Table of Contents for the longest ever posting to my blog

Announcing the Third Edition of Shifting/Seeing Nature

Snippets: Andromeda Galaxy unit

Toward a Commons culture

Offering A New Path

A dread seeped into me two years ago. It sucked my perceptions of the world downward. Dismay at how casually people predicted/anticipated civil war. Frustration at tepid, merely symbolic responses to climate change. Apprehension at the glut of normalizing dystopian stories and movies we were producing and consuming. Anguish for refugees dying in boats. Anger for the next generations already hobbled by student debt. Dread of a collapse of civilization and nature so global that the beautiful potential of this planet is set back millions of years.

How does one navigate such a broad, heavy onslaught of Dread? How can we make a difference against such global forces? A year into this increasing heaviness, a lesson I had learned decades ago emerged in a new context to give me a different perspective on my Dread.

It was a lesson from an eroding canyon I cherished. I wanted to save it from erosion so I tried building check dams to oppose storm runoff. In the midst of massive thunderstorms, I learned that it was better to spread the runoff out rather than trying to stop it. Trying to stop it simply overwhelmed and washed out my checkdams. Spreading it out slowed it down, giving more time and ground surface area for the runoff to soak into. “Offer a new path rather than opposing the old path” was the lesson.

“Offer a new path rather than opposing the old path.” How did that even apply to the Dread I felt? I didn’t know – but thinking about “a new path” over time began shifting what my mind sought and what it dwelt on. This shift in perspective led me to thoughts which have grown into this essay.

The Brown Tube and the Blue Sky

One day, as my class explored the woodlands along the Sacramento River, we came upon a seasonal pond among the cottonwoods and blackberries. A tan mist filled the shallow water along the pond’s edge. When we knelt down closer, the mist resolved into tens of thousands of swimming Daphnia (“water fleas”).

We went back the next day with two-way viewers so kids could scoop samples and look at the Daphnia through the magnifiers. The micro-crustaceans “paddled” their “antennae” while smaller appendages swept algae towards their mouths. Eyespots were visible. These Daphnia had translucent exoskeletons so we could also see their internal anatomy.

We could see their beating hearts and the next generation developing in brood pouches. Their digestive tracts ran through their bodies. At one end, the tubes were green with freshly-ingested algae which turned brown as it moved down through the tiny gut towards the anus. Every one of the thousands of Daphnia had a brown tube within it. We would find the same brown tubes if we looked within the earthworms underfoot or within the mosquito larvae soon to be emerging as adults or within ourselves. Brown tubes fueled the migration of the spawning salmon, now dying and drifting in the eddies of the Sacramento River. Their bodies will pass into the brown tubes of micro-crustaceans, flies, vultures, ravens and raccoons. In a few months, the salmon’s eggs will hatch and thousands of small fry will emerge, each with a brand new brown tube. On it goes, generation after generation, microscopic up to whale-size, brown tubes digesting other living brown tubes.

The brown tube shapes the bodies of us creatures with mouths. The mouth end is our “front” end because that is the direction we normally move – towards food. Our sense organs are “up” at that end so we can more accurately detect, grasp, and ingest other living things. Our anus is at the back end – the direction we move away from. We are not seeking that which emerges back there. Better to just leave it behind. Our bodies wrap around our brown tubes, giving us all a similar direction for our lives.

The Second Law of Thermodynamics shapes this direction we all share. The ingested living green algae turns to brown waste as it moves down the Daphnia’s tube because the Daphnia’s gut chemically extracts the algae’s energy for the Daphnia’s use. We live, day to day, by harvesting the energy within other living things around us. The Second Law says that energy “runs down”, becomes less useable over time. The energy that powers our lives is continually going down our brown tubes and must be replaced with “fresher” energy. We animals must harvest others if we wish to maintain our own metabolism and survive. If, at the same time, we can develop ways to avoid being harvested by others, then we can survive even longer, potentially leaving more offspring.

Long before consciousness evolved, Life had already evolved membranes that formed a boundary between a living thing and the world beyond. These defining membranes allowed a particular life to sustain itself by harvesting the world beyond, bringing part of it within and later excreting whatever remains back out to that world. Within these shaping membranes we experience the world in terms of “me” and all the rest – which includes trillions of other living organisms, some of which we must harvest if we wish to survive. I must take from them if I wish to continue. The Brown Tube must not run empty.

(I capitalize many words to denote they have acquired a deeper meaning for me that is not present in their daily use.)

However, there is also the truth of the blue sky we breathe. Blue; not the rust-colored sky of Mars or the sulfuric acid clouds of Venus. The sky’s beautiful glowing blue of oxygen reveals another truth about life.

*Liquid Oxygen Boiling – from Wikipedia*

Twenty-one percent of the air we breathe is oxygen. Oxygen is one of the most reactive elements in the universe. Liquid oxygen blasts our rockets to the Moon and beyond. Oxygen fuels forest fires. Oxygen combines with hydrogen to form water, combines with iron to create rust. In our lungs, our blood’s hemoglobin binds with oxygen and carries it to fuel the work of every cell.

Atmospheric oxygen (O₂) is so reactive that it should combine with everything it can, “disappearing” into oxides, and fading into insignificance like it has on Mars. But here on Earth, plants use the energy of the sun to split six molecules of water (H₂O) and six molecules of carbon dioxide (CO₂) and recombine them to form one large molecule of sugar (C₆H₁₂O₆) and six new molecules of atmospheric oxygen (O₂). Photosynthesis replenishes O₂ as other living things consume it, allowing the atmosphere to maintain 21% of itself as atmospheric oxygen.

Solar energy illuminates the space around us, powering our blue sky. Though the Second Law implies that energy must “run down” over time, it also allows new energy to enter a system and lift it upward into new possibilities – which the Sun has been doing for billions of years. A beautiful example is a baby growing within its mother’s womb, thanks to the umbilical cord which connects the baby to the Sun via the photosynthesized transfer of energy into the food the mother eats.

The harvesting of the Brown Tube and the life-created gift of the blue air we breathe feel like contrary directions, but the two together remind me of “Shoot the Moon,” a game that fascinated me as a child.

Widening the two rods seems the opposite of narrowing the two rods but when they alternate together in the proper rhythm, they can propel the steel ball upward against gravity. So it is with Life. When Life gets the rhythm right between the direction moving down the Brown Tubes and the direction glowing up in the blue sky, Life propels our planet Upwards into more possibilities. Life creates the Commons.

What is the Commons?

Different writers have different interpretations of the Commons. Here is what I mean within this essay. The Commons are anything
– that did not exist before life began,
– that life helped bring into existence and
– whose emergence helps create more possibilities for more life.

An example is soil. Before life, soil did not exist. Talus slopes piled up at the base of cliffs but they were not soil. Layers of sands and gravels covered some bedrock but these were not soil. All these forms of broken bedrock gradually crept and flowed downslope towards the sea — but they were not soil.

Life creates soil. Bacteria and algae coat grains of sand with slime, creating a “sponge” that absorbs some of the percolating rain water, slowing its flow. This allows the slimes to grow thicker. Slimes fill some of the gaps between particles, creating a network that adheres the fragments into something greater than themselves. This network of slime, living organisms, sand and water creates soil.

Gravels surrounded by a life-created slime spend more time within an aqueous chemistry which increases the rate at which these rock fragments break down into smaller fragments. Their breakdown creates more surface area for bacterial slimes to cover and retain more soil moisture. This allows vascular plants to colonize the soil. Their roots intertwine with the soil particles, holding them together so that this developing soil does not flow as fast back to the sea. The slowed soil “backs up” and deepens which allows more plant growth. As the plants decompose, their complex molecules are recycled within the soil by micro-organisms, creating more chemical possibilities that support more life. Soil, a complex structure of weathered rock fragments and air and water penetrated by billions of living bacteria, fungi, plants, and animals came into existence. The fertility of the soil became part of the Commons and developed the power to bring more possibilities into existence on Earth. The lushness of planet Earth testifies to this power.

Another example involves nitrogen. Atmospheric nitrogen (N2) makes up 78% of the air we breathe. But we can’t use it. We breathe it in, then breathe it back out unchanged. So it is with almost all living things. Atmospheric nitrogen is inaccessible. And yet, every cell of every living thing contains nitrogen in its proteins and DNA. Where does this cellular nitrogen come from? How did life get access to the nitrogen in the air?

We multi-cellular life forms are only possible thanks to single-celled bacteria that developed the ability to metabolize atmospheric nitrogen into ammonia two to three billion years ago. Other bacteria then evolved that can change the ammonia into other nitrogenous molecules that we multi-cellular bodies can chemically access to make possible those nitrogen-containing molecules essential to our lives. Bacteria helped bring ammonia into existence which eventually brought plants and animals into existence which can now create more possibilities for life. Useable nitrogen and our bodies are part of the Commons.

A wonderful example of this is the legumes, the large family of pea plants. Most of them have evolved nodules on their roots that are symbiotic with the nitrogen-fixing bacteria. The plants’ nodules provide protective, nourishing homes for the bacteria and these bacteria then metabolize into the surrounding soil more of the nitrogenous materials that the pea (and other plants growing in proximity) will use to grow more. Farmers plant clover, fava beans, vetch and other members as cover crops to enrich their soil. Industrial meat production is heavily dependent on alfalfa to provide the protein animals need to grow more meat.

Chemistry unlocked the understanding that all around us (including us) global flows of atoms are swirling into ever-changing molecular forms. The fundamental pattern of the Commons is of solar energy energizing these dancing flows, energizing Life to evolve ways to uplift the atoms into more complex forms that create new potentials.

Bacteria helped bring us into existence; what possibilities will we help bring into existence?

Strategies

When we examine the natural world around us from a Commons perspective, we find certain strategies with which life uses energy from the Sun to alter the flows of atoms over and over again to raise the Earth far above thermodynamic equilibrium.

Slowing Down and Backing Up
On a cold morning, when I put on a shirt that is as cold as the morning, I get shivery goose bumps for several seconds. But then the temperature next to my skin begins to warm and in a minute, the shirt feels warm against my skin. The shirt is not creating any heat. My body is generating the heat. The shirt is slowing down how fast that heat flows away from my body. The flow of heat “backs up” like water behind a dam and accumulates between my skin and the shirt, increasing the temperature of that thin layer of air right around me. I feel warm.

One important strategy for building the Commons is “backing up.” An implication of the Second Law, for example, is that water can not spontaneously flow uphill. If there’s an energy source, water can be pumped uphill. The Sun’s energy can evaporate water and lift it into clouds. But on its own, water can not flow higher in the gravitational field. It can only flow lower. However, the Second Law does not specify at what rate this flow must happen. If something slows this rate (just as my shirt slows the rate of heat flow from my body) then the flow of water will slow down and “back up.” The water level will rise which is not the same thing as flowing up. Slowing a flow so that it backs up is a powerful strategy Life uses for creating the Commons.

Beavers are backer-uppers. Beavers build stick and mud dams that back a stream up to form a pond. This backing up starts many sequences of cause and effect. More water-loving willows and other beaver-preferred plants can grow along the pond’s expanded perimeter. More willows fuel the births of more beavers who will spread and build more dams. Their ponds slow the stream flows, trapping silt. They slow snowmelt and buffer spring floods, reducing erosion. The ponds create habitat for fish, insects, amphibians, and other aquatic creatures which creates more prey which fuels more animals in the area surrounding the ponds. All of this change is part of the Commons. (Much of this flowed away in the early 1800’s when the mountain men trapped out the beaver to satisfy a beaver hat craze in the cities of Europe and North America. The mountain men dismantled a vital part of the West before most American settlers had even entered that part of the country.)

Similar to beaver dams backing up streams, plant roots bind and anchor soil that is slowly creeping downslope. Slowing this creep “backs up” the downslope flow of soil particles which deepens the soil so that it can hold more nutrients and moisture which can then support more life.

