Barriers and Bridges

Panarchy theory originator, C.S. Holling (1995), in his essay on Barriers and Bridges to the Renewal of Ecosystems and Institutions describes four belief systems about nature, and an emerging fifth conception. Each relates to a different mental model of how stability and change naturally occurs in nature using different causal assumptions. They are:

Nature Cornucopian ~ smooth exponential growth (endogenous abundance through human ingenuity)

Nature Anarchic ~ hyperbolic increase and collapse (inevitability in unconscious cycles of increase and decline)

Nature Balanced ~ logistic growth and plateau (conscious response to an environment to mitigate and find equilibrium)

Nature Resilient ~ nested collapse and renewal (cycles of creative destruction in reformations of organisation for efficiency)

Nature Evolving ~ evolutionary transformation (novel adaptation in systems of interdependent emergence)

Holling examines these beliefs, finding each is correct, and partial. Each is a truth story made out by the evidence with 'compelling lines of causal explanation'. So how to separate out the science from the fiction in the myth of the real? Holling suggests (p. 16):

"With every issue having supportive evidence and contrary counterevidence (all legitimate), the issues seem to involve no independent reality of nature, only moral issues that can be debated."

What then is nature's character? In choosing a predictive model what scale of complexity, level of inevitability and role of human ingenuity will we select? In managing 'nature' what projection of our own nature is the reality we seek to make real?

What I do know is each partial truth of what nature can and must do is an accurate reflection of each individual's own assumptions about human nature and what it is believed we can collectively do. For the describers of human pathology in its inability to live responsively in a complex ecology, their truth is correct. For the panarchy theorist who believes for survival we must learn observation and flexibility to respond adaptively, their truth is correct. For the resource rationalists who sees destruction as a necessary reconfiguration of utilisation in cycles of optimisation, their truth is correct.

Nature is compliant in reflecting all these truths. Yet, within this discussion is a meta-ethical discussion. If the only novel truth is that we can potentially choose the myths we live by as incontrovertible truths, what is the truth that nature would have us choose?

Perhaps we should ask - but perhaps only if we are prepared to listen.

The Fourth Nature

In the pivotal book for engagement in ecological work, Integral Ecology, Sean Esbjorn-Hargens and Michael Zimmerman propose the use of three post-modern conceptions of nature. They are 'NATURE', 'Nature' and 'nature'. Drawing these distinctions is difficult, but worthwhile.

These types of distinctions have been the significant contribution of Integral discourse, allowing us to see what we mean and understand what it is that we say. Grounded in the lineage of philosophical distinctions these signifers allow us to describe what we are experiencing by clarifying the signified. From this, the potential for a more integral discourse results.

The authors explicate the three natures  (derived from SES p. 491 -499) as follows:

NATURE ~ The Great Nest of Being (Kosmos' interiors and exteriors )
Nature ~ The Great Web of Life (exterior domains of the Kosmos)
nature ~ The Great Biosphere (the exterior and interior domains of the experienced world, at a sensory rather than cultural or conceptual level)

The distinction is that in our experience of 'nature' as the biosphere - the human mental, conceptual, cultural and social domains (i.e. the noosphere) are not included, making the biosphere distinct from the human experience of it. It becomes an object other. Wilber (1995) describes the dynamics of the pathology of separation of interiors and exteriors as 'the ego-camps absolutized the noosphere while the eco-camps absolutized the noosphere'.  This reveals the fourth nature in the taxonomy to provide the correlate to the eros-agape/interior-exterior divide as:

Nature - The Great Council of All Beings (interior domains of the Kosmos)  ~  (spoken to with great presence  last week by deep ecologist, John Seed, who was visiting).  

However, In a recent trip to Hester Brook I recognized how my intimacy with this place continues to increase, and (I would like to believe) its intimacy with me. In conversations with colleagues at the Integral Ecology Center I recognize a fifth  'nature' that exists in my experience informed by integral ecology injunctions, although doesn't appear for me in the theory.

It is very difficult to describe. It would be called Nature (with the N underscored) to denote a first person identity. This is the Nature with whom I relate to as a member participant. Not a unity with the Kosmos, and not its world of surfaces, and not merely my experiencing of communion with the contents of the biosphere ... more an intimacy of recognition with the bios ~ with life itself.

