning how to speak to people in familiar natural language terms about the wonderfully beautiful but unfamiliar deep organization of the living systems. Why that’s possible is fascinating, that natural language actually evolved *by means of* referring to the working features of the complexly organized systems of life, as a “way to talk” about working with nature’s systems that we rely so heavily on them “just working by themselves”.

So… it really helps to notice that the meanings of our words really do originate from the natural meanings of the complex organizations of things in nature. It makes natural language, by default, a quite advanced sort of “organic systems theory”. All one needs to do is “just take a fresh look“, at the things our words already refer to in nature…

Using words like “friend” or “storm” or “house”, you both refer to common “word meanings” and also to the complex systems of familiar natural relationships that the words also refer to, along with how they work in the natural world as their “natural meanings”. It’s a way to pull your mind back to connecting with the natural meanings of things, and a fuller way to experience them. To enrich the “word meaning” with the “natural meaning” you just keep adding to your reflections on the things of nature as you experience your natural relationships with them.

among best, For teachers, Natural systems, Popular, Scientific theory, Uncategorized, What to do

Finding Organization in Natural Systems – “Quick Start”

August 7, 2013 mothernature Leave a comment

How Natural Systems Work… is by forming processes that produce a profit, used to grow it, in a burst of creative self-organization, to become sustainable ONLY IF the profits that built it get used to maintain what was built; the essential road map.

That general model of nature’s “facts of life” is your “quick start”. Following is a foreword and then a compact introduction to a scientific method. Anyone can observe the details of how developmental systems work by just learning to study the development of individual systems in nature. You start with learning how to identify natural “living systems” as what fills our environments from watching how they develop. Then you can recognize them as cells of organization that produce resources for their own development. Easier reading descriptions are found in:

“In a Nut Shell“ and Why ?¸¸.·´ ¯ `·.¸¸ The scientific method

How Natural Systems Fail… A growth system that can’t change to maintaining itself after building itself, becomes disabled. As for our modern world economy, at the limits of the earth, keeps devoting more and more effort to expanding, it drains resources from maintaining itself. What’s wrong is the essential road map for sustainability is missing. It is absent from our great cultural conversations, absent from the models of the professions and groups trying to stabilize the economy or seek “sustainability”.

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An Organizational Stages Model (OSM)

– the science –

Foreword: Understanding natural systems involves learning how to first recognize them as individually developing systems, and then discover some of the hidden organization within them. You can find them where you see events have “lives of their own”. The real learning is a “learning by doing” process, as the key is discovering how to define your words by referring to self-defining objects of the natural world, not defining words with other words or use abstract models.

Abstract languages are “self-referential” and what a science of natural systems needs is words defined by nature. To understand system models, then, you then need to consider them as questions about the real world subjects that are NOT in the model… but referred to by the words associated with the natural subject, a new way of scientific thinking.

Most any history of events will have periods of accumulating change that speed up and then slow down. That becomes the main subject, the key that unlocks the basket of productive questions about “what’s happening”. It’s the question that identifies a systematic process of change as a sign of a developmental process and evidence of a self-organizing system doing it.

When some local system of change is “taking off” or later “fading away”, you notice where it and begin piecing together what is doing it, by watching for regularly changing rates of change. It could be anything from the history of your own career choices, to the stages of organization for “the big prom”, the founding of your own business or the dramatic global shifts in economies and societies that “history” is itself a record of.

[This is a sample graph showing a real systemic transformation. Only the data is shown to focus your attention on the changing rates of change](i)

It definitely helps to have some kind of “data” to indicate when locally developing changes are speeding up or slowing down, and notice the turning point from one to the other. The different periods of behavior display different states of organization, and are used for “building a narrative ” for how one transitions into the next. The traditional scientific. For systems with hidden organization, it’s the continuity of change that is the direct evidence, of organization you can’t actually see, but can expect to find if you look there for it.

Continue reading Finding Organization in Natural Systems – “Quick Start” →

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3Step process for Working With Nature

July 3, 2013 mothernature Leave a comment

Now one of the natural systems learning processed under the heading of “Contextual Systems Engagement.” Make a proposal.

- A “Sustainability Learning” Proposal
- Jessie Henshaw – UN representative of IPS & scientific adviser to the NGO Commons Cluster on natural systems, in response to the UN Major Groups call for: “Crowd sourcing ideas for thematic areas and modalities of engagement for the one day intercessional with the Co-Chairs of the OWG and MGs and other Stakeholders”
- – “Experiential Learning” and “Transformative Education”,
- – For building bridges from deterministic, linear and Cartesian thought and word use, by exploring our observations of the environments and their living systems affecting our ideals.
- 1. As a Break-out Group Activity 2. Outline of the process 3. Other Formats
  4. Purpose & Theory behind it
  5. Why we rely on social networks to define our reality
  
  Added References: Draft Facilitator’s Guide& Typical “Public Pad” meeting template
  
  Foreword:
  Here I propose a meeting technique for small diverse groups of people to help enrich each other’s awareness of how their environments work and see what they have and need to work with to “work with nature”. Looking for the working parts the world around them, for how their own cultures work as systems that create their own economies, it might first seem they don’t know any more about that than they do about the weather. The trick is to shift attention from what’s hard to explain in our minds to noticing what’s going on and working all around us. PDF copy
  
  _________

1. Learning to Work with Nature: – as a break-out group activity –

A diverse work group of 6 to 20 people would be assembled, helped by a facilitator, needing about an hour to just go through the basic 3Step process. It’s NOT a discussion group, of people offering opinions, but a learning group of people offering connecting observations. During the session they’d need to be able to write as they talk, building on each other’s observations, starting from being given or choosing an ideal goal to work with.

They’d use that ideal to lead them on an exploration of what people in the group already know from observing their cultural, economic & ecological environments, sharing with each other things they’ve seen are happening that could affect achieving the ideal. The product is a large collection of freshly shared observations on what’s happening and how it connects; they’d need to work with to proceed to planning for investments in changing their environment.

a diverse circle — Drawing out each other’s observations on how things work

Continue reading 3Step process for Working With Nature →

For teachers, Natural systems, Research & Measures, Scientific theory, Stories & Experiences

Tricky Reading – the Indicator & the Context

July 2, 2013 mothernature Leave a comment

From a conversation on the Commons Abundance Network.

Of course I agree a lot is solved by having it clear what you are using the word “growth” to refer to. But it’s easier to figure out we *should* be clear about what is being referred to than to really do it. It’s so easy to fall into the trap of treating some “positive indicator” as the system, some changing number that “sounds nice” in name, to end up promoting something not knowing what the real situation is at all.

That’s exactly how the BAU approach to consuming the planet ever faster got off track, using a trusted set of indicators and not paying the least attention to how their meanings were changing radically over time. So, that philosophy’s “mistake” was not paying attention to the whole system it was applying its values to.

It’s so easy to fall into the trap of treating some “positive indicator”
as “the system”

False priorities develop are all over the place that way. Giving relief wherever there is pain and suffering, for example, ignores that injecting artificial supports just skews the indicator. It changes the ability of people to care for themselves in the wrong way, giving them dependencies rather than independence, and directly causes their own local cultures to become useless to them and decay.

Continue reading Tricky Reading – the Indicator & the Context →