Surface area
Another powerful strategy is increasing surface area. Many rates are proportional to surface area. For example, mandibles and teeth bite and grind food into smaller pieces, increasing the surface area of the food so that more of it comes into contact with saliva’s digestive enzymes so that more of the energy within the food can be absorbed by the predator. On a more domestic note, I always cut up my pancakes before pouring maple slurp-up on. Cutting them up does not change the volume of pancakes but cut-up pancakes have far more surface area to soak up the slurp-up.

Earthworms “shoot the moon” in finding a sustainable balance between keeping their brown tube full and doing the work of creating more possibilities within the Commons. Their tunneling wedges apart soil fragments that would otherwise slowly compact. These tunnels offer quick paths for air and water to penetrate more deeply into the soil, aiding plant growth. As the earthworms tunnel, they ingest the small soil particles and digest the bacteria covering them. (More bacteria, however, are carried by the worm’s body slime into new areas of soil. Thus the tunneling worms both feed on the bacteria and help spread the bacteria.) The worms’ gizzards grind these soil particles into even smaller particles, increasing the soil’s surface area. The more surface area possessed by the soil particles, the faster the chemical rates of soil formation can proceed. Soil created the possibility of earthworms and then earthworms enhanced the power of soil.

Life’s ability to increase surface area is as obvious as the forest growing high above the ground, a forest rich in surface area. Surfaces that condense dew at dawn. The photosynthetic surfaces high in the trees absorb much of the direct sunlight before it ever reaches the ground. All the surfaces in the forest baffle and calm winds so that individual trees aren’t toppled by the winds as they might otherwise be. The accumulation of years of leaves and twigs form an absorbent, insulating duff beneath the trees that animals can burrow into.

The surface area of kelp forests beneath the surface of the sea is less obvious to us landlubbers. But if you watch a wave moving through a kelp bed, you can watch the wave’s energy being consumed pushing tons of pliant plant surfaces harmlessly back and forth. The relentless pounding surf gets domesticated into an energizing flow of oxygen bubbles and micro-invertebrate prey pulsing through tide pools. When the big storms do wreak havoc upon the kelp forests, tons of ripped-out kelp pile up on the beaches to be fed upon by swarming flies and their maggot children who will carry this gift from the sea into the air where it will feed many birds that will defecate the kelp’s atoms along the shorelines.

Carrying and Pushing Up
The creation of the Commons requires work. This is a fundamental implication of the Second Law. The Second Law limits the direction that things can “flow” spontaneously on their own. But it does not require that absolutely everything is always “moving down.” Things can move up if energy from elsewhere can be used to do the work of lifting it. Every plant that rises above the ground is an example of life lifting atoms upwards, closer to the plant’s energy source, the Sun.

A classic example of doing the heavy lifting work is salmon. Just as water can not flow spontaneously uphill, so too nutrients from the sea can not flow spontaneously upstream into the forests of the headwaters. But salmon, with their brown tubes, can harvest the Sun’s energy that was photosynthesized by oceanic plankton and then concentrated by micro-crustaceans and smaller fish. After several years of adding many pounds of nitrogen and energy rich meat, the salmon use some of that energy to swim upstream, against the flow. Returning to their birth streams, they fertilize and deposit their eggs and then, spent, die and drift into eddies and against shorelines. Some of their now-meat is consumed by micro-invertebrates who will later be eaten by the new generation of salmon that will be hatching. Most of the spent meat will be eaten by eagles and vultures, bears and otters that will then defecate that fertilizer throughout the riparian forests. The fertilized trees can grow taller, creating more shade which keeps the streams cooler which increases the amount of dissolved oxygen in the water so the hatching salmons’ gills take in more energizing oxygen. Salmon enhance the fertility of the forests and the forests enhance the fertility of the birth streams to which the salmon return to spawn and then die. It’s like the salmon help the forests in a way that allows the forests to help the next generation of salmon. An Upward Spiral.

Recycling
Slowing the water, backing it up, and spreading it out expands riparian habitat. This increases the amount of water being transpired through the leaves and lifted into the sky as water vapor which condenses into rain to fall on the land again. Enclose a leaf in a sealed plastic bag on a sunny day and soon a fine mist of condensation begins forming. This transpiration might seem insignificant at the leaf level but globally, more than half the precipitation that touches the land is water that transpired most recently from the land, not evaporated from the oceans. This additional rain allows more leaves to grow which increases the amount of moisture transpired back into the sky which leads to still more rain. The gift of fresh water from the sea is recycled and falls again almost two times before returning to the sea. That expansion of the water cycle from 11 inches a year from the sea to 27 inches overall has transformed what would otherwise be a planet of desert grassland into a planet of forests. The plants keep recycling the soil moisture, helping it remain high in the drainage rather than flowing quickly back to the sea. This greater abundance of recycled rain and the forests it nourishes form an Upward Spiral that helps create the Commons.

Species doing the Work of the Commons fill the world from deep in the soil up through the highest treetops up to life-created aerosols that act as cloud condensation nuclei. (The most important species in this work of the Commons are plants, bacteria and fungi but I will focus mostly on animals since they are doing the kind of work that we can do.) Using their brown tubes to harvest other living things around them, they use some of that energy to slow down, back up, lift up and recycle material in ways that create possibilities for more life. They create and maintain the Commons that they are part of and that they are dependent on.

We humans see much of the Commons as a given, just the way things are, and we take them for granted. But the Commons have emerged from the efforts of so many species over so many hundreds of millions of years. Things once seemingly impossible have become as common as the air we breathe, freely available to all . In our Second Law-shaped universe, creating and maintaining the Commons requires constant, ongoing work. The path upwards towards a Commons culture must foster a work ethic – but a work ethic different from the salary and profit-oriented work ethic we usually think of.

Feedback Spirals

The Commons are anything
– that did not exist before life began,
– that life helped bring into existence and
– whose emergence helped create more possibilities for life.

The heart of this definition is that the Commons arise through feedback spirals involving life, powered by the Sun. Feedback happens when cause and effect spiral together. The effect of a first cause becomes a second cause that creates another effect that eventually “feeds back” to effect the originating first cause.

For example, Scrub Jays harvest acorns, fly away and cache the acorns in the ground some distance from the mother tree. The jays don’t eat all of these cached acorns so some of them grow into trees. The jays help the oaks spread their range faster than the trees dropping acorns could do on their own. A wider range of oaks creates a wider habitat for future generations of Scrub Jays. This is a feedback spiral.

Feedback spirals are central to the path towards a Commons culture so I must spend some time describing feedback spirals. A Commons feedback spiral begins when life creates an effect on its environment that somehow changes that environment’s effect on the living things within that environment in a way that allows more possibilities for life. Often times, the feedback is complex, involving many species and environmental changes. (Beaver dams nourish willows and baby beaver, trap silt, create habitat for other species,…) This looping sequence of cause and effect stretches through time, creating a spiral of cause and effect through time. Oftentimes the effects are tiny, seemingly inconsequential. But the power of a feedback spiral lies in its looping over and over through time, gradually accumulating significance. Feedback spirals possess the power to lift, over hundreds of millions of years, a planet upwards into more possibilities for life. A Commons culture is centered on nourishing and enhancing this power and is, in return, rewarded with a life-sustaining planet teeming with opportunities and hope.

Side Note:
I admit I use the term “possibilities” loosely. For example, the growth of oxygen in the atmosphere allowed us to become possible so we think of it as good. However, it was catastrophic for the anaerobic life that was dominant back then. But, as mentioned, oxygen is so reactive that the expansion of atmospheric oxygen definitely fueled more chemical possibilities than anaerobic conditions ever could have.

On the other hand, global warming is a global increase in useable energy within the atmosphere. This does indeed energize greater possibilities – such as stronger and longer heat waves, larger forest fires, and stronger hurricanes. Some of this heat warms the ocean water, causing it to expand which is one of the reasons for rising sea levels. These are all changes that weren’t possible before but we don’t experience them as wonderful, marvelous.

When I think of “possibilities”, I think of catalysts. In chemistry, a catalyst is a substance that increases the rate of a reaction without being used up in the process. Enzymes are biological catalysts. “Almost all metabolic processes in the cell need enzyme catalysis in order to occur at rates fast enough to sustain life.” “An extreme example is orotidine 5′-phosphate decarboxylase, which allows a reaction that would otherwise take millions of years to occur in milliseconds.” (both in Wikipedia article on Enzymes) The power of enzymes lies in their structure. They aren’t part of the reaction. Instead, they provide a structure upon which the reactants can orient in a certain way that increases the rate of reaction. The evolution of new enzymes has made possible so many of the chemical reactions that cellular life has grown from.

Here are two life-created examples of what I mean by “possibilities” that I like to think of acting like catalysts – increasing the rate at which a process happens. One is insect pollination. Instead of having to produce billions of pollen grains for the wind to spread hither and yon so that at least some of the grains will land on a female flower of that species out there somewhere, insect pollination allows the plant to produce far fewer grains because the insect will transport it, often precisely to the part of that species’ female flower which that pollen grain needs to touch in order to fertilize it. So think of the insect as like a catalyst, allowing the pollen grain and the female flower to come into contact at a far higher rate.

The second example is human speech. By modifying the structure of our mouths, tongues, lips, vocal cords, we create a vast range of sounds which, when given meaning, allows a rate of communication between two people that is amazing in both its range and precision. The culturally-defined sounds are catalysts between one person’s mouth and another person’s ear that allows massive connection between two minds.

This catalytic sense of “possibilities” leads one to look for fascinating developments like a beaver dam backing up water. However, the ambiguity of “possibilities” underscores the challenge of finding a workable balance between harvesting the Commons to live – and nourishing new “possibilities” with that life.
End of Side Note. Returning back to the last paragraph about Feedback:

Feedback spirals possess the power to lift, over hundreds of millions of years, a planet upwards into more possibilities for life. A Commons culture is centered on nourishing and enhancing this power and is, in return, rewarded with a life-sustaining planet teeming with opportunities and hope.

This kind of cause and effect looping is often called a positive feedback spiral because the repetition of the feedback gradually pushes the system into new territory. “Positive” does not necessarily mean the feedback spiral is “good” or leads to more possibilities. “Positive” is a mathematical direction that means a change creates more change in the same direction. A current positive feedback spiral is occurring when warming arctic temperatures thaw permafrost which then release the greenhouse-gas methane into the atmosphere which then leads to more warming. This is a positive feedback spiral because it creates more change in the same unfavorable direction. It is not a nice positive change from our point of view. A screeching microphone/speaker is also this kind of feedback. “Positive” does not imply that the outcome is desired. Because of this incorrect emotional connotation of “positive,” I will use the often-used alternate term of “reinforcing feedback” spiral. A nice reinforcing feedback spiral we’ve all experienced is learning to read. Learning to read allows one to start reading stories which allows one to practice reading so that reading becomes easier and one can practice reading longer and harder stories, which makes reading more enjoyable which leads to more reading.

As with “positive feedback,” “negative feedback” refers to the mathematical direction of feedback that pushes back and resists change, that keeps a situation stable. Many of these negative feedback spirals are very beneficial. Our bodies are full of them; they maintain homeostasis. If we get too hot, we start to sweat which cools us down. If we get too cold, our muscles shiver involuntarily which generates body heat. If we exercise and need more oxygen, our heart beats faster. When we go into a dark space, our eyes’ pupils dilate to let more light in. If we start running out of stored energy reserves, we feel hunger pangs and seek food to eat. Our lives depend on these negative feedback spirals so I will use the emotionally-neutral alternate term of “balancing feedback” spirals.