I suppose this could be equated to the ancient personifications of Mother Nature or Pan spirits, but the mythic or projected persona is not adequate to describe this. It is also distinctly different to the many subtle and spirit personas which influence the mood of the land. It is not one of the union states of the twenty four nature mysticism. What I am experiencing is a second person, a sentient other. It is also a conversation. Not a conversation with a personification, a conversation of sentience with aggregation.

In Integral Theory terms, this is not allowed. The dominant monad is with the individual. The collective has no sentience. There are only individual senients who come together in a collective ecology and provide multi-scalar levels of meanings perceivable by us as the supposedly more aware species in the ecology as overlapping intersubjectivities. It is my first person experience of the second person phenomena of the collective interiorities of 'nature' in the LL (Lower Left Quadrant). This experience I have is permitted, but only as a naive distortion of the reality that is the fact of the theory.

This raises a question for me though. If I have difficulty describing my experience in the structure of the theory, should I change my experiencing, or is theory useful up to the point of its purposes? Who is this Nature that has a distinct, yet subtle, presence. Perhaps it is simply the Left Hand EGO correlate to ECO's Nature - yet that is not my experience of the Thou with surfaces seen.

Biologist E.O. Wilson going In Search of Nature names the counterpart to 'nature' as human nature (perhaps 'nature(h)'), being the noosphere as interiors and exteriors that makes us distinct from our biological co-habitants:

"The first is nature, that part of the world we think is beyond us, having no need of us, and yet is the cradle of our species. The second is human nature, our essence, the way we were in the beginning, comprising those sensory and emotional capacities that join humanity into one species as surely as language and ethic custom divides us into tribes. ...I argue that the only way to make complete sense of either is by examining both closely and together as products of evolution. ... We need this longer view, I believe, not only to understand our species but more firmly to secure its future." - In Search of Nature (1996)

What does the conversation between these two natures look like? How many Natures do we need actually need? What is the discourse that describes the relations between them?

And this is the dilemma we face with every model of the world experienced ... how it reveals and also hides the world from our experiencing ... at the same time.

Why Don't I Cry When a Monoculture Dies

They harvested the blue gum plantation in the adjoining property. Not quite the Serenity.Simplicity.Sanctury I usually experience in this region, yet the plantation was destined to go sometime.

The crop didn't quite look fully mature. I wonder if the reason for this frenetic removal was to liquidate some inventory assets to generate capital, as with the collapse of the prescribed interest tax deductible forestry industry, change is occuring fast in the vulnerability of the industry's own unsustainability. In any event, the plantation timber that crested the skyline has now gone.

This process is like watching The War of the Worlds as four crews of harvest machines work methodically across the landscape. No coppice strategy, just simply take everything and return the land to empty soil, efficiently. In fact, in two 20 hour shifts (as they rumble into the foggy night) the entire 10 year plantation is gone with no real sign there was ever life of any sort there. I wonder what will be the strategy for renewal. I wonder what the land will do left alone to do what it will.

With the previous experience of seeing an old growth forest felled and the desolation that resonates from it, this form of renewable timber industry (despite the water interception issues and loss of opportunity to restore diversity) provides a very viable alternative. A celebration is called for.

In seeing the silent rows of trees (for they were not a forest) disappear I shed not an emotion for their loss. While the abundant activity on this side of the fenceline seemed not to even notice the felling across the 20 metre sprayed and graded firebreak buffer, the whole process was strangely fascinating in a macabre way to me.

Then, of course, I heard it. Possibly only days later was it recognized. A deep subsonic low moaning, a resonant echo of both the trees and the systems of microbe life in limited diversity that existed in that form of man-made ecology. There is a loss, it is just harder to hear. It is there in the level of hearing of the root stock as it dies.

And that is perhaps the reflection. Our new renewable ethics, like in history before, are not better, just less discernible as to their conflict. This is the ethic of ethical deafness. What cannot be heard, does not have a voice.

Move along now ... nothing here to hear.

Would anything have even happened, had I not been an accidental witness.