We stay alive thanks to abundant balancing feedback spirals. On the other hand, the Dread I felt grows from our perceived collective inability to change course. Why can’t we change course? Because too many balancing feedback spirals hold us on our current path.

Often times, a feedback spiral oscillates, pulsing back and forth as the participants in the spiral wax and wane in relation with each other. A classic example is the nine to eleven year population cycle of the Arctic Hare. Their population cycle was at its peak my first summer in Alaska. When I walked through a spruce forest, I could see twenty to thirty snowshoe hares all around me. They seemed tame, probably because three feedbacks were now pushing back against their population. (1) The hares had cropped the plants more heavily than the plants could grow, leading to starvation. (2) The hares were so close together that they were stressing each other. There was no way to get far enough away from one another in order to relax. To avoid creating continual stress throughout the crowd, each hare initiated less movement. (3) Their closeness allowed diseases to spread more easily. At the same time, their fattened predators were having a field day. Hunting was easy, making it easier to raise a lot of predator babies. The next summer, I saw only three snowshoe hares the entire summer. The snowshoe hare population had crashed. On the other hand, that summer I saw three lynxes, one of their secretive predators, perhaps starving as they roamed day and night in search of their now-vanished prey.

Now the plants could recover. Now the few surviving hares had access to vast space and distance from any diseased hare so the diseases faded out. Gradually the predator population declined as many of their young starved to death. The snowshoe hare population began to increase once again. Over and over again, this population cycle repeated. It can be seen in Hudson Bay trapping records of snowshoe hare and lynx pelts stretching back almost two hundred years.

This process of biological change altering the dynamics of the Commons is a slow, ongoing process. Oftentimes it requires generations of feedback spirals to oscillate back and forth to test whether a new change that a species creates will enrich the Commons or deplete it.

For example: After salmon fry hatch, they slowly work their way downstream until they reach the estuary where fresh water meets the ocean’s salt water. They spend many weeks feeding in the estuary while their bodies adjust to the very different chemistry of living in the salt water of the ocean.

A resource agency in British Columbia, wanting to increase the number of salmon returning to their birth streams, hypothesized that if brush was cut back along the streams that the fry swim down, more sunlight reaching the streams would produce more algae that would increase the number of micro-invertebrates that the salmon fry feed upon on their way towards the estuaries. This would allow more of them to successfully reach the estuary so that presumably more would return to spawn three years later. The hypothesis was tested and found to be true. Cutting back the stream side vegetation did allow the fry to grow bigger. But when they reached the estuary, they had outgrown their traditional estuary prey and they starved to death.

Finding the proper “Shoot the Moon” balance between harvesting and contributing is part of the work of creating the Commons, including the work of creating a Commons culture. Working out that balance can take many years, maybe centuries. That is the work we’re engaged in. We have accumulated many thousands of years of cultures rising in dominance but then collapsing. Where is the proper “Shoot the Moon” balance?

What makes this work especially challenging is Time Lags.

The Lobster Trap of Time Lags

Time lags arise when there is a significant gap of time between an action and the consequence of that action. An example I’ve experienced in my travels is a shower that has a too-many-seconds gap between the knobs-turning adjustment of hot/cold water and the actual change in the water’s temperature. The too-cold water drives me out of the shower. I turn the knobs to increase the hot water. I stand, cold and dripping, with my hand in the flow of water, waiting for it to warm up. When it does, I gratefully get back into the warm water and then screech a few seconds later as the water keeps getting hotter and hotter and I jump even faster out of the shower. I turn the knobs, wait, get back in, overshoot, too cold, get back out… The longer the time lag between knob adjustment and changed water temperature, the longer it takes for the feedback to guide me to a tolerable shower. The quicker the result is experienced, the more easily feedback can guide my adjustments. Newer cars, for example, display instantaneous miles per gallon. With this feedback, one can learn how to drive more efficiently far faster than if one’s only feedback is the number of gallons (and cost) each time one buys gas.

In his essay, “Thinking Like a Mountain”, Aldo Leopold described what happened when wolves were eliminated so hunters could have more deer.
“Since then I have lived to see state after state extirpate its wolves. I have watched the face of many a newly wolfless mountain, and seen the south-facing slopes wrinkle with a maze of new deer trails. I have seen every edible bush and seedling browsed, first to anaemic desuetude, and then to death. I have seen every edible tree defoliated to the height of a saddlehorn. Such a mountain looks as if someone had given God a new pruning shears, and forbidden Him all other exercise. In the end the starved bones of the hoped-for deer herd, dead of its own too-much, bleach with the bones of the dead sage, or molder under the high-lined junipers.

“I now suspect that just as a deer herd lives in mortal fear of its wolves, so does a mountain live in mortal fear of its deer. And perhaps with better cause, for while a buck pulled down by wolves can be replaced in two or three years, a range pulled down by too many deer may fail of replacement in as many decades.”

Decades later, wolves have been reintroduced into parts of the West, a new experiment. What oscillations will that create?

Slow, oscillating feedback spirals create one of the greatest challenges our evolved intelligence faces. This is because the oscillation occurs over many decades or centuries. If one harvests too much from the Commons, the Commons will degrade such as happened during the Dust Bowl. High grain prices during World War One coupled with above-normal rainfall in the south-central part of the United States fueled a feedback spiral of high profits that were used to convert more of the prairie sod to plowed fields that produced more profit that could buy yet more prairie land, more tractors and plows. For years, the getting was good. But when drought came in the Thirties, the plowed dry soil had no vegetated protection from the winds. More than one hundred million acres lost most of its topsoil. Many people died from dust pneumonia, their lungs clogged with dust that had once been life-supporting soil growing plants.

The consequences of time lags might not be felt until years later, perhaps several generations later. People initially doing the over-harvesting experience abundance, prosperity. It’s easy to feel blessed and exceptional, loved by God. Only later does the dream start to crumble. How does a people raised on that dream turn out of a now-growing grimmer downward spiral?

It’s like slowly drifting towards the edge of the road when driving. The earlier one responds, the easier it is to make a course adjustment. All that’s needed is an easy, imperceptible shift in the steering wheel. But if the response is delayed until the tires are going off the edge of the pavement, then a panicked turn just might flip the car.

Time lags are like a lobster trap — something easy to get into but very hard to get out of. Lobstermen put bait inside that will attract lobsters. The lobsters find the entrance and enter but they can’t find the way out. An attractive one-way entrance without an exit forms the trap.

Human history is full of dynasties and empires undone by time lags. The lobster trap’s “bait” is that initially it feels good. Swagger across an aircraft carrier’s deck in a flight suit to a banner proclaiming “Mission Accomplished.” In earlier times, a kingdom invades and conquers a neighboring kingdom. Plunder, slaves, and resources flow into the victorious kingdom, enriching many of the people, allowing the kingdom to strengthen its capabilities, making the kingdom stronger and life easier for at least some of the citizenry. A generation later, conquer another adjoining kingdom. Repeat this feedback spiral of an expanding empire. Decades later, the military is spread too thin trying to defend a now too-long border. Poised against them are kingdoms that have watched this empire march towards them. The threat of that empire has been recognized by all and the kingdoms have mobilized and made alliances against it. The empire’s governing class has become decadently corrupted by too much plunder flowing in. What does the empire do now? The history of empires rising and falling feels like us trying to drive a new vehicle called civilization that keeps drifting off the road into horrible crashes. We keep getting caught in Time Lag’s lobster trap.

My rural county is realizing we are in a lobster trap involving groundwater. For decades, farmers have been planting orchards of nut trees and irrigating them with pumped groundwater. Nut trees produce high profits. The farmers and their workers and their communities welcome this influx of profits. With some of that profit, the farmers install more pumps so they can plant and irrigate even more nut trees. Many wonderful years go by but at some point, the increase in pumping exceeded the rate of groundwater recharge. Water tables began to drop. The farmers used some of their profits to sink deeper wells but the shallow wells of nearby homeowners are starting to go dry. Drilling a deeper well is a large, unaffordable expense to a homeowner but is an investment for the farmer. California is finally beginning to require each county to draft groundwater regulations. However, the people who’ve been willing over the years to sit on the boards responsible for these regulations are the irrigators who’ve invested heavily in and reap large profits from deep wells. When and how did we enter this lobster trap? How do we get back out?

How do we achieve the Shoot the Moon metaphor of finding the proper balance between the necessary harvesting of the Commons but then using some of that energy to do the creative work of maintaining and expanding the Commons yet more? It’s not that we’re not smart enough. After all, earthworms and pea plants can do it.

For me, the path offered by the Commons is not just a path that offers escape from the Lobster Trap and the Dread. The path leads to learning finally how to navigate Time Lags and avoiding many of the disasters that have littered the path of civilization. It opens up an entire new level of possibilities in our evolution. A bright joyous emergence into thousands of years of nourishing hope lies before us if we can collectively create a Commons culture. May our posterity be able to thank us ancestors for turning our culture onto an upward path.

The Paradigms of a Commons culture

What would such a culture be like? The wonderful systems thinker, Donella Meadows, wrote a much-circulated article, “Leverage Points: Places to Intervene in a System”, (worth reading in its entirety), in which she listed and discussed twelve levels of leverage points from least effective to most powerful in changing a system. Her second most powerful leverage point is “paradigms” which she eloquently describes this way:

“The shared idea in the minds of society, the great big unstated assumptions — unstated because unnecessary to state; everyone already knows them — constitute that society’s paradigm, or deepest set of beliefs about how the world works.  
There is a difference between nouns and verbs.  
Money measures something real and has real meaning (therefore people who are paid less are literally worth less).  
Growth is good.  
Nature is a stock of resources to be converted to human purposes. 
Evolution stopped with the emergence of Homo sapiens.  
One can “own” land.
“Those are just a few of the paradigmatic assumptions of our current culture, all of which have utterly dumfounded other cultures, who thought them not the least bit obvious.
“Paradigms are the sources of systems. From them, from shared social agreements about the nature of reality, come system goals and information flows, feedbacks, stocks, flows and everything else about systems. …“

What would a Commons culture’s paradigms be?

Commons paradigm – Work Ethic
A Commons culture would celebrate a work ethic that extends far back in time, long before money. Work is not something to shirk or “get out of” but an opportunity to embrace the work of maintaining and enhancing the Commons. In gratitude for the ancestors that went before and the work they did that made our lives possible, work is our opportunity to create opportunities for the descendants to come. The work heals Downward Spirals and nourishes Upward Spirals.

A Commons culture respects the work one does. That work does not necessarily mean hard physical work though that is honorable work indeed. A mother does work raising her child. A teacher does work helping students understand. A musician who uplifts spirits, a reporter who informs the public what is happening… This work extends beyond a job; practicing common courtesy to one another is part of the work. Being honest and keeping your word are part of the work. Work implies a direction being moved towards. For example, a reporter who spins falsehoods that frays the Commons is doing the opposite of work. He depletes without nourishing.

The work takes on many different forms. I reflect on my rain walk work. Going back at least to when I was five years old, flowing water fascinated me and I played with it in so many ways. I never thought of it as work because work was a job, something you got paid to do. I never got paid for “playing around” but the lessons I learned from it are the groundwater that has nourished my marriage, my family, my writings, my teaching of kids and the creation of a school that “encourages the light within each student to shine brighter.” So a Commons culture’s work ethic does not lead to regimentation and repetitious drudgery. It summons up some of the most creative experiences in one’s life.

The work counters Dread. It has developed in me an almost continuous awareness that there lies in every situation an opportunity to somehow nourish upward spirals. Most of the times the result will appear insignificant but it can be done and uplifts me when I do it and I experience the work growing on itself. When Alysia or I bring a cup of tea to the other, we turn the handle towards the other person’s right hand side because it is easier for us who is already holding the cup by the handle than it is for the recipient. The handle-turning has grown into an “I’m taking care of you because I love you” gesture. The work grows on itself.

One contrast with our current paradigm is a willingness to take on the “sacrifice” of contributing to long-term solutions. This Work can be put off into the future, “kicked on down the road.” But that allows the problems to grow, allows more damage which will require more eventual work. When confronted with consequences of this shirking, it’s easy to curse the past for not dealing with it. It’s harder to start dealing with it. Overcoming this “shirking” can be experienced as a sacrifice, a giving up of easier, more pleasing diversions. A Commons work ethic takes on this “sacrifice” as part of the Upward path. This pairs with:

Commons paradigm – Internal motivation
The other day, kayaking down the Sacramento River, I paddled into a beautiful side stream. Acorn woodpeckers yammered back and forth. A great horned owl flew overhead up the stream. I gasped at the beauty of a bright yellow tiger swallowtail butterfly. Upstream where the stream shallowed, green herons and black phoebes fluttered about. But what was most distinctive, what caught my eye floating amidst the aquatic vegetation were several floating plastic bottles that had probably fallen overboard on the river and came to rest here in this side stream. As I picked them up, I realized that this work was invisible. The next visitor to this place won’t see “someone has picked up the litter.” They’ll simply see a beautiful place where everything fits together. The word “litter” won’t enter their consciousness.
Probably a lot of our work towards the Commons will be invisible like that – a quiet disappearance of a degradation whose presence we had been coming to accept until we decided not to. It’s work that does not bring any external recognition. It’s just the right thing to do,

Commons paradigm – Understanding of Time Lags
Hopefully our gift of cognition will help us master Time Lags. My introduction to this was on the Staten Island Ferry as it shuttled commuters back and forth from Staten Island to lower Manhattan Island. As the ferry approached the terminal, it reversed its propellors, slowing the massive ferry down so that it came to a stop only a few feet from the terminal. In order to reach the goal ahead, it needed to reverse its engines before then because docking means no longer moving ahead at the end. It’s like Shoot the Moon in finding the proper balance between forward and back to achieve a safe but quick stopping/docking.

Little kids encounter this paradoxical strategy pouring a drink from a pitcher. Two time lags are involved. The water keeps flowing out (albeit at a declining rate) until the pitcher has tipped back enough to cut off all flow. At that point, there is still water in mid-air dropping towards the cup which will raise the water level still higher. The child must learn to tip the pitcher back before the cup is as full as they want it. Starting to turn back before reaching your goal is the way to reach the goal. If they wait until the cup is as full as they want, they will overflow the cup by the time all the water has dropped into the cup.

My daughters moved to L.A. for a time. They drove close to the car ahead and hit the brakes whenever the car ahead did (which was often). I counseled them to drop back a bit and watch for brake lights much further ahead. If you see brake lights come on up farther ahead, realize there will be a time lag before the car right ahead of you uses their brakes. Looking ahead gives you the time to ease up on the gas. That doesn’t waste gas like using the brakes do and it doesn’t transmit a brake light signal to the cars behind you, inducing them to use their brakes. There are two ways to slow down: use your brakes or ease up on the gas. If I give myself some space and if I watch further ahead, it becomes a fun game to see how little I actually need to use my brakes.

Reliance on this strategy for navigating time lags would be an attribute that a Commons culture would always deploy as it explored new possibilities: a willingness to let up on the gas so that one doesn’t have to slam on the brakes later. One is patient because one is thinking globally in a time scale of centuries. One is patient because, if in the space of slowing, the possible danger fades, one can resume one’s speed again. A Commons culture, for example, would not continue full speed ahead with burning fossil fuel on the hope that nuclear fission will develop soon. If we can produce net gain fission power, then perhaps that will allow an expansion of possibilities at that time. But until then, we need to assume it won’t happen and do everything possible to reduce the effects of climate change.

Commons paradigm – Seeing Deeper into the Fifth Dimension
A Commons culture understands that every change one sees involves energy. Every change is being shaped by the Second Law. If one looks for it, one can see the shaping. One starts seeing what I call the Fifth Dimension.

While watching a turkey vulture soar, one watches more than the vulture. The vulture is always gliding down through the air; that’s the only way its wings can attain the speed needed to create enough lift to hold the bird up in the air. But the vulture is a master at finding the places where the air is rising. If the air rises faster than the vulture descends through it, the bird will rise. It’s like walking down an up escalator. If you walk down slower than the escalator carries you up, you will be carried back up. The vulture seeks the windward sides of slopes that deflect the wind upward. The vulture glides downward along these slopes, rising higher within the ridge-deflected rising air.

On windless days, the vulture seeks places where the sun has heated the ground that, in turn, heats the air above it, creating a hot air balloon (without the balloon) that rises. These areas of rising heated air (called thermals) allow the vulture spiraling within it to rise in an upward spiral without flapping a wing. As it spirals, the sheen of its underwings reflects the sun. At a certain point in every spiral, this reflecting sends out a flash visible at distance. All the vultures in the sky are watching one another. If they notice the flashes of a vulture spiraling upward, they glide over there to catch the free elevator ride. If you watch vultures, you will often see a spiraling vulture be joined by several others coming from all directions. A Commons culture sees in the vulture’s flight an energy dance which rises and falls with the sloping angle of the ground, the direction of the Sun, the strength of the wind and an evolution-shaped sharing of information to others of your species.

Walking along a stream, one sees rocky stretches where the water splashes noisily over the rocks, forming a riffle. Further upstream, lies a quiet, deeper pool of water. Serene. Streams often alternate between noisy, flowing riffles and quiet, slow pools. The pools are lower energy places than the riffles. But when one understands the shaping flow of energy, one realizes that the quiet pool is deeper because it has been scoured out. During floods, the pools are the places experiencing the greatest erosive energy. Rocks can’t settle out there. What happened to the scoured rocks? They settled and piled up downstream where the flood had less energy. When the flood recedes, this pile of rocks becomes a low rock dam that the water flows over and through. It’s the riffle! So the low energy pools are actually the highest energy places during a flood and the splashiest places are actually the lower-energy, rocks-settling-out places during the floods. The world takes on more form when one sees Fifth-Dimensionally.

I once sat long beside a small rivulet of waning runoff that possessed only enough power to carry individual grains of sand one at a time across the level surface of a small, half-inch tall delta it was forming within a small pool. What held me there in fascination was how each sand grain rolled over the delta’s edge and down to a predictable position upon the extending base of the delta. The grain would come to rest on the top of the grain before or, when that got too high, to the side where the grains would start building up again. Back and forth across the width of the delta like a geological loom, the delta built up a layer one sand grain thick. And then it started depositing the next layer. When that layer was completed, the next sand grain tumbled to the base of that layer and another one-sand-grain-thick layer began assembling. Each rolling sand grain danced perfectly with the Second Law.

I’ve included a link to a short movie I made of another delta
https://vimeo.com/manage/videos/953194633
plus a stream table link here to help develop this sense.

A Commons culture would definitely cultivate a broad awareness of the many flows shaping the world around one. I call this “Seeing Further in the Fifth Dimension.” What I’m seeing is technically not a physics dimension. However, the fourth dimension of time is strongly intertwined with the Second Law of Thermodynamics. We tend to think of Time as this uniformly flowing passage. But the flow of useable energy is not uniformly flowing. It waxes and wanes, swirls and quiets. Being aware of these shaping energies allows better understanding of what patterns are more stable and what changes are coming up for the future. A Commons culture would practice and deepen this way of seeing the world as a beautiful dance of the Second Law flowing in everything we see down to each sand grain and each swaying strand of algae waving within the current. And then a water beetle swims upstream against the current! How did that happen?

At night, a cool breeze passes around our house. We live within a small drainage. When the sun sets, the warm air of day cools, contracts, and sinks. Once down near the ground, it drains down along the same drainage that water follows, past our house. This flow cools us nicely in the summer but freezes parts of our garden in the winter. (When backpacking, I usually avoid sleeping near streams because that place is colder than a place ten feet above the stream.)

A wood stove heats our home. There’s a perceptible gradient of heat from the wood stove to the farther reaches of the house. The doors to our bedroom and back porch are closed to reduce the amount of heat flowing into those colder spaces. If I open one of those doors, I can feel the “backed-up” accumulation of heat in the main room push through the opened door like water surging through a breached levee or dam. My wife loves to feel this warm stream as she leaves the cool bedroom every winter morning and walks “upstream” toward the warm living room. Awareness of flows keep us located within our house, within the world and the pleasure of being alive.

This awareness of flows invites me into a feedback relationship with them. Packing up during many cold mountain mornings created feedback that changed my starting routine. Originally, I started my hike with my warm jacket on because taking it off made me shiver. But too many starts halted ten minutes later to take off my pack, take off my coat (now much too hot from hiking exertion), open my pack, stuff my coat into the pack, close up my pack, and sling my pack back on. I experienced this awkward feedback morning after morning until I tried taking my coat off when I was ready to start. I shivered for a minute or two while I stuffed it into the pack, closed up the pack and slung it on. As I started walking, the shivers calmed into bracing awareness of the morning. Soon the exertion of walking kept me warm and I could smoothly hike for an hour with no need to stop.

I’m always playing a game: trying to shape my actions to glide efficiently within the Second Law’s constant flow of useable energy. When I was about seven and needing to change my pants, I thought I could save time and energy by not taking my shoes off first. As my shod feet got wedged into my pant legs, I learned that this route was not the efficient route I thought it would be. As I play such games, I grow more aware of the energy flows around me.

Energy flow through trophic levels shapes the ecosystems around us. Leaves being eaten supports a certain amount of insects. Insects being eaten supports a lesser amount of birds. Birds being eaten support a few bird predators. However, as we claim more of the solar energy for ourselves (through habitat alteration, pesticides and insecticides), less remains for other living things. They must diminish. Native plants give way to our food crops. Birds and insects that utilize those native plants diminish. More of the energy flowing upon this planet is routed to be of service of us. Less remains to sustain the rest of the Commons. To nourish the Commons, I must be aware of this lest I take too much.

I once heard of a Native American language in which words are inflected according to whether the speaker is higher or lower in the watershed than the listener. That is awareness practiced with every sentence. It keeps one oriented within one’s watershed, making it deeply paradigmatic. Imagine a culture that has similar awarenesses of energy flows shaping the world around us. This would be not book knowledge but embedded into daily speech so that awareness is practiced and reinforced every day. Some of that has become embedded in “Upwards” and “Downwards” for me.

Commons paradigm – Understanding of Feedback Spirals
Another experiential base of that culture’s paradigms would be an awareness and understanding of Feedback Spirals. I’ve already mentioned how awareness of flows invites one into playful feedback experimentation. This play with the world knits one into the world. We can do things that trees can’t do and they can do things we can’t. We aren’t superior to all other things. Neither are we only a blight and a curse upon the land. We bring powerful gifts to the world; a combination of opposable thumbs, depth perception, speech, enhanced cognition, tool-making, writing. We can fulfill an important role but an important part of that role is gratitude that acknowledges our dependence on the work that other species are doing all around us. We are working alongside other living things, creating upward spirals that nourish one another.

Commons Paradigm – Commons Courtesy
Many years ago, Alysia and I had a kayak accident that resulted in Alysia being driven in an ambulance twenty miles to a hospital. I sat up front with the driver. It was late afternoon. The road was empty so we were hauling right along. After several minutes, I noticed a gentle throbbing in the highway signs and later realized that the late afternoon sunlit highway signs were also reflecting our ambulance’s red flashing light. Shortly thereafter, I realized why the highway was empty. Cars were on the side of the road. I looked farther ahead and I saw cars a quarter-mile ahead pulling over, creating open road before us. Tears came to my eyes. All these strangers were helping Alysia get to the hospital faster. It’s the law to pull over to the side for an ambulance or a fire truck so we do so and after it passes, we pull back onto the road and continue on our way. But it is a very different perspective to see it from the front seat of the ambulance. Like Moses parting the Red Sea, the highway miraculously opened up ahead of us. We were all strangers helping one another create this miracle. True, it’s the law but the law is part of the miracle. This miraculous parting of the traffic is part of the Commons. In so many ways, we have the power to create a better world. (Alysia was OK and released the next morning.)