Fifth Phase

It is interesting to reflect on the initial four phases of the first four years of this project so far. It is perhaps the pause for reflection that marks the significance of this approach to ecological restoration (and such an absence of visible intervention). The four phases discerned can be loosely described as:

First Phase - Experiencing of Self
Second Phase - Informing in Object
Third Phase - Engaging in Self and Object
Fourth Phase - Generating Object from Self

First Year ~ For the whole first year of the project there was simply observation. Touch nothing, disturb nothing, record nothing, intervene in nothing. Simply experience without preconception. The intention was to resist objectification, not using the pattern of labeling to hide the landscape from oneself. Weeds were seen, degrading of waterways were noted, but primarily the landscape changed continuously in awareness with generative surprise as its many seasons and forms unfolded during the year. The main observation then was not of the landscape , but watching one's own mind form a reality that previously did not have this witness. Simply, a holding back of conception and an observation of the mind of prior perception.

Second Year ~ The second phase was of engaged observation with no intervention. In this phase integral ecology principles were so useful to disclose multiple aspects of the landscape, a baseline of consciously taken perspectives in a number of specific dimensions. A few thousand grid coordinates were taken to generate a dimensional analysis and 3D map. Sites of weed infestation were logged, species identified, opinions sought, history researched, photo records taken, fenceline breaks found, stories heard and fires risks noted. Again - no intervention. Nothing was touched. Yet there was an intervention. There was the active formation of projection. Enaction of a reality of perception. This is perhaps the greatest footprint we form onto a land. The imposition of (albeit an integrally informed) conception.

Third Year ~ The third phase notes the shift into emergent meaning. This is seeing the landscape as an emergent phenomenon. The experiences of the first phase informed by the observations of the second phase allow for the discernment of transition and direction in the third phase. Groves of banksias emerge healthy, others recede in possible indicators of dieback disease (or simply age). Introduced species make burrows and become a predator's focus who enters and both then vanish again. Fenceline intrusions embattle the landscape and the capacity for resilence (or its absence) is observed in the riparian degradations. Priorities appear. Actions are formed. There is a release of meaning made. The end of this phase marks the beginning of small interventions, using highly aware observation of what was or might be occuring. Small steps, trial treatments, micro-managements and ... observation of the impacts of one's own presence.

Fourth year ~ This is the phase of reflexive learning. Seeing differences made and success in weed management and the absence of other interventions having no discernable effect on an ecology in balance or allowing outbreaks by omission in systems of imbalance. Expanded trials begin of the weed management where experience, moves to assessment, to engagement to active experimentation and informed management. Intimacy results as the stabilities and changes occur. This signifies a shift from the observational to the apithological in terms of the visible.

and then ... there is a fifth phase,

Fifth Phase - Generating Self with Object

Fifth year ~ What alters in all of this is the caretakers role. How do we define care? How do we define ourself? What is the inquiry necessary to discover the co-enactment of that? What is being asked? Who more importantly is doing the asking? The emergent generation of meaning in reciprocal engagement of self with land and land in self asks many questions. It is the answers to these that must be known if we are to move knowingly past simple stages of stabilisation. How does the land change us and how are we changing the land?

The Art of Science

One of the most remarkable artist's work I have ever been kindly given is a Celia Rosser print from the collection of botanical drawings that are a significant part of her life's work. Her botanical paintings in The Banksias series, documenting all known forms of this 40 million year old species, has taken three decades to complete.

Celia Rosser is one of Australia's great botanical artists. She has been recognised nationally and internationally, with an award from the Linnaean Society of London, an Order of Australia and an honorary Master of Science degree and doctorate from Monash University.

It was with some joy recently that I visited the Rosser Gallery on a trip to Wilson's Promontory in Victoria. The third folio was on display which included the species Banksia Seminuda, one of three at Hester Brook (the others being Banksia Littoralis and Banksia Grandis).

With over 60 of the 78 major genus of the species of Banksia endemic to South Western Australia it is pleasant to see this small fragment of a wider body of knowledge captured in art and preserved in life. The naming of the new rare arid species of Banksia found in 2000 as the Banksia Rosserae, after the artist herself, is a testament to a life's work in the intersection between botantical science and inspiring art.

banksia rosserae

Resilience

I am interested in the human response to global warming. The more innocuous term climate change was adopted politically sometime ago as being less dramatic and to take the force out of the ecological preservationist lobby's debate. However, for myself, I fear climate change much, much more.