I once read of a psychology experiment where the test subjects were asked to make a choice between:
an action that would benefit all or
an action that would benefit them at the expense of others.
The only variable that was different in the experiment was whether the subject was referred to as a “citizen” or a “consumer.” Those called “citizen” tended to choose the action that benefited all; those called “consumer” tended to chose benefiting themselves at the expense of others. In the media, “American consumer” has replaced “American citizen.” We are citizens, not “consumers.” Even better than “citizen,” a Commons culture would see us as “creators” (or “co-creators” or “weavers” or “builders” or “cultivators”).

That can always be our intent – to creatively dance with the world, to dance in constant awareness that at any moment, an opportunity to create an upward spiral might appear. It’s not scripted; it’s spontaneous. It’s a dance – the open-ended creation of the Commons culture that displaces the Dread and its starting First Position is Commons courtesy. Commons courtesy is common courtesy with the awareness of how it contributes to our Commons and how deserving it is of our maintenance. Commons courtesy is common courtesy mindfully and sincerely expressed. It’s a taking care of one another.

Discrepancies

I was about 5 years old walking with the neighborhood gang of Baby Boom kids along a street lined with trees. As I passed each tree, it receded behind me. Houses across the street were also appearing to move back behind me though more slowly. But in the sky, the Moon did not move. It stood still. Everything around me was changing its position as I moved but the Moon did not! The Moon suddenly became this mysterious visual object – distinct from everything else. Why didn’t it move? I didn’t know – but I definitely felt a discrepancy that I still remember almost seventy years later.

The science historian, Thomas Kuhn, created the modern definition of paradigm when he was explaining what happened during a scientific revolution. In The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, he used the word “paradigm” to describe how scientists learn and practice a way of thinking about, modeling, and working with the world. The paradigm allows scientists to continue exploring and adding new explanations within the paradigm. So fundamental is this paradigm that if a discrepancy arises, scientists hold it off to the side with the assumption that, eventually, the discrepancy will be resolved and fit into the paradigm. (For example, several decades after the 1781 discovery of the planet, Uranus, it became apparent that Uranus was not orbiting in the way Newton’s laws would predict. But rather than abandon the Newtonian paradigm, astronomers assumed that Uranus’s orbit was being perturbed by the gravity of another sizable planet even further from the Sun. They used Newton’s laws (with every calculation done by hand) to predict the position of this unknown planet and in 1846, Neptune was discovered within 1˚ of their calculations.) What first appeared as a discrepancy eventually confirmed Newton’s paradigm.

Science continues adding more information but also uncovering other discrepancies. Every now and then, there comes a point where enough discrepancies accumulate to break open a new expanded paradigm that can contain all that the old paradigm contained (though often with a different interpretation) plus the now-explainable discrepancies.

Paradigms are so foundational to one’s way of making sense of the world that Kuhn, the historian, documented how the old guard often could not make the shift to the new paradigm. Rather than a monumental clash, Kuhn observed that the scientific revolution relies more on the process of the old guard dying off while the new guard carries on the reinvigorated banner of exciting exploration and discovery.

In college, I took Geology 101-102. Introduction to Geology. I loved it. Learning the slow processes that are shaping the Earth over millions of years transformed how I saw the world. In so many places, I could now see what had been and what will be. Landscapes began talking to me. The next year I took Geology 201. Historical Geology – taught by the head of the department. It didn’t make any sense. The sequences of various rock layers throughout North America were a jumble that revealed no grand view. Just a bunch of scattered rocks. And the textbook’s final chapters on geosynclines and mountain building was frustratingly opaque to me. The next semester I took Geology 202. Oceanography – taught by two new professors, young and full of missionary zeal. The mid-Atlantic rift and its magnetic reversals in the seafloor had been discovered and subduction is happening along many continental edges. Plate tectonics! We’re making all these discoveries right NOW and they are changing how we understand the story and I was going “WOW, I get it!” My Historical Geology class had made no sense because the textbook was the old paradigm the head of the department had learned and taught. (I once came upon this professor in his office; he smelt of alcohol, a bottle of which was in his desk drawer. Part of the old guard dying-off process.) The old paradigm assumed that the place where the rock was found was the place where it had formed. But if the tectonic plates are moving around, this rock might have formed a thousand miles away from here. Now another interpretation is possible that sings an amazing song, taught now to middle school students.

Donella Meadows wrote, “You could say paradigms are harder to change than anything else about a system, and therefore this item should be lowest on the list, not second-to-highest. But there’s nothing physical or expensive or even slow in the process of paradigm change. In a single individual it can happen in a millisecond. All it takes is a click in the mind, a falling of scales from eyes, a new way of seeing.”

Once, while I was looking at the gibbous Moon in the blue daytime sky, the terminator line (the abrupt transition where the sunlit half of the moon meets the shadowed half) stopped being a curved line on a circle. It became a flat plane cutting a sphere in half. Suddenly, the Moon no longer appeared as a flat 2-D circle. I saw it as a bulging, 3-D sphere.

“… there’s nothing physical or expensive or even slow in the process of paradigm change. In a single individual it can happen in a millisecond. All it takes is a click in the mind, a falling of scales from eyes, a new way of seeing. Whole societies are another matter — they resist challenges to their paradigm harder than they resist anything else.” [Bold italics added] That’s what we’re dealing with with climate change! Resisting the challenge of climate change harder than we resist anything else.

For Thomas Kuhn, discrepancies between the current paradigm and newly encountered aspects of reality eventually generate new, better encompassing paradigms. More and more people today are experiencing discrepancies between the paradigm they were brought up in and the reality they are now living within. They are starting to question the legitimacy of that dominant paradigm.
More and more people are realizing that many of those labelled as “leaders” are leading the world further into the lobster trap of climate change, not leading the way out of it. “Leaders” announce governmental and corporate climate goals that they don’t honor or that two or three years later turn out to have been greenwashing that gave them two or three years of more resistance-free profits rather than two or three years that could have been used to ease out of the climate change lobster trap. So many “leaders” are focused on maintaining the profits coveted by the current paradigm, trying to deal with climate change without altering the flow of money. They’re now the “Davos crowd”, their image as “leaders” reduced to “blah, blah, blah” by a teenager. As the realities of climate change keep advancing, experienced directly by more and more people, the current paradigm and who it defines as “leaders” will crumble under the onslaught. The people empowered by the current paradigm will feel their relevance fade like my geology teacher did.

Human-caused climate change is new. We don’t know how far this oscillation will push us and the Earth. So we are experiencing each record-setting hotter year with fresh anxiety. With each disaster, more people are realizing that things they took for granted might disappear. What if home insurance companies pull out of fire-prone states? If your home is flooded, how many months of your remaining life will be dominated by mucked carpets and disintegrating, moldy sheetrock walls? Some politicians survive by calling climate change a hoax but insurance companies survive by unemotionally analyzing the balance between premiums in and payments out. “Will my house, whose mortgage has been the focus for much of my adult life, suddenly become unsellable?” Long-held assumptions are questioned.

Climate change is one ecological system after another ecological system being strained to possibly catastrophic tipping points. Sea water expanding in volume as it warms, raising ocean levels. Hurricanes strengthening dramatically faster. Ice caps melting at accelerating rates and possibly slowing ocean currents. Himalayan glaciers that irrigate the fields that feed billions shrinking. As these changes grow obvious, people start to comprehend what the Commons had created. We start to understand how all these systems were interconnected so that each system created possibilities and opportunities for other systems

People wonder whether there will come a time when it is too late – and the answer is that it is already too late for many people and other species that have gone extinct. Waiting for the moment when “we” decide it is too late is way too late. It’s like waiting to reverse the propellors on the full-speed ahead ferry until we are crunching into the terminal dock.

Why can’t we change course? What is holding us on this increasingly fraught path? Feedback spirals are an important pattern in systems. Many of the seemingly intractable problems we face are due to system patterns that generate consequences in round-about feedback ways that we don’t recognize or understand. We often respond by blaming somebody for the problem. But systems create behaviors. When we look from a system’s perspective, our inability to change course looms as a major discrepancy within our current paradigm. By looking at structures of systems, we gain insights on ways to change them in order to create outcomes better aligned with our best aspirations. Is there a better path?

Two Paths

When the rain falls onto the ground, it has two possible paths.

One is to soak into the ground. Once in the ground, it percolates slowly. Some of it will “back up” and raise water tables. Much of it will be transformed by sun-powered life. It will be absorbed by plant roots and brought up into acres upon acres of leaf surface areas. There some of the water will be transpired into the air. This water vapor can be recycled to fall again as rain to flow through other plants again and again. On each journey, some of it will be split by photosynthesis to combine with carbon dioxide to form sugar. Some of this sugar will be assembled into cellulose that creates more leaf surfaces so that ever more summer solar energy can be absorbed for life. When the leaf drops to the ground, its decay will add its chemistry structure to the deepening soil so that, over the years, the soil will be able to absorb more rain and support more life. Meanwhile some of the sugar formed in the leaves will be eaten and fuel the growth and lives of all of us animals. All of these changes lie on the path of water soaking into the ground.

The other path begins when the rain or snowmelt starts to run off, converging with other runoff. When water converges, it flows faster. We see this with raindrops on windows but it happens with runoff on the land for the same reason. A grassy channel whose runoff flows along the surface through the grass converges with a similar grassy channel. They meet and immediately, their combined channel has the energy to cut down through the sod and the runoff becomes confined within a narrow, eroding channel.

More of the converged stream is further away from its slowing edges. Now most of the water in the stream can flow faster. The stream’s kinetic energy (1/2 mv2) is proportional to its mass (which just doubled) and the square of its velocity (which just increased). More of the runoff’s useable energy takes on the form of kinetic energy, giving the water the power to erode soil.

When the rain falls onto the ground, it has two possible paths. One path works with sun-powered feedback spirals to form soil and possibilities; the other path is a downward spiral eroding soil and possibilities. Falling rain can flow on either path.

For more than forty years, I’ve gone walking in the rain looking for opportunities where I can diverge the runoff and lead some of it onto slower paths – because its fun and I love doing it. This gives the runoff more time and surface area to soak into the ground high in the drainage. I don’t curse water’s tendency to converge or view it as evil. I accept the pattern as natural; I just want to help slow the rate, as trillions of grasses, gophers, and other living things are doing all around me. I want to slow it down, back it up, so more of it is absorbed into the soil-forming path rather than the soil-eroding path.

$ $ $ $ $

We see a similar convergence with money. Money converges in subtle ways as is being revealed in the current discussion of swipe fees and rewards credit cards. Many credit card issuers have different classes of credit cards. People with more wealth can receive rewards credit cards that give “free” rewards (such as frequent flyer miles) proportional to how much they are used. If that person wants to take a vacation to Fiji, free air fare is a significant reduction in the cost of that vacation. So that person creates an account for that premium card. That bank gains a wealthy customer who is likely to use that card a lot and keep a large sum in that account.

However, the cost of paying for these free things is an expense, so the bank offsets that by raising the interest rate on their regular credit cards. In addition, they increase their swipe fee, the charge for businesses to use their credit services. This forces those businesses to increase their prices just to stay even. So most people are paying more than they otherwise would so that wealthy people can get free rewards. Money flows up from the lower and middle classes to the upper class, converging on the wealthy without calling attention to itself. (This is an example of the Commons culture’s paradigm of seeing the world in terms of flow – seeing further in the Fifth Dimension.) The results are the same as if we were paying for their vacation but the bank that manages both levels of credit cards acts as a middleman that makes this convergence of money upon the wealthy invisible. (“Upper” and “lower class” are part of our current paradigm. For me, I tend to see the much larger “lower class” forming the vast slopes high in the drainage and the smaller “upper class” as the much smaller stream corridors converging lower in the drainage. A difference in paradigm leads to a different orientation of what’s “upper” and what’s “lower.”)

Hedge funds that strive to produce the highest rates of return require an initial investment far beyond the financial capabilities of most people. Larger flows of money acquire more money at a faster rate. Similarly, larger flows tend to flow through limited liability companies, capital gains, and off-shore banking so that they are proportionally taxed at lower rates. Larger flows lose less of their flow to taxes than smaller flows.

Money has become so concentrated that “private equity” is buying up the cultural Commons, extracting the value within them as monetary profits and leaving all of us with diminished quality. Health care has declined because of private equity buying them up and then reducing staff. Private equity firms, using investor money (very little of their own money) will buy a company and then strip the assets from the company and burden it with debt and fees (producing profit for the investors) so that the company’s quality declines and eventually it goes bankrupt. (A sad game one can play: if you ever notice a decline in the quality of a company you appreciate, look it up to see if it was bought by private equity. (Round Table, Subway, Les Schwab, Red Lobster, …)

Here’s a link to a forty-minute interview with Pulitzer-prize winning reporter, Gretchen Morgenson, describing specific cases of how private equity used debt to dismantle businesses. They would often strip profits out of the business in a way that forced everyone else (rate payers, school districts, pensioners) to lose money.

Her many examples reminded me of the time kids and I were sweep-netting for insects and we caught a good-sized grasshopper. We put it into a two-way viewer (same ones we used for observing the brown tubes of Daphnia). The grasshopper moved very little. I was pointing out the spiracles on the grasshopper (spiracles line a grasshopper’s abdomen and function like nostrils do for us) when I noticed one of the spiracles wiggling. Something was emerging out of that grasshopper’s spiracle! As we watched in horror, an increasingly larger pallid insect larvae came wriggling out of the grasshopper’s abdomen. It finally dropped out. Its gross bulk was easily half that of the parasitized grasshopper’s abdomen. A minute later, the same thing happened with a spiracle on the other side of the grasshopper. Another pallid larvae wriggled forth and dropped out. That larvae was also easily half the volume of the grasshopper’s abdomen. What was it like to gradually have your insides eaten out? To be a still-barely alive, hollowed-out hulk like a company deliberately stripped and bankrupted by private equity? What’s it like for the employees who invested their life energy into a company that was dynamic back then, a company run with pride by founders close to their product but now being parasitized by engorged pallid larvae?

Money tends to converge as it flows. It tends to flow from individuals into large corporations, banks, insurance companies. It even flows like water from the rural lands, converging downslope onto cities at the mouths of rivers. Why does money flow like this? How does this happen? I’m not asking with moral outrage. I’m asking more like Galileo intrigued by how objects fall. Does the flow of money concentrate for the same reason that the flow of water tends to converge as it flows? I ponder this as I play in the rain and I’ve come to believe that the flow of money is shaped by the Second Law like everything else in the world.

Water has a cycle. When the inflow of solar energy causes water to evaporate, it vaporizes and expands, later condensing into billions of tiny diffused fresh water droplets which begin converging again as they fall. Every spontaneous flow, every convergence over thousands of square miles of headwaters aligns with the Second Law of Thermodynamics’s direction towards less usable energy, less Possibilities. Water has a definite direction of flow – downward – due both to gravity and the Second Law’s stipulation that the direction of spontaneous flow be towards less usable energy. Water flows in the direction that lowers its usable energy. The direction of flow and the consequent decrease of usable energy are linked together, two sides of the same coin.

Compare a gallon of water in the Mississippi Delta with a gallon of water from high in the Rocky Mountain headwaters of the Missouri River which flows into the Mississippi. Both are the same volume of H2O. Put in bottles, they might appear the same. But the Rocky Mountain water is high above sea level. It possesses 10,000 feet of potential energy, giving it the useable energy to flow more than 2000 miles, picking up bits of its river bed and carrying them along its way. The water in the Mississippi Delta is losing the last of whatever potential energy remains. It’s losing its ability to carry even silt, letting it drop out and drift down upon the ever-growing Mississippi Delta. The river forms a gradient of diminishing useable energy, from the sparkling headwaters trailing out into the silty sea.

Just as the gallon of fresh snowmelt water has more potential energy than the gallon of slowing delta water, so perhaps what a dollar represents “high in the drainage” has more useable energy than what it possesses far downstream, concentrated in the midst of a billion other dollars. Might it be that as money “flows” and converges “downstream”, it loses some of its useable energy (ability to create Possibilities) just like water does? That the converging flow and the loss of possibilities are two sides of the same thermodynamic coin?

Money uses up its useable energy as it converges downstream so that a dollar buys “less”. Up in the headwaters, a suitable digital watch can be bought for $15. But by the time money has converged upon the wealthiest, it takes five to ten thousand times as many dollars to buy a suitable Rolex watch. Money converges as it flows and it converges upon some places that feel very low in the drainage, like art in storage containers.

“One of the World’s Greatest Art Collections Hides Behind This Fence”  By Graham Bowley and Doreen Carvajal, New York Times, May 28, 2016
“The drab free port zone near the Geneva city center, a compound of blocky gray and vanilla warehouses surrounded by train tracks, roads and a barbed-wire fence, looks like the kind of place where beauty goes to die. But within its walls, crated or sealed cheek by jowl in cramped storage vaults, are more than a million of some of the most exquisite artworks ever made.
“As the price of art has skyrocketed, perhaps nothing illustrates the art-as-bullion approach to contemporary collecting habits more than the proliferation of warehouses like this one, where masterpieces are increasingly being tucked away by owners more interested in seeing them appreciate than hanging on walls.
“With their controlled climates, confidential record keeping and enormous potential for tax savings, free ports have become the parking lot of choice for high-net-worth buyers looking to round out investment portfolios with art….”
“Though the audit did not specifically measure the increase in stored artworks, it estimated that there were more than 1.2 million pieces of art in the Geneva Free Port alone, some of which had not left the buildings in decades.”

One container contained more than a thousand Picassos. It’s a way to park a lot of wealth in a form that can slip through different national laws so that the wealth can be changed into forms that escape taxation. If you were to ask people, “what is art? What makes art valuable?” you would hear many uplifting comments, none of which pertains to items sitting for years in a storage locker. There is a huge discrepancy between art as we think of it and art as the way people upon whom great flows of money have converged think of it. The process by which art that once hung in a museum to uplift all those who saw it gains a much higher monetary worth when locked up in an energy-consuming, climate-controlled storage container exemplifies money losing its useable energy as it converges in its flow. The art’s power to be art is degraded at the same time its monetary value rises (and the rise in this value inflates the worth of art even more as an “investment”). This is a discrepancy. Why would the convergence of wealth lead to draining great art out of the world? So that more of the wealth of the world is unavailable for the building of schools and maintaining highways and feeding the young next generation so that their brain growth is not stunted.

(A participant in the largest art fraud case in America observed, “The thing is, the numbers aren’t real for those at the top of that world, it’s a feckless level of wealth. The numbers aren’t the same as if we were to experience them.”

(Related to “feckless level of wealth”: A framed copy of Banksy’s Girl with a Balloon auctioned for more than one million pounds. A few seconds after sale, the painting was shredded by a shredder that the artist had hidden within the frame to protest the weird money dynamics shaping the art world. The purchaser kept the shredded piece, retitled it, and auctioned it three years later for more than eighteen million pounds. (https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2024/sep/13/men-charged-banksy-artwork-girl-with-balloon-stolen-london-gallery))

One also sees organizations paying high salaries to public relations people for lying. Lying that Oxycontin is not addictive. Lying that cigarettes don’t cause cancer. Lying that plastic is recyclable. Lying that burning of fossil fuels doesn’t contribute to climate change. Salaries for corporate lying is like art in storage containers, a loss of money’s useable energy as it converges.

The Gradient of Wealth

One of the most important assumptions of our dominant cultural paradigm concerns wealth. Each person’s wealth can be measured in terms of money. This numerical measure can be used to arrange everybody along a gradient of wealth from the poorest to the wealthiest. (Forbes magazine regularly updates its list of the wealthiest people in the world.) Your position on this gradient is important. More wealth is better. This creates a direction by which you can guide your life: work towards obtaining “more wealth than others.” Not everyone in the culture strives for that but the culture shapes itself around that direction. Most of the official power within our culture is given to those who have successfully advanced in acquiring “more wealth than others.”

Because our culture is structured to give/relinquish power to those further along the wealth gradient, it becomes important to signal your position on this gradient. So many ways to signal. The clothes you are wearing (I overheard an 8th grade girl say disparagingly of another “She wears clothes from K-mart.” I’m also still trying to understand what the phrase “fashionable society” actually means.) The car you drive. Where you live. The length of your boat. The alcohol you serve. The events you go to and where you sit when you’re there. Almost every purchase can be used to signal. This can get expensive. The farther along the gradient you move, the more money you need flowing through just so you can demonstratively affirm your position.

(From a New York Times article about the Hamptons: “This place is predicated, for a certain set, on showing off,” Dr. Young said. “It’s the homes one has, the things one does out here — from the restaurants to the workouts to the parties. But it’s a place where one can get overextended really quickly, where a house of cards can suddenly collapse.”)

However, striving to move farther in the direction of “more wealth than others” sets up a strongly reinforcing feedback spiral. You might want to obtain more wealth than those around you but they also want to obtain more wealth than you. Nothing personal; it’s just a consequence of “more wealth than others.” Their advancement goads you on while your advancement spurs them on. None of you want to fall behind. Advertising often plays on this by presenting the person with the (often bigger) product as smiling, acknowledged as higher status by the person who doesn’t have the product. Ads that embed products into images of happy families and friends enjoying life together reinforce the image of “consumer.”

Realistically, the gradient is endless. You will never make it all the way to more wealth than anyone else in the world. You will always be somewhere in the middle. As you progress, you might change where you live, where you vacation which will leave some less-wealthy acquaintances behind. But that change will also bring you into the social orbit of those with even more wealth than you. So you’ll always be aware of others who have more wealth than you. You will always be somewhere in the middle of the gradient.

However, as you begin accumulating money, the excess can be invested, creating a second source of income. This helps move you faster towards more wealth than others. But the wealth seekers around you are also investing their extra wealth. If you want more money to flow to you, you need to get a higher Return On Investment (ROI). If you have a higher ROI (Return On Investment), your wealth will increase at a faster rate than others and you will overtake and surpass them on the way to obtaining more wealth than others.

A classic way to obtain a high ROI is to harvest the Commons. The Commons are often seen as free and up for grabs, requiring no maintenance expenses which would lower profits. “In the late 1700s, virgin forests covered about 30 million acres (86%) of Wisconsin. White pine was nearly wiped out in Wisconsin by 1920.” This was before chain saws. 1916 was the year that Paul Bunyan stories were popularized in print.

The billions of passenger pigeons (“Surely the most abundant bird in North America will always be here, won’t it?”) were market hunted to extinction in a few decades. The Commons are so vast that surely a little bit harvested won’t cause any harm such as the harvesting of several minutes of our lives each time “Your call is important to us; please stay on the line for our next available representative.”

Hydraulic mining in California washed hillsides away and clogged up rivers downstream so that towns were flooded and agricultural fields were buried under silt. Only when the value of agriculture surpassed the value of gold mining within the state did the California Supreme Court shut hydraulic mining down as a “public nuisance.”