For anyone who has seen climate range graphs showing the warming trend, the alarm is not in the overall mean temperature rise that now seems inevitable, but in the massive seasonal variances. Having disturbed the equilibrium, it is the dis-equilibrium we should be observing, not the transition to the new steady state.

In mid-June we had a -5.7 degree frost (measured 20km away) being the coldest minimum on record. That one event in half an hour wiped out between 200-300 peppermint trees, some of them quite mature. The shape of the property acted like a big ice cube tray and stressed the entire species below a certain contour line.

To my delight and hoping, in November 90% generated new growth. Their resilience, the 'ability to recover from a setback or recover shape after a compression', was sufficient this year. But that was a one in 100 year event. What if it becomes annual? What will be the effect on this years new growth? What if that extreme is only the beginning?

I think we may have missed the point. While the long term effects of global warming will definitely be dramatic and threatening, the immediate impacts of the variable climate may already be here. For humans seeking certainty and predictability our response to this extreme variability will say a lot about our own evolutionary progress and adaptability.

Here's hoping that we do as well as the trees.

Mr Beetle

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I was just reading biologist E. O. Wilson’s essays “In Search of Nature” and it led me to think how we search for nature.

He estimated previously that there are over 42,000 vertebrate species that have been described and over 990,000 invertebrates also identified. There may be as many as 10 million invertebrate species – and perhaps only 4000 mammals.

Of the invertebrates over 290,000 are beetles – four times as many as all the vertebrates combined.

While we look to the megafauna and complex higher animals, in every tiny niche is another species of ant, beetle, bug or aquatic swimmer. The species of spiders for each of these niches is not far behind.

He writes: For each hectare of Brazilian rainforest there may be a few dozen birds and couple of mammals but well over one billion invertebrates. Of the dry mass of animal tissue, 93% of the biomass is invertebrates and a third alone are the ants and termites.

I wonder what the proportions would be for Hester Brook? My guess is that they would not be that different. That is why I am continuously amazed at the depth and span of the ecological diversity in this one small patch of land.

Kind Teachers

In an integral ecology approach we learn from all our kind teachers. We draw from the depths of the well of knowledge and drink deeply. In doing so we can taste from ecopsychology, environmental phenomenology, deep ecology, environmental anthropology, ecofeminism, environmental ethics, environmental hermeneutics, biophenomenology, biological and ecological empirical sciences, social autopoiesis, population ecology, sociocybernetics, ecosemiotics, interspecial phenomenology (Hargens 2004) - and even apithology.

Yet within all this knowledge from all these ways of knowing we are always left thirsting for more. This is because in all our learning we may sometimes neglect our real teachers.

In response to the question of ultimate knowledge, Siddhartha speaks to his old friend Govinda of this and of his teacher:

"There was a man at this ferry who was my predecessor and teacher. He was a holy man who for many years believed only in the river and nothing else. He noticed that the river’s voice spoke to him. He learned from it; it educated and taught him. The river seemed like a god to him and for many years he did not know that every wind, every cloud, every bird, every beetle is equally divine and knows and can teach just as well as the esteemed river. But when this holy man went off into the woods, he knew more than you and I, without teachers, without books, just because he believed in the river.” (Nobel Prize winner Hermann Hesse - 1950)

In the search for knowledge, we do not need to look far at all ...

In all existence is found truth ...

All existence is then my teacher ...

Collapse

Jared Diamond nails it in relation to Australia in Chapter 13 of his book Collapse. While the book and his analysis has much greater complexity, his five point framework explains the unease the agricultural community feels in Australia.

"Eventually, I arrived at a five-point framework of possible contributing factors that I now consider in trying to understand any punitive environmental collapse. Four of those sets of factors - environmental damage, climate change, hostile neighbors and friendly trade partners - may or may not prove significant for a particular society. The fifth set of factors - the society's responses to its environmental problems - always proves significant." (Diamond, J. 2005:11)

The resilience of a system, being its tolerances in its system dynamics, makes up a big part of the outcome of the stories he re-tells from around the world and across time. By looking at sets of factors, Diamond's work moves into the field of apithology.