One of the paradigm-challenging debates as we grapple with climate change is how much freedom does a landowner have to do whatever they want with “their” land. Are there situations such as the deforestation of the Amazon or the drilling of deep wells in my county where the law should restrict what “private property” means?

Often the Commons are so taken for granted that they have no protection. Egrets were hunted almost to extinction for their mating plumage which fetched high prices as stylish hat decorations. The Audubon Society was formed to boycott feathered hats and lobby for legal protections for the egrets (and other birds) which is why the egret is the symbol for the Audubon Society.

We just assume atmospheric oxygen will always be there. After all, the Amazon rain forest will always be there. Groundwater will always be there. The aptly named “common courtesy” will always be there. The 1.2 billion tons of prairie topsoil that flowed away during the Dust Bowl was supposed to have always been there. Throughout history, the gradient of wealth’s siren song of “more wealth than others” has lured people to ravish the Commons.

Money Flows

People who are moving higher on the Gradient of Wealth can bring more money to fueling a “more wealth than others” ambition. The search for the highest Return On Investments can lead it to be invested in gray areas that harvest the Commons faster than they can be replenished.

The direction of “more wealth than others” leads to the emergence of what I call ROIwraiths. The term is modeled upon Tolkien’s Ringwraiths because, like them, the ROIwraiths were not born evil. They were born to mothers who nursed and cradled them. But their life energy was captured by “more wealth than others,” the bait in a spiritual lobster trap, that allowed ROI (like the Ring) to possess their spirits

Hedge funds pay high salaries for people who can write double-speak like:
“We regard it as our obligation to play our part responsibly, alongside all other creditors, in ensuring there is a path towards a sustainable outcome .… As an asset manager, we are a fiduciary to our clients, people from all walks of life. The money we invest on their behalf is not our own and we are obligated to act in our clients’ best financial interests at all times.”

This is self-serving circular reasoning. Such hedge funds promote themselves as generators of high ROI. That’s what attracts investors to give their money to the fund. … They don’t have an “obligation to play our part responsibly.” That’s just lip service. To remain successful, they are “obligated to act in our clients’ best financial interests at all times”, no matter what the long-term costs are to the Commons.

(Ironically, fiduciary means “a person or organization that acts on behalf of others and has a legal and ethical duty to put their interests first.“ If “fiduciary” actually implied an ethical duty to put the interests of others first, then that would lead to investments that would not degrade the Commons because all other long-term interests are dependent on the health of the Commons.)

Since money is symbolic, its value exists independent of the useable energy that initially created it. Because money is symbolic, a looted dollar has the same value as an earned dollar. Imagine a company creating a pension plan that contributes part of the company’s profit so that people who work for the company over many years have the wherewithal to comfortably retire when they grow older. Then imagine a corporate raider coming in, buying the company and looting that pension fund. The dollars they looted have the same monetary value as they would if they had gone to the workers. But the effect on the Commons is diametrically opposite and devastating.

Another example happens with converging money flowing into politics. Political campaigns are expensive. Long before, but especially since Citizens United, those upon whom great flows of money converge have the ability to significantly help candidates win their elections. In return, those elected gain the ability to shift tax codes and steer government contracts. This creates a reinforcing feedback spiral in which more of the funding and power of the government goes to benefit those already with money. The money converges upon them. Less exists for all others. The government’s ability “to promote the general welfare” diminishes. Most citizens lose opportunities like all the home owners who lost their homes in the 2008 housing crash while the bankers who created the dubious investment instruments were protected. And realize the Commons is more than money. The Commons include respect for government and “rule of law” that is degraded by this systemic favoritism.

The inability of the value of money to actually reflect the loss of useable energy as it flows down, to distinguish between dollars flowing to a pimp and dollars flowing to the Master Gardeners program is one reason why Adam Smith’s “Invisible Hand” often does not lead to the greater good as it is touted to. A Commons culture’s awareness of flows within the Fifth Dimension would help make these distinctions.

The book, Barriers and Bridges to the Renewal of Ecosystems and Institutions, presented three case studies of natural resource management and concluded that when a natural resource agency manages the resource for only a few variables, the ecosystem gradually grows brittle. If forests, for example, are managed only by the measure of harvestable board feet, the forest will gradually start losing the work of its Commons to sustain the possibilities within that forest.

I believe this applies to more than just natural resources. I watched this happen with schools when No Child Left Behind focused schools on the sole variable of once-a-year test scores. Lessons became scripted rather than interactive. Teachers felt under threat all year. Art, music, and science (which were not tested) were replaced with test-prep. Children were herded into test-practice drudgery on computers instead of interactive lessons with their classmates.

Our complex relationship with the living world is increasingly being “managed” for Return On Investment and the world around us is growing “brittle”. Boeing’s legendary standard for safety is corroding under an apparent focus on production and profit and stock buybacks. A growing sense of the world becoming “brittle” nourishes Dread.

In the meantime, there is no immediate short-term profit in many of the things that need to be done (like reversing climate change, reducing deaths of despair, tearing up the asphalt covering abandoned big box stores’ parking lots so the rain can once again soak in) so they are left undone and life high in the drainage withers.

Turning Upward

What we need to learn is how to turn away from this direction of “more wealth than others.” Like the ferry boat, to reach your goal, you need to start turning the other way earlier than you might want to. The challenge of wanting more money is that it’s not a goal. It’s a direction. It can’t be reached like a goal can. There is no place you’re trying to reach. More is always possible. So you never practice slowing to a stop. (I read of a survey in which wealthy people were asked how much money they would need to have enough. The average response was twice as much as they had. A millionaire thought he would be satisfied with two million. A two millionaire thought he would be satisfied with four million. A four millionaire thought he would be satisfied with eight…) There is no end.

A Commons culture practices a work ethic. Part of that work is detaching from the Gradient of Wealth, allowing it to become irrelevant in one’s life. Not letting it shape your judgment of people, not luring you into assuming all billionaires are ROIwraiths. Not letting it shape your choices, from the smallest purchases to the biggest life decisions. Not allowing it to tempt you to a good-paying job if you know it is unethical or destructive. There’s a wiser direction to navigate by.

A challenge of this work is that detaching from the gradient of wealth will probably cause your position upon that gradient to slip. You will encounter the conditioned fear of falling behind, the fear that those around you will see you as a loser. But part of the reason we get caught up in the Gradient of Wealth is because it seems to be the only direction in town. By detaching, one withdraws some of that shaping energy, weakening its hold within our culture, thus making it easier for others to detach.

So, one part of the work is talking aloud with one another “What are we trying to achieve here? What are we organizing our lives and relationships around?” This is why understanding and seeing the Commons is so vital. Believing the world is doomed to run down will lead to a very different answer to “How do we win?” than understanding that life, over hundreds of millions of years, has created an Upward Spiral of Possibilities within which we’ve emerged and that we can be part of its ongoing creation. We need to ask: Am I focused on creating “more possibilities for all” or having “more wealth than others”? “More possibilities for all” leads to actions that enrich The Commons from which the true wealth of Possibilities actually flows. “More wealth than others” can lead to takings that diminish trust and degrade The Commons in the deepest sense.

It’s important to keep in mind that money is a tool that we created to help facilitate the exchange of things but this tool is still evolving. The discrepancies it is currently creating, if acknowledged and understood, can lead to a more highly-evolved tool.

For example, the GI Bill following World War 2 provided low-interest mortgages for home purchase and low-interest loans to start a business and payment of tuitions to pursue further education. Though racial discrimination diminished the opportunity for blacks, the bill is credited with “a major contribution to U.S. stock of human capital that encouraged long-term economic growth.” Wikipedia

However, our current paradigm of “more wealth than others” is doing almost the exact opposite with the current student loan situation. Banks profit from high-interest, virtually inescapable loans while our mid-generational population’s ability to own a home or start a business is depleted. It’s a major depletion to “U.S stock of human capital” that discourages long-term economic growth.

A great paradigm shift of a Commons culture is from this “more wealth than others” to “more possibilities within the entire system.” That shift leads to increased opportunity and Hope which our current paradigm is draining. Just like Kuhn found with scientific revolutions, the “leaders” will probably still be clinging to their crumbling paradigm like my professor did to his bottle as they die off while a new generation leads us in a new direction: Upwards.

This direction does not focus on “Income inequality”. I think of income inequality as a consequence, not as a cause. The real problem is the increasing rate at which our culture’s wealth (by which I mean so much more than just money) is converging upon lower energy states. We are draining the Commons, degrading the climate to create depleted dollars that buy art-filled storage containers, yachts, and quarter-billion dollar survival bunkers. A consequence of this draining is “income inequality” but the real issue is the squandering of the potential energy within our culture’s wealth. Because Bush, for example, lied our country into a war with Iraq, some of our wealth will flow for decades to treat veterans scarred in body and mind. If they had never been scarred in the first place, that wealth could have created far better possibilities. Squandering useable energy is like paving the world so that more and more of the rain quickly runs off to the sea. Less remains on the slopes to nourish terrestrial plants that, in return, recycle it back into the air to fall again. A green land turns to dust.

The converging of water downstream is natural. But it’s also natural that, on its own, the Earth would receive only about eleven inches of precipitation per year, barely enough for a desert grassland. Life has discovered the wisdom of recycling as much of that water as possible, thereby more than doubling that “natural” amount to support forests. Life has increased the wealth of Possibilities available to all life, not just for those downstream. Our culture needs to develop a similar wisdom in regards to monetary wealth and develop creative ways to energetically recycle it in ways that truly strengthen The Commons.

Those focused on “more wealth than others” would oppose this, seeing it as robbing Peter to pay Paul. They would see it as a taking that decreases the multiple by which they are gaining more wealth than others. But on the other hand, they would start living in a world that was growing richer in possibilities for all (including themselves) than it was before, a world in which hope was growing for them and their grandchildren rather than fading.

Hope lies in the work that we do with this gift of life. The issue, for me, is replicating with money what life has done in creating the wealth of The Commons. Hide it not under a bushel basket like art in a dark storage container. Hold it high on the slopes where the sun can lift it back into the sky, fresh again. Combine it with the energy of other lives to create structures that change the rates of flows so that more Possibilities accumulate within The Commons. This is wisdom.

I’ve focused on money to illustrate how one’s perspective on “more wealth than others” changes when viewed through the Commons’ paradigms of flow and feedback. But civilization is more than the flow of money.

We’ve been doing war for so many thousands of years that it fades into a list of dates with winners and losers (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_wars) which is simply taken for granted. Honor and self-sacrifice are associated with war. Heroes emerge during war. We elect generals to be our presidents. It’s an important part of our economy, supplying salaries to many people. Our myths and movies are filled with battles. We are brought up in the paradigm that war has been a heroic part of who we are so we valiantly arm ourselves. We must never be defeated so that’s just the way it has to be.

Our current culture accepts all of this as reasonable because “if we don’t defend ourselves, others will conquer us.” Transforming a nation’s potential into tools of destruction grows into a global, self-reinforcing feedback spiral that induces everyone to play along with what is increasingly insane. Like with the gradient of wealth, there are so many reinforcing assumptions embedded in war. So much money flows around war. These assumptions and the money flow create a strong balancing feedback that seemingly lock war in place, that force a resigned acceptance of its inevitability.
When Russia invaded Ukraine, I initially cheered the surprisingly strong Ukranian defense. But as images kept coming, week after week, of homes, factories and businesses turned into rubble, fuel depots bursting into flame, electrical grids destroyed, I started seeing war through the lens of climate change. How Stupid we are using massive amounts of fossil fuels to blow up infrastructure, which required massive amounts of fossil fuels to build, and will require even more now to clear the rubble away and rebuild again. And now we observe the same rubblelization in Gaza

And it is not just the rubble. War is burning so much of our fossil fuel keeping large naval fleets cruising around the world and keeping fighter pilots trained with flights that get less than a half mile per gallon of fuel. Our Department of Defense consumes more than four billion gallons per year.

War is burdening us with the medical and social consequences of casualties and PTSD of veterans. Our school, Chrysalis, expended a lot of energy one year with little effect trying to help one of our families that was “blown apart” when the father returned home from Iraq with severe PTSD. A significant portion of our economy produces expensive weapons whose purpose is to destroy as much working/living material as possible. And we are just starting to learn that these weapons have become so powerful that the soldiers learning to fire them are sustaining long-term brain damage because of the concussive shocks passing through their skulls each time the weapon is practiced-fired.

Our civilizational assumptions about war developed pre-Industrial Age. Weapons weren’t so destructive then. Infrastructure was simpler, easier to replace so it’s eventual replacement was just assumed within the long-term equation of war. It kind of made short-term sense back in the time of small kingdoms where the “winner” obtained more land, resources, and slaves. We think of war as a zero-sum game (winner and loser) but now it’s not even that. One side loses less than the other side but both sides lose. War is a negative-sum game; so many upward possibilities are re-routed to destruction and death (though profit for some).

What if climate-accelerating hurricanes and heat waves and flooding are damaging so much infrastructure around the world that there are not enough resources to de-rubbleize a place like the Ukraine or Gaza? What if Russia occupies the Ukraine by reducing it to rubble? What then? Does it just stick its flag on a persistent pile of rubble and pretend to have achieved a glorious victory? People fantasizing about civil war/race war assume that we, the winners of course, will just tidy things up afterwards. What if the destruction is greater than they imagined and there never again is enough resources to recover? That we blew up that which we needed to carry on?

Much of our resources flow into arming ourselves against others which is then used to destroy each other’s arms. (Follow the flow; we use our resources to destroy our resources.) What if some of those resources were put instead towards helping other regions nourish their Commons – for the sake of the Commons? Their Commons and our Commons are all part of The Commons. We would gradually acquire the good will of other regions. Other regions would not want to invade us because they would be hurting an ally and hurting themselves by diminishing some of the input that vitalizes their Commons. A Commons culture would strive to develop with its neighbors win-win relationships that would unite and strengthen both of our Commons (in the largest sense of that concept).

Climate change leads one to think of a future that lies outside our enculturated assumptions about how the world will carry on. That shift in what we assume the future holds moves us to a new perspective that starts revealing discrepancies all around us. “Am I alone or are there others seeing this too? Maybe these assumptions don’t determine the future. Maybe we have wiggle room to change direction – of our own thoughts and lives at least and maybe more.”

The longer we allow our current assumptions to shape our actions, the further down we will go in weakening the Commons. Less will become possible. As we spiral down, there comes a time when we realize we shouldn’t have gone this way. Too much is being lost. We should have/could have gone another direction instead. The sooner we realize this and start changing course, the more of the Commons will carry on.

The Earth will eventually turn back Upwards. The Commons will form anew as it has done many times over hundreds of millions of years. Perhaps we will help it turn upwards within decades. Perhaps it needs to reduce our hubris to rubble first. Our Work now is to help that turning so that as much of the Commons as possible makes it through the transition from downward back to upward. Our Work is learning to navigate time lags so we can move past our thousands of years of rise and fall of short-termed greedy empires with their petty wars. Our Work is to embrace our gifts of sight and mobility, opposable thumbs that can make tools, speech that can help us sing together, dream together, work together. Our current paradigm’s well is running dry. Many cling to it, hoping that what that paradigm calls wealth will help them survive. The new path will not be comfortable; it will require hard work because it leads uphill but it can be joyous work that nourishes Hope for the future, not Dread.

The intent of this essay is to plant the seed image of a Commons culture so that it becomes part of our orientation as we navigate the thousands of choices we make each day. As we align more of our actions towards nourishing the Commons, a feedback spiral develops between our actions and the response of the world that can accumulate significance. What is possible?

This essay has taken far too long to write. I’m sure it can be expressed better but I needed to finally just get it out there. Feel free to send me suggestions on how it can be improved by posting a comment. I won’t make the comment public but I will appreciate and possibly apply the feedback with my thanks.

An Anthem for the Commons

The Commons are anything
– that did not exist before life began,
– that life helped bring into existence and
-whose emergence helped create more possibilities for life.
By this definition, singing and songs are part of the Commons. A beautiful song can lift one’s spirit, inspire one to action, unite a group around a common purpose. How wonderful we humans can be.

As I was working on Toward a Commons culture, I heard the hymn Be Still, My Heart. I recognized the melody as part of Finlandia by Sibelius. About 2/3 of the way through Finlandia is a section that’s been called the Finlandia Hymn. Sibelius wrote it as an orchestral piece. Be Still, My Heart was created by someone who wrote religious lyrics to this orchestral piece. A variety of lyrics (such as This is My Song) have been written by people to fit onto the melody, most of them quiet, yearning.

However, Sibelius composed Finlandia in 1899 as a resistance of tsarist Russian censorship of Finland’s newspapers. In 1941, the Finnish poet, Veikko Antero Koskenniemi, wrote lyrics for the “hymn” that have become almost like Finland’s national anthem. I went onto YouTube and listened to several performances. Then I came to this one.

Two aspects resonated together and ecstasy welled up as tears. One aspect was its triumphant nature. This performance was not a hymn; it was an exultant anthem. The other aspect was the subtitled translation of Koskenniemi’s lyrics. The lyrics expressed for Finland what I would like expressed for humanity when we fully embrace our union with the Commons and emerge from 5000 years of war and greed into a completely new phase of human history.

So I’ve been trying to fit that expression onto those lyrics. I wanted to change the focus from Finland to all people, of course, but I also wanted to respect the elements in the original lyrics (A new dawn coming, the singing larks greeting the morning, the acknowledgement of brave people in the past, and the survival of spirit through heavy oppression.) Here is what I have so far. Feel free to improve it.

People, behold,
a golden dawn’s emerging.
Sunlight drives out
dark shadows from our past.
The singing larks
fill morning’s sky with bright hope,
inviting us
to take flight and soar.
As we awake
from dreams of greed and dread war
our Earth calls forth
“Grace us with your gifts.”

Give thanks to those
who helped us find our way through
breaking the spells
that bound our minds so long
Our souls grew strong
holding hope through that long night
Our path’s now clear.
as the Sun shines forth
A new day dawns,
we rise into the blue sky
The morning calls,
“Come join Life’s great work.”

“People rejoice, rise to this our destiny: work, play, love, sing”

(Fitting in “our destiny” in that last line takes some adjustment and practice.)

I invite you to listen to that performance and then sing these words as that choir sings in Finnish starting around the 5 minute mark. If this uplifts you, thank the Commons as nourished by Sibelius, Koskenniemi, and these musicians.

Third Edition of Shifting/Seeing Nature is now available

Thirty-five years ago, I self-published Shifting. That was the first edition with a couple of printings, all of which I sold. Then Chelsea Green re-published the book as Seeing Nature, what I consider the second edition. It eventually went out of print.

Three years ago two people independently called me within a month of each other, saying the world needed to have Shifting/Seeing Nature back in print. They offered to help make it happen and help get the word out. Eric Bear said that internet publishing had made distribution much easier and took on the whole project as a gift to the world and a challenge for himself. Heather Rangell (who had been telling many about the book) helped secure the copyright to the Seeing Nature illustrations. I thank them both so much. And now my book from 35 years ago has been updated and is available again for a new activist generation. Currently it’s available as a hardcover. Softcover and Kindle should be available soon.
https://www.amazon.com/Shifting-Natures-change-Paul-Krafel/dp/9198917218/

If you are a fan of the book, you can help it by adding your review to that webpage.

Snippets

The Andromeda Galaxy Unit

The Andromeda Galaxy is rising in the evening sky now (September). It is the most distant object we can see with the naked eye: two and a half million light years away. You need fairly dark skies to see it.

The following link is a good description of how to find it. Right now, Pegasus is low in the eastern sky when the stars are coming out. It will appear higher in the evening sky as we move into winter. I see Pegasus as a baseball diamond with home plate at the bottom. The journey to the galaxy starts from third base.

https://www.space.com/7426-starhopping-101-find-andro meda-galaxy.html

For years, I thought the hazy patch I could see was the entire Andromeda Galaxy. Not until I saw the entire thing though a telescope did I realize that my eyes, on their own, could see only the bright (orangish in the image below) core. The fainter arms of the galaxy occupy a much bigger part of the sky but you need optical assistance to see them. So that galaxy is bigger than it looks.

The light we see today (streaking at 300,000 km per second) originated from there two and a half million years ago. As I gazed at it, I started wondering, what was happening with us humans when all that light from those trillion stars began its journey towards my eyes.

Astronomers created the “astronomical unit” which corresponds to the 93,000,000 miles between our Earth and the Sun. Turning 93,000,000 miles into 1 AU (a unit of distance) eases solar system dimension discussions. So the Earth is 1 AU from the Sun. Mars is about 1.5 AU from the Sun. Jupiter is a bit more than 5 AU from the Sun. I started thinking about an Andromeda Galaxy unit. An Andromeda Galaxy unit would be an astronomical measure of time based on human’s evolved vision, both in terms of the furthest we can see and what our minds have figured out about our place.

One Andromeda Galaxy unit is 2,500,000 years. What I like is that there is a nice match between astronomical time and human evolution time because one Andromeda Galaxy unit ago, Homo habilis, the earliest-named species in our Homo genus, was just emerging. So our genus, Homo, began about the same time the light we now see began its journey towards our eyes. Homo has been around for one Andromeda Galaxy unit. The evolution of walking upright was well-developed by then – with implications throughout the skeletal system. The brain was evolving larger through this time, eventually doubling in size with most of its growth happening after birth. From this time on, the various Homo species were developing better control of stone tools, fire, and language as social complexity developed.

Homo sapiens (us) emerged .12 Andromeda Galaxy units ago (about 300,000 years) when that star light had completed about 88% of its journey across intergalactic space.

The light was about 98% of the way to Earth when we were creating cave paintings and cultural evolution was accelerating. This also is a nice match between astronomy and history because this corresponds to when that light from Andromeda finally reached the outer limits of our 100,000 light year diameter Milky Way galaxy.

Most of what we consider human history (stone buildings that endure, writing, empires) took up .002 Andromeda Galaxy units. The light that’s just now radiating from the Andromeda Galaxy, what kind of eye-brain on Earth will see it one Andromeda Galaxy unit from now? (A good question for a Commons culture to keep in mind.)

The Techno-Optimist Manifesto

A friend, after reading an earlier draft of Toward a Commons culture, asked if I had ever read the Techno-Optimist Manifesto (I hadn’t) and sent me the link.
https://a16z.com/the-techno-optimist-manifesto/
It’s not the opposite to my essay but it definitely heads in a direction that makes me shake my head. It’s written by a tech billionaire. I don’t detect any affection or understanding of the Commons in it. It’s all about us. I provide the link for those who want to do a Compare and Contrast.

Toward a Commons culture

Toward a Commons culture

An Anthem for the Commons

Announcing the Third Edition of Shifting/Seeing Nature

Snippets: Andromeda Galaxy unit

The Techno-Optimist Manifesto

Toward a Commons culture

Offering A New Path

The Brown Tube and the Blue Sky

What is the Commons?

Strategies

Feedback Spirals

The Lobster Trap of Time Lags

The Paradigms of a Commons culture

Discrepancies

Two Paths

$ $ $ $ $

The Gradient of Wealth

Money Flows

Turning Upward

An Anthem for the Commons

Third Edition of Shifting/Seeing Nature is now available

Snippets

The Andromeda Galaxy Unit

The Techno-Optimist Manifesto

Traci

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