The South West of Western Australia gets a special mention in Diamond's global analysis. In the poker game of global death we have a five card straight. Environmental damage in the form of land clearing has led to salinity and soil degradation (which may take 100 years to reverse). Our economic structures make oil dependent phosphate fertilizers vital for our yield. The price gained for that yield is dependent on export demand. Our friendly trade partners are also the major oil producers and consumers. Export partner conflict with those oil producers raises prices. Oil dependent transport costs are a major variable on demand, prices and profitability. A low and late rainfall year or a high oil price year completes the straight. The lucky country holding the low cards loses. We have systematically reduced our own environmental, economic and social system's resilience.

The fifth factor, the human society's response, should then be our main focus. As Diamond says, this response is dependent on political, economic, social and cultural values. Understanding these dynamics involves the study of how human societies think, being the emergent aspects of societal consciousness (the one factor we know least about and the one not covered by Diamond).

As the triggering factors come into play, the tight knot we have created for ourselves, becomes a tightening noose. What we do not know is how we will respond to this stranglehold.

I suppose that is why Hester Brook Retreat is here. To discover that.

Pathology and the Bios

It is interesting how quickly we forget. The first dimension of apithology is to preserve what is. Find the desired in the existing state and protect it - before doing anything else.

On returning to HBR (Hester Brook Retreat) after an absence it was clear the adjacent farm's livestock had entered through a fallen fence. This happily solved the problem of restoration. Monoculture had been returned and now there was nothing to preserve. The riparian zones with natural re-growth were once again treacherous mud. A good feed had been had. Open pasture had been too tempting at the end of the longest driest period on record.

I had failed to look carefully enough at the first dimension. The lesson is well learned. There is no point doing restoration work or enhancement unless there is a means in place to protect what exists. Find the cause of decline, the pathology of the bios, and remove this cause first, before looking to the dynamics of wellness. As they say, good fences make good neighbours.

We are finding this in integral ecology work. Years of work for the preservation of habitats are about to be wiped out by global warming and the loss of transmigration corridors. More fools us. We allowed the causes of degradation to continue while mistakenly working on restoration. There is no naivety in integral ecology work. Only increasing humility. And so we learn.

Taking and Making

I saw a slogan the other day describing our modern society. It said the four stages of our existence were: Take - Make - Use - Waste

It is quite terrifying really. In a world of finite natural capitals and unlimited population growth we have only a limited time here. No where on Earth is exempt. Where the Take philosophy occurred at Hester Brook Retreat is obvious. The abandoned loggers railway runs right through the property and the 600 year old growth now gone is slowly and naturally being replaced by re-growth.

The question must always be asked: If that is how our thinking is now, what would the apithological re-frame be?

The answer is easy. The four apithological stages of human existence are: Observe - Conserve - Produce - Replace

1. Observe - We see a natural abundance and before we Take we Observe what else relies on it, for nature wastes nothing.
2. Conserve - Before we Make we decide what are our real needs and Conserve every part (ie. materials, energy, capital, time, spirit etc.).
3. Produce - Instead of Use, we take what we need to Produce enduring value.
4. Replace - To complete the cycle we do not Waste but instead Replace to put back what we have Taken.

It is only with this thinking that plentitude and abundance can exist in a human-needs based world! To think otherwise must mean that we do not plan to be here long.

"Sustainability is acting with good grace like we plan to stay"

- Stephen Forsyth

Darwin In the Field

Chapter III of Darwin's The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection or the Preservation of Favoured Races In the Struggle For Life is like a favourite piece of music to me. If I had to listen to this over and over a hundred times, I would only hear more. It is the opus that sings to us of the complexity of ecosystems and how they are both beautiful and tragic. The closing words are like a coda to Mozart's Requiem.

Last week Darwin came to visit Hester Brook. As we were leaving we noticed that the single Cottonbush I had seen a month before was now twenty plants spread far and wide with several in flower. Knowing it was a prolific weed, what to do in this moment? I hesitated. The ignorance of our understanding of connections gave rise to this moment of uncertainty. There we were, witnessing in the field (with Darwin's ghost looking over my shoulder) all that Darwin had described when he said:

"It is good for us to try in imagination to give to any one species an advantage over another. Probably in no single instance should we know what to do. This ought to convince us of our ignorance on the mutual relations of all organic beings; a conviction as necessary, as it is difficult to acquire."

Who knows the factors that had given rise to this proliferation. One seed had perhaps come from the stockfeed in the old hay shed, moved to the open field by an Emu (who had left evidence of its forage there). The seed had received the unseasonal rain and grew, sending delicate tufted seeds across the cleared area. With no cattle to mow them down, mature plants had appeared almost instantaneously and now with them the Monarch and Wanderer butterflies aggregated in a beautiful ballet of pollination.

We left one mature plant (removing the seed pods) and moved the voracious juvenile caterpillars to this one plant for their feed. The Cottonbush when introduced had brought the Monarch's to Australia, but the butterflies do not eradicate the weed, nor keep it in check. One's struggle for existence is the other's also. They are friends - not foes.

And my thoughts still go to our ignorance in introducing any species to Australia after Darwin's precautions and our healthy continuing hesitation in bringing their predators too.

"Many cases are on record showing how complex and unexpected are the checks and relations between organic beings, which have to struggle together in the same country. Lighten any check, mitigate the destruction ever so little, and the number of the species will almost instantaneously increase to any amount." - Charles Darwin 1859

How deaf we are to the words of wisdom.

Predation

We have a predator. In November 2004 a scattering of feathers in two locations showed an unwelcome visitor had dropped in for lunch. There had been no kills since. Because of the remote location and the success of the CALM control programs domestic ferals were not previously a problem. It seems our itinerant resident has returned in January 2006 with four more occurrences. This invisible intruder raises some interesting questions. The first is could the location be fenced to exclude cats and foxes? Because the property is a corridor, open movement through its boundaries is essential. An Island is not a sustainable system. The second is why do we treasure things with feathers over things with fangs? We should pause here and ask could the intruder be native and its prey introduced? Until the CSI unit finds our killer, the jury cannot not decide whose true nature we should protect. In the meantime, something is snacking in the sanctuary.

Pond Watching

The first question asked about the property was always "What are you going to do with it?" The answer was fairly clear to me. Nothing initially. Touch nothing and just watch - for at least a year. The study of the environment is essential for our understanding of it. It helps also to understand the student. Where once we would not look to the environment at all - now we rush too quickly to apply what we know. The first practice is to observe. From that we can also observe ourselves. Thoreau found this at Walden. Find knowledge humility before beginning and take the time to watch the pond.

"I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived." - Henry David Thoreau

Reality Imagined

On returning to the property for the first time as owner there was a sense of trepidation. I expected that the heat of summer would have turned that which was green to brown and the flowing creek to but a trickle. But the return did not reveal a snake and leech filled marsh but instead hundreds of wanderer butterflies emerging and a completely different dominant ecology with the seasonal change. The brook was flowing well underneath still waters. The first exploration revealed large areas untouched, forests of beauty and more weed infestations. Things were both worse and better than expected. The reality now experienced embraced the good, the beautiful and the true. It was that moment when I ceased to be the owner and became the caretaker of this place.

Parallel Worlds

Between offering to buy the property and settlement I had been to Colorado to participate in the first Integral Ecology and Sustainability Seminar run by the Integral Institute. The wilderness beauty and built environment of the Rocky Mountains created a stark reality for me. Roadway and mountain range meet - with no buffers. This is reflected also in Australia. Development and preservation have distinct lines (visible from space). We are a part of - and apart from - nature and our nature. The Americans have the outdoors and Australians have the outback. Nature is something we visit. It is also something we have. Where the two meet is where integral ecology begins.

First Impressions

First impressions of the location were that it was not suitable. I had been looking for a manageable sized property, remote from, but close enough to a regional centre, one with waterways access and adjacent to forest reserve. The road entrance to this location was overgrown and impassable. The fenceline was in disrepair. Stock feeding had degraded the cleared acreage and oats and weeds had taken over this section. There was no vehicle access. Hiking into the property I found the brook was choked and large sections were unreachable through the dense blackberry infestation. There was a decrepit corrugated iron hay shed and some old building rubbish. The property had been completely ignored for a decade. It was of course perfect!

Beginning

Hester Brook Retreat was purchased in December 2004 to create a dedicated location for the applied practice of integral ecology. The journey began on the far West Coast of Western Australia and with a swag, skillet, billy, kayak, hiking boots and a selection of 1:50,000 maps I headed east with the intention to keep exploring until I could find something affordable. After 7 days and over 50 locations Hester Brook Retreat was found by acccident.